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Bringing Home the Bacon: Wim Delvoye
Internationally celebrated for his stained-glass soccer goalie nets, monumental steel Gothic trucks and tractors and sophisticated Cloaca digestive tract machines that turn food into excrement, Belgium-born Wim Delvoye became a part-time resident of China in 2004 when he rented a farm to tattoo pigs. Delvoye wasn't interested in breeding hogs or raising them for meat - he is a vegetarian - but rather to use their skins to make art that literally grows. In 2005 he purchased a new, larger farm about one hour outside of Beijing, where his workers tattoo and pamper his precious property. ArtAsiaPacific caught up with the 42-year-old artist at his studio in Ghent, Belgium, to discuss his Art Farm and other projects in China.
When did you first start tattooing pigs and what was your original concept for the work?
WIM DELVOYE: I started in 1992, did one or two pigs in 1994 and in 1995 I tattooed 15, but they were dead pigs; I got the skins from slaughterhouses. I started to tattoo live pigs in 1997. I was interested in the idea of the pig as a bank - a piggy bank. I didn't have the concept formulated yet, but I decided to place some small drawings onto these living organisms and let them grow. From the beginning, there was the idea that the pig would literally grow in value, but I also knew that they were considered pretty worthless. It's hard to make something as prestigious as art from a pig. It's not kosher.
How do you tattoo the pigs and what do you tattoo on them?
WIM DELVOYE: In the early works, the imagery was as banal and trivial as possible: skulls, hearts, crosses. It was an encyclopedia of trivial things. I wasn't really interested in the pig's anatomy. But once I started tattooing live pigs, I was forced to take an interest in their anatomy, and that affected the composition. I gained new respect for the animals and began making tattoos for them. For example, the tattoo would follow the butt and shoulders and, as the pig grew, it became paler while the lines became thicker. To tattoo a pig, we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin. We are currently tattooing Chinese drawings on the pigs. After all, 2007 is Year of the Pig. There was a period when Disney princesses such as Ariel, Cinderella and Mulan fascinated us. We regularly use Louis Vuitton designs. This year it's the Murakami cherries. We're still a couple years behind, but we're getting there.
Are the tattoos based on your drawings?
WIM DELVOYE: Yes, except for the Disney and Louis Vuitton designs. When I was still tattooing pigs in Belgium, I aimed at competing with painting. I wanted to show that what I could do on a pig could be as good as Raphael or Murillo, sugary as Baroque art with holy virgins, happy children and cupids. I would take a Murillo painting and tattoo it with the same colors and shadowing. This kind of highbrow tattooing was an obsession for a year. Now we have returned to the more "classic" tattoo designs.
I'm known for doing tattoos very quickly, but don't give me and human subjects. It would be a shame. I'd tattoo them like pigs!
What is your relationship with the pigs? Do they have names?
WIM DELVOYE: Yes, we name them; the name is often tattooed on the pig. It's part of the personalization of the industrial product. For example, a pig with a tattoo that reads "I love Jamie" is call Jamie, and the name sometimes becomes the title of the finished artwork.
What kind of lifestyle do the pigs have on their way to becoming art?
WIM DELVOYE: They are really spoiled. Last October, for example, we ordered coal for winter. I didn't want the pigs to get cold so I ordered a lot. Two big mountains of coal came in and the whole village was immediately whispering. It was insulting to the village honchos that I treated my pigs so well. They couldn't understand why a guy with a few pig keepers and a flycatcher needed so much coal.
How are the pigs exhibited?
WIM DELVOYE: I prefer to show the pigs alive. In a perfect world, I would just show the Cloaca shit machines and live pigs-eating and excreting together. I recently did that for the first time at the Xin Beijing Art Gallery. There are two schools of thought about how the pigs should be exhibited. Some people like the flat skins hanging on the wall because you still see bits of the head and legs. Others prefer the hairy skins stretched like a canvas. If I have a complete skin with hooves and ears intact, and I like the tattoo, then I stuff it. It becomes more sculptural that way. I used to have the stuffed pigs standing, but now I prefer them sitting, like a stone lion outside a Chinese restaurant.
