I gave Wim Delvoye a brief mention in a recent review of the popular culture mag Wound, but I really don’t think I can leave it there, after this subversive Belgian born China/NY based scourge of the arts scene surely needs far more examination. For a start the man is incredibly prolific, not so much in the number of works he’s created as the vast scale of his installations and complexity of his infamous pig tattoos. What’s more he’s contributed some of the most baffling art works to the current scene, his obsessions vary between farmyard animals – he actually runs a studio in Chenjiatuo, Shunyi District, Beijing, China called Art Farm - large machinery, cathedrals and chapels, and the function human digestion, to name a few. Delvoye’s ouevre is hyper-eclectic, a creative mind who can no doubt find inspiration and utilise just about anything, anyone and anywhere to his artistic advantage.
Born in 1965 in Wervik, Belgium, his first solo exhibition was in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in 1992, he has written a number of books which both complement and expound upon his personal artistic tenets, including his 2004 book Tatu – Tattoo which as you might guess follows his obsession with the art of tattoos. With over 60 solo shows under his belt, exhibiting in just about everywhere imaginable bar the Moon, Delvoye has a highly accomplished record as an artist, both conceptually and financially. He currently owns a C13th Belgian castle, Corroy Le Chateau, which is rumoured to have cost him €3.3 and has plans to eventually convert it into an art museum. Delvoye is seen as a highly controversial character, in circles far beyond the world of arts, namely for his pig tattoos, however I am as you might guess in contention with the popular misgivings of the wider public, and I’ll tell you why.
Delvoye views pigs as creatures like many humans do, there are exceptions to the rule, vegetarians, proponents of the pig intelligensia even, but deep down many people across the world eat pigs, that is a plain fact. What’s more at least two major religions in the world do not allow the consumption of pigs, not out of a sensitivity for the animal, but a blanket judgement that these creatures are in fact ‘dirty’. Sure that’s an over-simplification, but the truth stands that few people on earth but vegetarians, and confusingly enough (considering they send them away for slaughter every year) pig farmers. I see pigs as beautiful animals, but I do eat bacon, and thus this makes me a hypocrite.
I am not a vegetarian, although I have been in the past, and if I had to kill my food I’d probably be one again. Excuses aside, in the early to mid eighties with no talent for cooking and a revulsion to continuous soya based meals and an aversion to vegetables, I didn’t stand a chance. I can tolerate vegetables more these days, but still can’t cope with a pure vegetarian diet. Thus I as many others out there are in a bind, we love animals, but we love to eat them. For all those in the same position as I Delvoye’s work cannot be seen as cruel, their are many factory farms out there which treat pigs in an abominable way, far worse than the treatment they recieve at the art farm. They are not over bred or over fed, in fact they live longer and more peaceful lives as art than they ever would as potential pork products.
But beyond that is the fact that as a bi-product of Wim’s endeavours, pigs are at last being viewed in a different light. Delvoye’s reasoning and artistic argument for his tattooed pigs, is that no matter what he or anyone else does, the pig refuses to be art. Physically it will always, until it dies, be a pig. Delvoye has been involved in a law suit from Louis Vuitton, the high fashion bag brand for the use of certain designs of theirs on his pigs. He is actually delighted with the legal wranglings, citing the process as an inclusive and integral part of his art. Contentious, but ultimately a fascinating direction to take indeed.
 |
 |
Cloaca which essentially for humans is the anus, comes from a Latin word meaning ‘sewer’. Delvoye’s Cloaca Machine is literally an artificial digestive production line, yes you’ve got it, it doesn’t produce it consumes. Though there is a waste product, artificial faeces. Some of which this February sold at Sotheby’s for a staggering price, £12,000. I have to say I am not surprised, the same ridicule was aimed at the late great Marcel Duchamp by his contemporaries, works including La Fontaine (a urnial signed by R. Mutt at the factory that produced it) were viewed with much the same irreverance. The fact is that the Cloaca Machine goes beyond the blurring of boundaries between art and science, myth and logic, life and death, this piece is in fact mimicking life down to the finest detail, and indeed mocking it.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Delvoye by Josefina Ayerza explaining how the Cloaca Machine works…
Josefina Ayerza: The shitting machine. The machine shits. The first question that comes to mind is where does the impulse come from? From the outside, or from the machine itself? You know, the initiator of the motion, where does it come from? Is it in perpetual motion, or do you start it, like a car, with a key?
