Wim Delvoye | Action Doll Cloaca

Wim Delvoye

Action Doll Cloaca

Gent, Belgium: Self-published, 2007

36.5 x 35 x 10 cm.

Edition of 3000

Reportedly "anatomically correct", this action figure of the artist comes with scale models of his shit machine Cloaca and one of his tattooed pigs, as well as a cellphone, an outfit for openings and farming boots.

"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.”” 

- Wim Delvoye in conversation with Paul Laster

Wim Delvoye | Early Works

Wim Delvoye

Early Works (1968-1971)

Belgium: Rectapublishers, 2002

264 pp., 30 x 23 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

An artist book masquerading as a monograph, this title plays with the Early Works trope of unearthing examples from the beginnings of an artist’s career (often elderly, or deceased). Given that Delvoye was born in 1965, these works would have been produced between the ages of three and six - just before and just after beginning primary school. 

Purportedly preserved by his prescient mother, the drawings show how a young child is "directed, limited, and influenced by contemporary iconography”. Conversely, it has been suggested that Delvoye collected drawings made by children and signed his name to them retroactively. 

Either way, the book is a playful satire of the merchandizing of an artist’s life. 

Wim Delvoye for Dummies

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye for Dummies 

Brussels, Belgium: Rectapublishers/Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, 2008

[6] pp., 15 X 15 cm., softcover

Open edition

A "monograph"/artist book, in the style of both the "For Dummies" series, but also children's bath books, with soft, padded, waterproof pages. The title features images from Delvoye's shit machine Cloaca, his tattooed pigs and ironing board series. 

Originally intended as an unlimited edition, the title is out of print and valued at around $250.00. 

"Cloaca was a great fit for the MuHKA [Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen], because people went there expecting to see art, prestigious contemporary art, and were furious to see shit, or rather, shit officially labelled as art. But the Louvre targets a mass audience, so this show shouldn’t be judged as a Wim Delvoye show, but rather as Wim Delvoye for Dummies. Within a few days, thousands of new people are going to be acquainted with my work, and you have to think clearly about what you want to show for this kind of introduction.”

- Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye | SeXrays

Wim Delvoye 

SeXrays

Luxembourg: Beaumont Public, 2002

[94] pp., 30.5 x 23 cm., spiral-bound

Edition of 220

Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, this title features twenty-five X-ray images of sex acts on acetate sheets from aluminum cibachromes, held together by spiral binding underneath a card cover book. With the help of a radiologist, the artist invited several friends to paint themselves with small amounts of barium and perform explicit sexual acts in medical X-ray clinics.

"The first x-rays were done in 1999, or 98, but then I made some very good ones in 2000-2001, and that was when I was showing the Cloaca machine – a large installation that turns food into feces. That was in 2000. Then I went to New York in 2001, I was in the New Museum – so I was immersed in that math and science kind of stuff. I was much more into bronzes, and other types of sculptures. But at that time, everyone’s fascination was for science, medical, clinical things, the human body, and x-ray machines. X-ray machines were fun, and I returned to that. As soon as I got the Cloaca machine finished, I went back to the x-rays.

[...]

A lot of my work, in general is machine-like; we make spud guns, we make shit machines. It is not why I started to do x-rays. I’m thinking of a movie where Jeremy Irons plays two characters in the film [David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers from 1988].  From the beginning of the movie, you know that this is going to end up wrong. There’s these twin brothers, and there was this really strange sexual tension. I was aware of that movie when we were doing these x-rays – you have science and the medical, contrasting with human feeling and romance. By the way, only later I realized I could never do the sex x-rays in the United States. This country is so religious. Doctors are so worried about being sued. There’s a certainly prudent attitude in the United States. For example, I needed doctors, and the doctor I found was so adamant to participate. He was astonished that he’d never thought to do that. He happened to be in his midlife crisis. And it was also funny – I put my penis in the mammography machine, and he said, “Look, I’ve been here for years and never thought to put my penis in this machine.” I thought, that’s the first thing I think of. I opened his eyes to his own clinic!”

- Wim Delvoye, interviewed by Andrea Blanch

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye turns 59 today. 

Wim Delvoye | Cloaca Mug

Wim Delvoye

Cloaca Mug

New York City, USA: New Museum, 2002

11 oz mug

Edition size unknown

Perhaps the artist's signature work, Cloaca is a large installation of beakers and machinery that mimics the human digestive system: you feed it in the morning, and in the the afternoon it shits. 

These commemorative ceramic gift shop mugs were produced for Delvoye's first solo show in USA, at the New Museum in New York City, in 2002. The show later travelled to the Power Plant in Toronto, where I fed it its final meal with my friend Alex (coincidentally, on an Easter Sunday).  

The Cloaca logo takes the Procter & Gamble brand name and mascot (also known as Mr. Proper) and presents him with his intestines exposed, adorned with a title card that resembles the Ford logo. 

"This exhibition of Wim Delvoye’s large-scale installation Cloaca represents the first-ever solo presentation by a U.S. museum of the acclaimed young Belgian artist’s work. Built from chemical beakers, electric pumps, and plastic tubing arrayed on a series of seven stainless steel tables, Cloaca is the result of a three-year collaboration between the artist and scientists at the University of Antwerp, whose shared mission was to duplicate the functions of the human digestive system as closely as possible. Cloaca is fed twice a day from a large funnel reached by climbing a stepladder.  At the work’s inauguration, Delvoye himself ascended the ladder carrying a tray laden with a tasty and substantial Belgian meal of mushroom soup, filet of fish, and a rich pudding, which he dropped in the funnel a dollop at a time. The food is chewed by a garbage disposal device before traveling on a 27-hour-long digestive trajectory, through six glass vats connected by tubes and pipes, pumps and various electronic components that are Cloaca's stomach, pancreas, and small and large intestines. The “digesting” food is constantly kept at a precise 37.2 degrees centigrade and each of Cloaca’s “organs” is full of computer-monitored enzymes, bacteria, acids and bases such as pepsin, pancreatin, and hydrochloric acid. The product finally goes through a separator and the remaining solids are extruded onto a conveyer belt."

 - Dan Cameron, Senior Curator at the New Museum

Wim Delvoye | Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Wim Delvoye

Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Antwerp, Belgium: Editions Carine Rot, 1990 - 1992

32 x 28.5 x 5.5 cm.

Edition of 25 [+ 4 AP] signed, titled, numbered and dated copies

A binder containing fifty photocopies, of the rowdy office party variety, seemingly representing twentieth century disasters. The work is produced by Editions Carine Rot, best known for their Lawrence Weiner publications. 

An obscure work by the prolific Delvoye, last November a copy sold at Christies far below its low estimate of two thousand Euros. 

Wim Delvoye | Cloaca

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