Wim Delvoye
Cloaca
Gand, Belgium: Self-published, dates vary
17 x 21 x 4 cm.
Edition size unknown, signed and dated
Machine-made shit, vacuum packed in a perspex box. These originally sold for around a thousand dollars, and are now selling for ten times that amount (not unlike Manzoni's canned shit from decades prior).
“It’s very cosmopolitan—if you are from Chile, feces is very cosmopolitan. You go to New York and you have this bio-terror obsession, and then the same machine goes to Lyon [France] and people are like, ‘So, what is the machine going to eat today?’ The same machine goes to Vienna and people are sharing details about their childhood and psychoanalytic theories about their relationship with their families. Then the machine goes to Düsseldorf, where the city is very Protestant, and they are shocked, and they say this is criminal because there are so many poor people in the world and this art is just feeding this machine. And then you go to Toronto and all the Canadians are all very nice and say, ‘How do you make it?’ They want to make it in their house, too—very unphilosophical, they never have a Freudian or a Lacanian thought. They just say, ‘I want to do it too!’"
- Wim Delvoye
