Wim Delvoye

Your Daddy’s Techno-Toys

Conceptual artist Wim Delvoye’s work asks us to revisit our comfortable conceptions of a few modern, cold, calculating tools.

In “Kiss 2” we get a most alarming cross fecundation between things private and public, between that which is for potentially life saving intervention and that which is purely intended to goose us intellectually or physiologically. Which way one’s perception swings is left to our own personal preferences.


Kiss 2, 2001 Cibachrome print on aluminum


Created in 2001, Kiss 2 is part of the Kiss series, where Delvoye deploys x-rays to allow the audience a more intimate view of the intimacies of Love making. The series covers the range of sexual repertoire – from French kisses to sodomy, all in the soft muted smokiness with which the x-ray renders the human body.

Tissues become translucent or disappear altogether while bones have their apparent solidity replaced by merely the suggestion of something more substantial than tissue paper. Once the novelty of the format and the titillation of the content are spent we are left to do our own algorithmic factoring of what we are being shown.

The images work on multiple levels, almost always asking that we consider – or re-consider – our anachronistically simplistic but technologically contemporary views. We are, or are we not, the products of yesteryear’s cultural attitudes playing with today’s toys.


Kiss, 2001
Cibachrome print on aluminum

Seeing through something is to dismissal as seeing into things is to gaining a deeper understanding.

In Kiss, is the carnal experience being rendered by something which sees our material existence for what it is, just smoke, in order to diminish the glamour of the sexual drive, or in order to contextualize it within the realm of the truly cosmic and everlasting source of all creation – Energy. Where does the idea of skeletons enjoying the act of procreating, or maybe just the acts surrounding procreation, lead one?

Is this the gaze of some all knowing deity, piercing the veils of our desired privacy? Is this peering into these two lovers intended to show us once and for all where to find Love within us, as though it were some cyst, polyp, or (albeit felicitous) growth that can finally be seen by our superhuman sight?

Could getting an x-ray while engaged in love making be the new/best way of being diagnosed with True Love? If I told you that were the case would you and your partner wish to find out?


Cloaca Machine Installation view.

Another Delvoye work, Cloaca, continues the figurative theme.
This time rather than show us bodies and their actions recorded elsewhere, we get the actions right here and now, without the bodies.

Let me explain: Cloaca is a machination designed to simulate the human digestive tract. Beginning as we do, Cloaca must be fed. A gourmet chef prepares a meal, and then “chews” the food with a blender. The resulting paste is then introduced to the first of six glass jars containing digestive enzymes and acids.

The six jars - connected with wires, hoses and pumps – continue the mimetic gastric process, until finally when leaving the last container the material is filtered and extruded onto a slowly moving assembly-line belt. The final extrusion, as one might begin to have guessed, is essentially fecal matter in every possible way but one, it was never part of the alimentary process of a person.

It is hard to square the uncanny effect of merging the gallery’s sterile space with this electro-chemical vitreous behemoth (it literally fills the room) periodically shitting on a slowly rotating shiny plate. Strangest of all, possibly most brilliantly, Cloaca, just as any person who’s had a meal in the last day, passes gas.


True to Delvoye’s form, Cloaca, whose titular nameplate looks like a smashup between the Ford
Motor Co.’s logo and the Coca-Cola font, can be overwhelming at first, then consecutively baffling, offensive, genius, science-project-y, stomach turning, and finally the work spits you out on shores you know you’ve never seen before.

The first question, the first falling drop of the deluge that is sure to follow, is whether Cloaca is a reproach aimed at all within its presence. What is it exactly that is shit? Or is that the wrong spin, rather than focusing on the connotative meaning of the end product, might we not be engaged by the Frankenstein taking shape, even if only at the level of an organ system?

Is Cloaca a performance piece, if so, who’s doing the performance? Delvoye is certainly not to be found (maybe one can only stand so much shit in one’s own life, or possibly just one’s own), so who’s performing?

Is Cloaca, despite not being neurologically alive, some form of automaton? There is certainly a strong resemblance between the work and the circumstances believed to have nurtured the formation of life on earth billions of years ago. Then, it is believed, single amino acids began to form ordered chains that appropriated chemical units from the primordial soup around them and reproduced themselves – eventually forming cells. Cells have a metabolic process; they take in raw material, mine it for nutrients, then expel the remainder of the process as waste products. Cloaca does the exact same thing, operating like a gigantic disembodied cell whose only material remains are its metabolic analog.

Is Cloaca a harbinger for an analog of life in the future, or an emblem of life’s fueling/combustion/propulsion mechanism? The work might simply be pointing with its synthetic entrails at the nature of Living, at the Zen of the Organic.

Whatever the form of Delvoye’s works, inevitably they leave us with more questions than answers, more possibilities to take a lead from than solutions to neatly shelve away as being solved. Both Kiss and Cloaca demonstrate modern man’s amazing grasp and dexterity with the matter from which we spring, and yet these man made items confront us with how inept we are at understanding what that lexicon of physical manipulation can lead to.

We are like a child asked to color in between the lines of a medical text book, the coloring can be straight forward, but knowing what the total assembly of parts means and does is another matter, it takes a grownup to do that. Are we adult enough to do that?