THE INVENTION OF THE EVERYDAY
The works presented in this gallery are characteristic of the first “shifts” undertaken by Wim Delvoye in the 1980s: everyday objects, associated with manual or domestic work, are ornamented with motifs from the decorative arts, such as traditional Delft earthenware, while the construction site penetrates the domestic environment via the precious hand-crafted facture with which it is reproduced and decorated. The iconography he deploys is deliberately anachronistic and bears the memory of the golden age of Dutch decorative arts, thus accomplishing the ambition vaunted by Delvoye at the beginning of his career to “be provincial and do something internationally.” Here, ornamentation relates to identity, functionality and the value of industrial objects, unless it is the banality of the latter that “trivializes” the emblems and expertise of the past.
By forcing these seemingly contradictory worlds to coexist within the same object
– the ornament and the tool, industry and craft, the domestic and the urban, the heraldic
and the contemporary – Delvoye claims to be seeking the “right emulsion” so that each
element remains identifiable. In a spirit that is reminiscent of Belgian surrealism, his
work is characterised by a re-enchantment of everyday life. Like the imaginary maps that
make up his Atlas, with which the exhibition opens, he uses imagery to substitute
another reality, tinged with a subtle sense of strangeness and astonishing subversion.

ORIGINES
“We are born between feces and urine.” This phrase attributed to Augustine of Hippo and stamped with the hallmark of humility, seems to reflect the intention of a whole section of Wim Delvoye’s work: to translate the origins of human life through the triviality of its corporeality. In many ways the body forms a limit, the overcoming of which has always been a challenge and a temptation for artists. Its outer shell, the skin, and the materiality of its excretions (which is often taboo) are Delvoye’s favourite themes. Thus, the ambitious Cloaca project, composed of technical and biochemical systems that mimic the functioning of the digestive system is, according to the artist, “the only human portrait” in his entire body of work. The material that these machines
produce, the most “egalitarian” there is, invites numerous interpretations, starting with a questioning of the art system and the values it conveys. It was also in this spirit that Delvoye installed the famous Art Farm in China from 2003 to 2010, devoted to raising tattooed pigs: often demonized and yet so close to humans, for the artist the pig represents the “democratic being” par excellence.

The question of origins is also at the heart of the series of Early Works, a title he gave
to a collection of his childhood drawings, playing on classifications peculiar to the field
of art history studies. One cannot help but identify, in retrospect, signs of his future
artistic vocation and the nature of his work itself. 

“ORNAMENT IS A CRIME”
In 1908, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos published his most famous essay Ornament and Crime, advocating the complete abandoning of architectural ornament. A veritable manifesto of modernist architecture, this conception was soon to accompany the artistic spirit of the twentieth century. Nearly a century later, Wim Delvoye states: “I am aware that ornament may be a crime, but whatever the case may be, I commit the crime.” Swimming against the tide of artistic orthodoxy, his artworks indeed often proceed from an ornamental gesture which acquires a conceptual dimension through being put into practice. When applied to impersonal and industrial objects, as in Carved Tyres, he overthrows nature and reconciles, in a single motion, industry, fine arts and decorative arts.

Thanks to the prowess that enables the technologies of computer graphics, Delvoye also reinterprets the artistic forms of the past. They become malleable in his hands, materials to generate new forms, perverted motifs he can reproduce, display, multiply. These references include his collection of nineteenth-century academic sculptures. After being scanned, they are distorted or duplicated, like Rorschach cards, before being materialized in porcelain or in bronze. The process is similar for the crucifixion motif, which the artist employed several times between 2005 and 2010: he sees it as a cross, a geometric shape, “which can”, he says, “by applying new technologies, be turned into DNA helices, Möbius strips, circles, sine waves.” 