Have collectors actually bought your live pigs?
WIM DELVOYE: Yes, but they have never taken them home, which was my original plan. Some people with nice gardens seriously considered it though. Regardless, the pigs grew and their owners' profits increased.
Why did you decide to set up a pig farm in China?
WIM DELVOYE: I wanted to do something in China. I considered continuing the engineering of Cloaca, but that wasn't realistic. I've wanted an art farm for a long time. Previously pig-raising had been a nomadic activity, wherever the occasion arose. My work has evolved in different ways, but I always come back to pigs. In 1997, I only did 4 pigs; in 1998, two; then I went to San Francisco and did three, and following that, three in Moscow. But my nomadic life has settled; the tattoo project finally found a permanent address.
How big is the farm?
WIM DELVOYE: It's huge. We've had two farms; we rented one and then bought one. The first was romantic, but small. When the British television show Art Safari came to shoot, there was hardly room to move. The second farm is much bigger. We double the number of pigs each year now. Usually we have fewer than 20 pigs being tattooed, but currently there are about 30, with a dozen workers. There is a farm manager, people who care for the pigs, a professional fly swatter, four female tattoo artists, a skinner and a tanner. It's all very costly.
How do the tattoos change as the pigs grow?
WIM DELVOYE: Every hour the tattoo artist works now saves a few hours of work later. Every week the pigs grow five or 10 kilos heavier so the tattoos are constantly expanding. I send a photocopy of a drawing and instruct them where to apply it. If there is any delay and the pig grows, the artists have to go back to the copy center and enlarge the drawing. But if all goes well, the drawings grow with the pig.
How much time do you spend on the farm?
WIM DELVOYE: Last year I was there almost every month. Beijing is much bigger than Ghent and there are more things to do. I've been really well received in China. A lot of foreigners go there looking for opportunities, but I chose to stay in the countryside. Foreigners were already opening galleries in Beijing when I arrived, but no one else was outsourcing artwork.
Are you friendly with artists in the Beijing art community?
WIM DELVOYE: Yes, and although I pretend to remember their names, they are hard to recall. I end up saying, "there you are, the one who does the candy-color smiling faces." I concentrate on one artist-I call him the Joseph Beuys of Beijing, the boss there-Ai Weiwei. We like each other a lot. He lived in New York and his English is very good.
And I went to China with a reputation. A lot of the artists I met already knew about Cloaca. I avoid the ex-pats and in doing so I am even more accepted by the Chinese. I've exhibited once at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai and twice at the Shanhai Museum of Contemporary Art. If I'm not careful, I will become a Chinese artist!
Are you working on any other projects in China?
WIM DELVOYE: Yes, my doll, a Wim action figure with accessories. My whole life story is reduced to a caricature. The box set, which is like a GI Joe, includes an artist action figure, a tattoo gun, a Cloaca machine, a mobile phone, an outfit for wearing to a gallery opening and boots for the farm. It's manufactured in Shenzhen. We're working on an improved second generation and have plans for a third that is specifically about the Art Farm, including plastic tattooed pigs. We've learned a lot from Mattel, the toy manufacturer, and even altered their slogan to read, "You can tell it's not Mattel."
Source: By Paul Laster - ArtAsiaPacific - 30 September 2007
SURE, IT'S CRAPPY - BUT IS IT ART?
The National Post, 27 March 2004
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has made lots of outrageous art. For example, he's tattooed pigs with elaborate Harley-Davidson symbols in order to save them from the slaughterhouse. He's also carved a life-size cement truck out of teak. But he's known everywhere for Cloaca, an elaborate machine that replicates the human digestive system. It has a mouth, a stomach, a duodenum, a pancreas, bottles of various enzymes and a conveyor belt that delivers daily a turd, or 'output' as it's more clinically referred to. Recently, Delvoye founded Cloaca Ltd., a fully fledged company he started with Cloaca output as collateral. In the near future, when company bonds become available, Cloaca Ltd. will be the first work of art ever to gain corporate status.
