CONVERSATIONS WITH AN ANATOMY REVOLUTIONARY

Some years ago I had a series of conversations with the artist/anatomist/educator, Jon Zahourek. Jon is the creator of the Anatomy in Clay® Learning System of learning and experiencing anatomy through sculpting muscles on a life-like 1/2-sized model.  Our conversations were far-ranging and not very linear’ they veered off in any number of interesting directions and digressions at any given time.  I decided to write up our conversations as if there were an interview, even though neither of us had systematically answered any questions!

So I used broadly what William Burroughs called the “cut-up method”. I typed up our conversations, then literally cut them up into bits, pinned them onto to a big corkboard.  Then I took the bits and arranged them by topic, then I made up questions we didn’t ask and followed them with things we said that sounded like answers.  Jon and I really enjoyed the outcome.  So I hope you enjoy these excerpts from the so-called ”interview” with Jon Zahourek, Anatomical Revolutionary.

DL:  Jon, what in your art led you to developing the maniken?

JZ:  I take the greatest pleasure from making things happen from thin air.  I have always been a figurative artist; I have always loved human and animal images.

DL:  So then you went to reality (rather than abstract images) for your inspiration?

JZ:  The only way I could produce art was to just let it come out like some sort of caveman onto the wall – from inside out. You have to conjure the truth.  My paintings were almost always big, naked, tumbling, flaming figures.  I wanted to speak body-to-body because I think that’s where the truth is.  The first human truths are animal.

DL:  What else in your early years contributed to your development of Anatomiken?

JZ:  I was also a wrester.  I almost never lost because I had a great sense of where I was, about leverage, about the translation of rotatory motion into a sort of missile motion.  It was really ecstatic because there is no gravity.  In wrestling you and your opponent are each other’s shifting gravity – there’s no up and no down.

DL:  What were our goals when you first started teaching anatomy?

JZ:  I was just trying to get my students to approach anatomy from the standpoint of personal magic or fun – not just as a practical tool – but to find their own personal dynamic in its as a joyous necessity.

DL:  Don’t you think that Western culture has had to reach the limits of the notion that brain itself could provide the answers to “What is truth?  What is happiness?”  We’ve needed to reach the limits of the mind before we could start looking at the studies of the body as more than simply biological?

JZ:  Yes!  We are a series of ideas that the cells have erected among themselves.  The human body is the largest experience we have of natural law.  It’s the only direct experience we have.  So a detailed experience of ourselves generates an understanding of how pattern and law run through everything else.  Socrates said “Know thyself.”  Polonius said “be true to thyself and you can be false to no man.”  Well, the same is true of this body of knowledge.  If you know yourself, if even begin to know yourself, you are introduced to every bit of the world around you – there are no categories, they are all artificial.  History and music are separated by a septum – they are not separate systems, they’re only the short fibers and long fibers of a person’s existence.

JZ:  I push people very hard to learn and use the language of anatomy, because it is magical…people come into classes I do and say, “I’m not going to learn the language.” Yet within two days they’re dancing with the language because, through creating the muscles, it has a new meaning for them.  It’s their child that they can give a name to.  If you study anatomy as if you were to study a language for just the nouns, then all you would have is a memorized series of nouns, but they never really take flight.  However, once students begin assembling it, their own bodies are just crying out, “Tell me more, tell me more.”

DL: Fascinating.  The other day in preparing a lecture, I just wanted to refresh my memory with some textbooks.  Under muscles they listed three functions – movement, maintaining posture, and heat production.  They didn’t say anything about muscles as sensory organs.

JZ:  I think a third of our mind is our body sense.  I see that proprioceptive sense as an autistic child whose opportunity for deeper internal forays get shut down at age five when children enter the educational system.  Then it’s like they’ve been told “Don’t touch that.  That’s for the doctor or the nurse.  She’s going to take care of your body.  Let’s go to the body place.” And so on…it’s tragic.

DL:  Why are so many people reluctant to learn anatomy?

JZ:  The traditions of anatomy are particularly rigid because our approach to it has depended on death.  The prospect of death can be so terrifying to us.  And the cadaverous aspect of death, as revealed in anatomy labs, is so ominous and terrible that it tends to immediately limit the number of people who are willing to undertake the study of it.  And the process of dissection is backward anyhow, always taking things apart instead of putting them together.

DL :  I keep thinking of Leonardo Da Vinci, of his wonderful synthesis of art and science.  Through what you’re doing, the legacy of the Renaissance is now available to everybody.

JZ:  Previously anatomy has been in hands of the doctors and surgeons, but now a medical student has very little time to study anatomy.  In medical school, many times they don't even study gross anatomy – they are expected to have had it in pre-med.  That’s a big step, because that means relinquishing the torch.  Once the medical profession has let it go, then who’s going to pick it up?

Anatomy is being handed to the lay people.  Therefore we now have Rolfers, movement specialists and massage therapists helping people take charge of their own bodies.  It’s as if bodyworkers were part of an evolution.  And the trick is now to not let just a few people pick up this torch, but to have us all pick it up.

DL: How does that relate to me as a bodyworker and teacher?

JZ: So, I think it’s important for you as a bodyworker – to forget the bodywork.  The fact that people think they have practical reasons for wanting to know something is a hell of an obstacle because they have already channelized what it’s going to do for them.  They have already placed it in their mind and don’t allow it into their soul. 

As an artist, you really want to touch the truth of the universe with your work and that’s why an artists’ viewpoint is a good place to come from.

DL:  I know you, as an artist in your own way, obviously have a healing intent.  I know dancers, composers, and poets who have become movement professionals, massage therapists, acupuncturists, etc.  Do you see this as a general tendency?

JZ:  Absolutely.  Artists have almost started to abandon art in the traditional sense because of the cultural irrelevance that art has been consigned to.  The relevance of the artist is currently that of dancing bears - artists as performers.  So, I think artists are turning to the body. 

Why not simply expand?  I am still a painter.  I’m an artist who will pick and choose my way through the rest of my life happily without any sense of role.  Because my little magical soul has depended on my ability to make images.  And I will hit that truth that I want so desperately a lot more closely through this work that I’ve undertaken the last 30 years of my life.  It will be well worth it.  Fifty years will be well worth it.  For an image that will be so human and so true it will also be redemptive.

https://www.anatomyinclay.com/