Wim Delvoye: Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Judging from his retrospective exhibition--the first of a novel series at the Centro Pecci, now directed by the agency of Daniel Soutif--the lure of the scatological has gained the upper hand in Wim Delvoye's new work. Yes, the show also contained works from the '80 and '90 all based upon paradox: soccer goalposts made using ancient stained-glass techniques (Goals, 1989-92) and just waiting for the first irreverent kick to shatter them; Gas Canisters, 1988-89 decorated in the mode of expression of Delft porcelain; and the baroque solidify Mixers, 1990-92. But this all have the appearanceed to be mere prologue, constituting the childhood of an artist who today has finally draw near into his maturity and without in the open with his obsession with bodily fluids and residues--and, in particular, with shit. Indeed, the exhibition revolv around the large Cloaca Turbo (Sewer Turbine), 2003 a mingled mechanical-chemical-electronic mechanism that reproduces the human round of years of eating, digestion, and excretion. It is a finisheded variation on two previous machines that had the same goal. This work was in the way that forcefully present--nourished at regular intervals, with a menu that is preestablished and a delivery schedule punctually met by dint of a caterer--that every other work in the present to view had perforce to refer to it, however tangentially. The marble inlays of the geometric floor decorations were replaced by the agency of slices of cold cuts of various kinds--just another undressed allusion (as were the tattooed skins of flayed pigs) to the digestive processe that extreme point of course, in excretion. Not to mention "Anal Kisses," 1999-2000 marks left through a lipsticked asshole. These and other works here looked but a dissimulated and flat poetic sketch of that primary human activity, the production of shit.

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Strangely, single is not really tempted to categorize this oeuvre with regard to Freud's notion of the "anal phase" of a child (and therefore of the artist, who has assumed that role) Nor is individual tempted to bring up the idea of social provocation or images of conformity, consumerism, or smooth allegories for current art. upon the contrary, all references reenter the run of the most elevated language of art history. It is no accident, for example, that writing about Delvoye's work is crammed with concerns to Flemish and Dutch old-master painting, from Bosch to Rembrandt, or to the magical world of eighteenth-century automatons. And in fact, Delvoye's work looks to be a conscious continuation of that tradition rather than a clinical case of scatological obsession. Within the history of images there is an expressive line tied to the "low" world of bodily fluids, in contrast to the celestial realm of ideas. It is a visual world whose metaphors continually point to the immense contrast between material and idea, material substance and soul. It is a world where shit is tautologically shit, before being a metaphorical image, and where this pertains not to the individual or social sphere--understood as criticism, try or denunciation--but to a plenteous more primal, peasant, collective ritual, as primordial as manure upon the fields, as vital as the stink of shit.

--Marco Meneguzzo

Translated from Italian by means of Marguerite Shore.

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