Wim Delvoye: No, no, no. Once the machine is installed in a museum, it is a live thing. Even when the museum is closed the machine is fed everyday, because in the organs, there is real human stomach bacteria.
JA: This bacteria has to be fed every day, right?
WD: Yes. And if the machine doesn’t eat, for example, when the museum is closed, then the organs get empty and the glass bulbs, the glass organs, they dry up and the bacteria dies, and then it takes three or four days to set it up again. Because the machine uses chemicals, mechanical things and also biological products like enzymes, and it uses bacteriological products.
In 2001 Delvoye’s Kiss series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to paint themselves with small amounts of barium (the liquid digested for use x-ray scans) and then be photographed having sex in medical clinics. Although the imagery becomes more and more explicit, the idea that this in fact pornography is a joke. Looking through naked bodies rather at them induces an antiseptic and medical slant on the old argument of where does the line between art and pornography lie. Delvoye’s art examines the act of sex in as much way as a phorensics team view a body, clinical in nature, and only truly voyeuristic on a scientific level, these works remove the viewer from their unique position within the human race. It’s almost a polar opposite of the fake Roswell autopsy video of 1996,
The removal of subjectivity is done with a surgical slight of hand, making the viewer feel more like a prurient extra terrestrial than a visitor at a gallery. With the fast decline in most major religions and the severe lack of deeper philosophies eshewed for the even quicker satiation of celebrity gossip, violence and rumor mongering, the ideas of what and who we are and why we are here are repressed by governments more concerned with popularity and economic greed. As with all many of Delvoye’s works, there is a distinct void of sentimentalism and emotionality in general, and that subjective chasm is filled with a false spirituality of science and logic. Objectivity does not exist. Objectivity is introduced to society at moments of change and doubt on a subjective whim. Obectively we can produce nuclear bombs in order to repel enemy nation states, yet subjectively we continue to mate and produce more and more human beings until this earth will no longer be able to support complex lifeforms. One can choose to view mankind as emotional beings, or as a virus, or even flit between the two, depending on one’s state of mind. Racists I have argued with in the past have spouted their opinions on the inferiority of different castes and cultures yet made exceptions when their same rules are applied to non-caucasian friends. I would love to see a reduction in the world’s population, yet I could never consider denying other people than myself the chance to reproduce. A quagmire of human inner conflict captured by Delvoye’s photography.
Another of Delvoye’s is religious architecture, cathedrals, churches and chapels, buildings for which he has a nostalgic view, seeing them as places of congregation and higher being. As a matter of fact he transferred his Kiss series of photographs to a stained glass window in 2002.
The church, or at least the idea of the church, has had a deep and lasting influence on much of his works, however it is most apparent in his series of machines, many of which are life size and mimic regonizable industrial forms of transport so similar to many of us. The difference being he has used church construction techniques including arches, parapets, gables and columns of cut steel to create these hyperreal sculptures.
I have to included a couple of Wim’s altered photographs too, which I personally find very amusing, although I would rather he’d actually had altered these landmarks altered than the photos.
Walk on the wild side, take a trip in to the bad boy of art’s world at www.wimdelvoye.be.
[...] is a superb artist and is really quite ahead of the rest when it comes to art and the net. ‘Bad Boy of Art‘ is one of the best reviews of Wim’s work that I have read so [...]
Shit/faeces to be auctioned in times of crisis at Christie’s
Christie’s is auctioning a piece of shit by the Belgian contemporary artist Wim Delvoye. The faeces was produced by Delvoye’s Cloaca machine; a computerized mechanical system designed to copy the human digestive process.
Estimated price is between 5000 and 7000,- euro
Auction details:
Christie’s Amsterdam
Post-War and Contemporary Art
8 june 2010
LOT 152
( http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5326539 )
I am a Chinese citizen working in the civil aviation systems. I am Belgian and Belgian culture, have a deep interest. However, because of general reasons, has not been able to experience an exotic atmosphere.
Recently, my friends occasionally, as I introduced a kind of art (that is, conceptual art), I am quite interest. Recently also through the media that the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye at the 2010 Art Expo exhibitors you want to, but because of their participation project may have some problems, it was rejected. I am very interested in his work, truck drivers had no way to contact me, had to come up with this approach. In this, I implore you to help me in this busy busy, give me a chance and he contacted.
Once again urge you to help me! I wish the 2010 Shanghai Art Fair a success!
Hi Yang – didn’t understand a word of that – sorry mate.