MONUMENTS
Created in response to a commission from Mudam for its inauguration in 2006, Chapelle was an important moment in Wim Delvoye’s career, launching a series of increasingly impressive works in terms of scale and degree of finish, directly inspired by Gothic architecture and its character­istic “stone filigree”, which he has studied at length. “At first”, he explains, “I built these [pieces] in a kind of ironic manner, but now I have a better grasp of construction principles and respect for materials, and I take the work very seriously. I looked at thousands of drawings, plans, elevations and measurements in the books that I have collected.” Taking the form of architectural elements (chapels, towers, pergolas) or sculptures directly inspired by vehicles, devices or everyday objects (trucks, bulldozers, cement mixers, suppositories), these sculptures establish a link between the “high technology” of medieval construction and that of our era. In the same spirit of connection, Delvoye has also worked for several years with craftsmen, creating works in which oriental motifs produced using the repoussé technique are combined with Western “symbols” such as the
iconic Maserati.

In the final gallery, many of these major works enter into dialogue with a group of large-format photographs from the Mountains series, originally created between 2000 and 2003, in which brief inscriptions that one might expect to find written in haste on Post-it notes or scrawled on public lavatory walls acquire a colossal and timeless dimension, like monuments erected in homage to the everyday. 

GRAND HALL
SUPER CLOACA
Developed between 2000 and 2010, Cloaca is a large-scale project that includes ten digestive systems of different sizes, numerous drawings, logos, a range of derivative objects and the produce from the machines, vacuum packed or in jars. A piece like Mosaic (90-400-DOC) (1990), presented at Documenta IX in 1992, heralded this ambitious group of works. Each of the Cloacas, from the Cloaca Travel Kit (2009-2010), contained in a suitcase, to the Super Cloaca (2007), about the size of a container, perfectly simulates human digestion, from feeding to the evacuation of excreta.

Wim Delvoye worked closely with a team of scientific experts in order to successfully reproduce this complex biological process. Within Delvoye’s body of work, Cloaca could be included in the period called “democratic”, marked by the desire to produce art that is totally “egalitarian”. What could be more democratic and more egalitarian, in fact, than defecation? While the main aim of the artist was to build an unnecessary “zero machine”– "I sought a complicated thing that is expensive and hard to make and which leads to nothing”, he says – Cloaca generates many metaphorical meanings and questions both the limits of art and taste-based judgments. 

WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE EXHIBITION
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue bringing together a large number of images, new essays by Sofia Eliza Bouratsis and Tristan Trémeau, along with the text “Vitraux in vitro et in vivo” written by Michel Onfray in 2006, on the occasion of the creation of Chapelle (an artwork permanently installed at Mudam Luxembourg).
Sold in bookshops and at Mudam Boutique
French. English
Authors: Sofia Eliza Bouratsis, Enrico Lunghi, Tristan Trémeau, Michel Onfray
Edition : Mudam Luxembourg, Somogy éditions d’Art
ISBN 978-2-757210-93-2
224 pages
Price : 35 €
© Studio Wim Delvoye,
Belgium
 
EVENTS
13.11.2016, Noon
SUPER CLOACA ReLOADED
Superbrunch with Wim Delvoye and Enrico Lunghi
within the framework of Luxembourg Art Week
13.11.2016, 3 pm

TALK
With Sofia Eliza Bouratsis and Tristan Trémeau about
the catalogue of the exhibition Wim Delvoye
GUIDED TOURS FOR 3-5 YEARS OLD CHILDREN
ONCE UPON A TIME…
EN – 03.09.2016, 10 - 11 am
FR – 10.09.2016, 10 - 11 am
DE – 17.09.2016, 10 - 11 am
Fairy tales for children, illustrated by artworks on show, Within the framework of the exhibition Wim Delvoye. The fairytale tours can also be booked on other date for private groups (schools, daycare...).
Free entrance for children. Regular entrance fee for adults.
Booking required: workshop@mudam.lu ; t +352 45 37 85 531 

See the Agenda> 

MUDAM LUXEMBOURG
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3 Park Dräi Eechelen, L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
+352 45 37 85 1
info@mudam.lu
www.mudam.lu