ARTISTS' PORTRAIT
Wim Delvoye

Angela van der Burght

“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cloaca turned the art world upside-down, in 2000, when Delvoye’s excreting machine was exhibited at the MuhKa Antwerp, Belgium. Fed at one end and ‘digested’ at the other -where the actual shit comes out -it’s a process, known to all. Still, the public was shocked when observing all that passed through the clear, transparent tubes.
Challenging conventions of taste, Delvoye’s scenario insists that beauty must be in the eyes of the beholder. The machine is characteristic of Bio-Tech’s beginnings: glass flasks are packed with food and enzymes in various stages of digestion. Nature is simulated and life is recreated. Our own mortality and everyday existence is reduced to: eat or be eaten; live or die; eat and shit. Without care this machine dies, too.

In 2001, Cloaca was upgraded as Cloaca – New & Improved and Cloaca Turbo. Accompanied by the character Mister Proper, a detergent brand and advertisements for certified Cloaca shit merged with toilet plungers and the motto Ars Gratia Artis; the message is: Buy Cloaca –shitting’s never been easier!

Included in Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1991) by curator Jan Hoet, Delvoye laid out floor tiles like a patterned carpet with an infinite repetition of happy turds.
Living just south of the Dutch border in Belgium, for me, Delvoye’s installation and quirky humour feels more like home than the empty aesthetic objects produced as part of a Northern European solution. The tricky part, after you’ve finished smiling, is when the reality sets in; you are forced to take a stand.

Describing Edward Leibovtiz’ early work as rooted in the European tradition of Fantastic Art envisioned through a wild, unrestrained imagination, or the fanciful, even subconscious motivation that forcefully projects images that vary as much as from Jerome Bosch to Blake or Ensor and Goya to the authentic 1980s U.S. appropriation art and testy, tasty Pop Art of Jeff Koons and Richard Meitner, we arrive at Delvoye’s objects, a delicious mix of the best of each. One branch forked off into a more humorous, though serious range of subjects characteristic of Flemish art, we find: ham hung on museum columns or cupboards scratched by Bic blue ink pens thanks to Jan Fabre and Panamarenko’s wonderful-flying objects, as well as, the Casserole and Closed Mussels sculpture by Marcel Broodthaers. S.M.A.K. museum [www.smak.be] explains: “S.M.A.K. owns one of the most important collections of contemporary art in Western Europe. The collection is unique and has an international reputation, with local art being set in the context of international developments since 1945. In addition to a number of prominent movements such as Cobra, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, many of the artists represented have in the meantime come to assume definitive international status. The collection includes works both by internationally renowned artists like Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, Thomas Schütte and Juan Muñoz, and by major Belgian artists like Panamarenko, Marcel Broodthaers, Thierry De Cordier and Luc Tuymans. The museum's radically contemporary acquisition policy additionally means that lesser known young artists are also represented in the collection.”

S.M.A.K.’s collection of Delvoye’s installations include numerous Delft-painted Gas Cannisters: as common an object as a window or concrete mixer, but, adorned with a time worn technique, it suggests a ‘welcome home’, yet delivers an unexpected provocation – just take a second look!
Clearly, Delvoye’s works share a trait with Jeff Koons, whose crystal porn figurines and silver plated toy trains make us stop to re-examine and reconsider the consumer goods we use and don’t see.

Delvoye’s Gothic Works are stained glass windows in the medieval stained glass tradition, but his imagery is provocative not religious and is installed not in church windows but those of art museums and galleries such as Sperone Westwater’s New York gallery; Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf, Germany; MoCA Lyon, France and the Manchester Art Galleries. Medical imagery -X-rays, sonograms, mammograms and MRIs –all of Delvoye are sandwiched between layers of several models engaged in various sexual acts, this is part of Delvoye’s on-going project reconfiguring vernacular craft traditions. Beginning in 1999, Delvoye carved lace-like a life-sized cement truck, tattooed some taxidermised pigs with popular contemporary motifs and painted everyday objects in Delftware style.
By 2004, Delvoye produced laser-cut stainless steel versions of a Caterpillar concrete mixer, a cement truck and a truck whose gothic motifs were as delicate as lace followed by life-sized rusted iron machines. Again, a balance is struck here, between the reality of the moment and the romantic glorification of the past.

In Bologna, Joe La Place commented at the Arte Fiera’s 2006 opening: “Speaking of unusual mediums, Wim Delvoye’s Tattooed Pigs (2000), two stuffed and tattooed porkers named Katharina and Christopher, were on offer for €120,000. They made the perfect foreground for Marble Floor (1999) a 115 x 120 cm photograph of an elaborate church floor made entirely of cold cuts, yours for €16,000”.

For the museum MUDAM Luxembourg, Delvoye made Chapelle:
Delvoye has created for the exposition Brave New world in 2010, the metallic, gothic-inspired chapel with stained glass windows containing subversive imagery specially for Mudam. The artist makes reference to his own work in black, grey and coloured glass. Obscene gestures, kisses, human intestines and skeletons from Cloaca are x-rayed, thus gaining the status of pagan stained glass windows. His x-rayed pieces of meat unveil their atheist message thanks to the light that stained glass once rendered divine. The skulls, the bones and their by-products are grimacing, cynical modern Vanities.
http://tele.rtl.lu/waatleeft/replay/v/20100629/139/21777/

From 31/5 throughout 17/9, 2012 Wim Delvoye exhibited his work at the Louvre in various locations within the museum and nearby: in the Department of Decorative Arts galleries, under the Pyramid, and in the Tuileries gardens. From his down-to-earth redeployment of Gothic motifs to Baroque-inspired contorted and twisted crucifixes, Delvoye’s popular and decorative art is rooted in subversive and ironic reinterpretations of past styles, that is a particularly trenchant echo within the Louvre’s collections. Delvoye’s produced a beautiful new stained glass windows and a new Cloaca installation at the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia.

Surely, when you encounter Delvoye’s objects, you will smile first, then think twice!

© Angela van der Burght 2006-2013
Translation Erica H. Adams

See > Bozar exposition Brussels 2010 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi19e4Fq1ps

Interviewé par Alexandre Devaux, Wim Delvoye parle de sont exposition. Ses œuvres sont présentées jusqu'au 17 Septembre 2012 dans les appartements Napoléon III du Louvre >www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRVzxoC1MDI

Wim Delvoye: Rorschach at Galerie Perrotin, Paris >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu6lgdye0VI

Stained glass chapel
> http://www.architizer.com/blog/skeletal-stained-glass/http://www.architizer.com/blog/skeletal-stained-glass/