Delvoye's latest machine (he has made three so far) is now being fed at the Power Plant. National Post: Wim, how do you decide what to feed Cloaca?
Wim Delvoye: It is an omnivorous machine. Myself, I am vegetarian, but I wanted this machine to include all human beings, so the machine had to eat everything from every culture. I feed it everything: except curry is a bit difficult. Curry is very acidic, so you need a lot of stomach salts to compensate. Leeks are not good. And certain foods give the machine bad breath.
NP: How much does it eat in a day?
WD: This machine has a capacity of one or two human beings. Two meals a day. To be practical with museum schedules, breakfast is at 11 a.m.
NP Does it get constipated?
WD Sometimes, for the same reasons we do. Sometimes for trivial mechanical problems. The machine can also vomit. It can do that in two ways. Vomit from the stomach or vomit from the duodenum; which is very smelly. Humans have more ways of vomiting. The machine doesn't suffer from anxiety, or nausea, or from other psychological states. In this way, this machine makes objective poo. It doesn't protest what it is fed.
NP So it mimics exactly how food is digested by a human?
WD The enzymes we use are pharmaceutical. One is biological enzymes, one is chemical, and the third part is purely bacterial. So the stomach breaks things down with acid. It's pretty chemical. But the big secret is the small intestine. That's the bile and the pancreas. The pancreatic fluids bind all the enzymes together. NP You must find people either really love or really hate your work. You're putting "outputs" into an art gallery. I can see people thinking you're saying art is crap.
WD I think the machine somehow agrees with people who feel left out of the art world. People who watch TV and who see contemporary art, they think art is crap. But in a way, when they see me or my machine on TV; they like it. They identify with me because, myself, I come from a small village. I do not come from an art background. I'm very, very sensitive to certain problems in art. Art always hides its real nature, which is showing off status. It's always hiding status, but it always wants it. I refuse to think that an Impressionist painting is more amazing I than a guy from Vancouver with lots of tattoos; So I tell people who think contemporary art Is crap, "You're right, it's crap," They think, "OK, yeah, he's with us. He's one of us." They see me as a Robin Hood. They also adore that Cloaca is technically difficult; What many people hate in art is that artists are all saying things they don't understand but in the end they see something they could make in an hour,and this is what they hate.
NP But artists making art that says "art is crap" - that's been done many times before.
WD Cloaca is all the people I admire of the 20th century. It's like a geneology of the super avantgarde; it's so coloured by the icons of the avant-garde. You can see Marcel Duchamp. You can see 1960s artist Plero Manzoni, who sold cans of feces. Then you think of the Basel artist who made "suicide machines" in the 1950s. Actually, it was not artists who influenced me, it was a film. My favorite is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I have collected every cover of the book. I've got hundreds. Every language.
NP You seem very affectionate toward the machine.
WD Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because to, me It's not an art piece any more, it's a child. I saw guards in museums weeping when we were breaking the machine down and putting it in cases. For three months, being with a machine that shits every day, it's like a car you like: There is not much difference between this machine and a human being. I would go so far as to say that it is life. I don't see differences between myself and the machine. Emotions, consciousness, these are very trivial differences. Maybe that it doesn't reproduce itself, that is a big handicap, but the ides of consciousness is very overrated.
NP That's funny because it's somehow true.
WD You know, every week I'm surprised that I thought of this machine.
NP Why is that?
WD The shocking thing about Cloaca is not that it's an art piece or that it is poo, It's that it is artificial. There is something very weird about making the digestive system artificial. It's like you rob the humanity from the human. It's like you come into the gallery space and you feel like something is stolen from me now, an intimacy, a kind of dignity. It's very private, and then suddenly there it is so open and professional, and transparent. That's what's shocking. You don't have to be an art critic to be more shocked or less shocked. It's a human reaction. Even now, when there has been so much liberty in the last 20 years, people do whatever they like, and still that poo thing has evolved the other way.
Source: By Catherine Osborne - The National Post - 27/03/2004
Poop scoop
Now Toronto, Vol. 23, No. 30., 25-31 March 2004
Artist lectures are, in general, not all that interesting. In fact, they tend to dish out a lot of shit. Then there's Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who talks a lot about shit and is a very interesting fellow. Delvoye is in town for the opening of the Toronto Installation of his poop machine, Cloaca, New & Improved. Cloaca uses enzymes and bacteria to replicate the human digestive system, accepting food at one end, breaking it down in the middle and excreting dung at the other end.
This machine, the second of three (there's an Original and a Turbo version), can produce the equivalent feces of five people every day.
When it was up at the New Museum in New York, the machine was fed gourmet meals from the city's celebrity chefs. At the Power Plant, Cloaca will be fed scraps from local restaurants. Pray you don't visit the lnstallation on a day that sees it digest a lot of leftover meat. Cloaca makes real shit, in every way.
Delvoye's fascination with shit is less about fixation than about frustration.
"I'm a frustrated da Vinci artist," he says over the phone from Belgium. "Sometimes I'm a frustrated advertising executive, and sometimes I wish I were a doctor."
But instead of treating irritable bowel syndrome, Delvoye invented Cloaca. "It's shit but it's clean." he says of the sterile-looking metal machine. "That way I get away without offending anybody."
His body of work includes tattooed pigs, "marble" floors made out of cold cuts, prints of his anus, and sexual acts captured on X-ray. His work is accessible because It deals with basic human functions. In many cases, the person on the street can relate to tattooing more than fine art. DeIvoye relishes the fact that his work has a sort of street credibility, and he exhibits a healthy skepticism toward exhibiting in museums. '"Museums remind me of clinics," he says, speaking again like a frustrated doctor. "It's somewhere art goes when it's sick, nof when it's young and fresh."
Cloaca, indeed, is like a sick patient, reliant upon the gallery staff to feed it the nutrients it needs to continue to function.
"For Cloaca, the gallery is like a nurse. In fact, the word 'curate' means 'to nurse' in Latin." But as an art piece, Cloaca is very, very healthy. In fact, it has been a worldwide touring success. The ad man in Delvoye has turned Cloaca into a marketing machine, appropriating the images of Mr. Clean and elements of the logos of Ford and Coca-Cola to help sell his crap (www.cloaca.be), and he's currently creating a personal version of Cloaca so that everyone can have a poop machine at home.
Why would anyone want a poop machine?
"The only thing that all art objects have in common is uselessness, he says, noting that there is nothing more useless than a machine that makes shit when we make it ourselves and then flush it away as quickly as we can.
"As a machine,l would not recommend purchasing Cloaca, but as a piece of art..."
Delvoye is selling convertible debentures on the Belgian stock exchange so that investors can get a piece of his action. Originally, he was going to approach the Toronto Stock Exchange because it was recommended as a market that doesn't mind listing shit.
Cloaca's likely failure as a business enterprise doesn't bother Delvoye. "When you're trying to sell people shit, there will be a tragic ending. Shit guarantees that.
"In everything I do, I fall. But a degree of failure makes you more interesting. And failure generates the ultimate art piece. Cloaca would cease to be art if it saved lives. If someone called me and said, 'We think your machine would help save this child's life, then that would be the moment it would be useful and it would cease to be art."
He thinks for a moment and laughs.
"And then my frustration would be over."
Source: By Thomas Hirschmann - 24/03/2004 - Now Toronto, Vol. 23, No. 30
