Wim Delvoye

MICHEL ONFRAY ON WIM DELVOYE
Vitraux in vitro et in vivo

When not defined as a producer, a dilettante onto a good thing or merely a cog in a market system, an artist is characterised by style. A basic platitude. A style (away from the tricks of the trade, fashionable gimmicks or guidelines for scrambled consciousnesses) is incarnated by two or three jingles. First platitude. A jingle (as opposed to corny old songs giving a metaphor of destitution having found a market) takes on flesh in a refrain that is recognisable from the first bar even to the distracted ear or an averagely attentive intelligence. Final platitude.
Let’s get it straight: in the (small) world of contemporary art there are many corny old songs, oft repeated refrains, dodgy deals, cloned merchandise and legitimating quotations. There is not really a grand tone or strong words of incontestable power. To hide the absence of style of those who display several in a brief career, historiography speaks of periods… There is nothing more rare than an artist who, with the passage of time, turns his back on the ruptures of periods, makes variations on the same theme and affirms his style. However, Wim Delvoye is one of them.
What is his style like, then? What about his jingle? What about the refrain? Basically, Wim Delvoye makes oxymorons, forms of style that I am particularly fond of and which presuppose collision. As a technique belonging to our age of accidents, catastrophes and calamities, the oxymoron associates two contradictory terms or instances. Normally, according to the principles of a sane logic, the contradictions cancel themselves out because two opposing forces meet and result at worst in destruction or, at best, in the production of something neutral. According to this rhetorical form (held in great esteem in the Baroque period), the laws of Hegelian dialectics come to the fore because a thing associated with its opposite produces a third object, a new meaning, a progression that modifies the sense of the two forces in play. We know what to make haste means and we understand the meaning of slowness, but La Fontaine generates a new meaning by inviting us to make haste slowly...
What about the oxymoronic thinking of Wim Delvoye, then? Let us consider first of all the series of life-size building-site objects made of material that contradicts such qualities as solidity and rusticity as well as the practical efficiency of the basic model, preferring instead crafted wood sculpted in the manner of Oriental screens or painted with colours not normally associated with building sites. For example, a violet and gold cement mixer (like a Catholic prelate), a concrete-mixing truck in precious wood, etc. Unusable utility, fragile strength, delicate solidity, unproductive work. But what is the aim? To see and look at things differently, modify one’s perception of things, make of art an occasion for transforming the museum object? Certainly. But, outside of all that, it is a matter of operating a new cross-evaluation that leads one to experience a building site in a different way, in a more playful way, with a smile on one’s lips (which was certainly the case in the exhibition space). Another example is the series of animal tattoos.Certainly animals are tattooed, but usually with numbers for breeding with a view to slaughter (it was no accident that the Nazis reserved this treatment for humans sent to the abattoir). Otherwise it is to allow an owner to find his lost pet or to indicate the provenance of a first-class competition animal.
At the same time, even if we theoretically belong to the category of homo sapiens sapiens, we might tattoo the desired motif on our body: a heart, an anchor, initials, a fist and the whole caboodle. Bikers who own Harley-Davidsons are particularly fond of tribal sign tattoos: Hells Angels, the Harley logo itself and associated accessories (crash helmets, chrome goggles, etc.).
So what is Wim Delvoye up to when he tattoos the community motifs of Americana-loving bikers on the skin of a living pig? Is he suggesting that they are pigs? Or that he considers the sows as the happy few of the incriminating mark? Is he inviting us to reflect on the nature of the
human beast, the humanity of the beast, the rites of the biker hordes or, more generally, on the techniques of identifiably marking the body with commercial sign-writing on the flesh and merchandising ink in the skin... Humanity as pigsty, the gregarious individual, the junk of the American way of life?
Other oxymorons? There are variations on the theme of cooked pork meats such as ham, salami and sausage mosaics… Of course, we are all aware of the Muslim prohibition of representations of the Prophet and any human form in general. The result is an art of motifs, arabesques, tracings, calligraphy and ornamental skill. Everyone also knows that pork is taboo for Muslims. Consequently, we can measure the powerful, violent charge involved in composing mosaics out of pork. False grounds, real illusions, pure pig. Islamic delicatessen, Muslim pig, trussed-up sura, Islamic pork products – recently such a conceptual rotisserie has the whiff of gunpowder about it! But why consider serious things tragically? Iconophilia, iconoclasm, iconography, iconophagy, iconology – Diogenes-style variations…
Another example? In Cloaca, Wim Delvoye concentrates all possible and imaginable technology, creating a sublime machine which is the quintessence of artifice. Cutting-edge biochemistry and food put through a grinder are used to produce a duly calibrated, coloured and “naturally perfumed” turd. Where is the oxymoron? The machine man, the human machine, natural artifice, the value of waste, defecation without intestines, cultural faecal matter, or put in a more trivial way, the art of shitting or shitting art.
A last example before the stained glass: the series of x-rays. Usually, x-rays are used to warn of illness, show damage, measure the effects of treatment or reveal the disappearance of a tumour, a cancer or a protuberance. X-rays are not taken light-heartedly. Everyone awaits their x-ray analysis with fear and worry. Radiology and concern about death therefore function in tandem. Consequently, Wim Delvoye turns the process into a celebration of the life drive, especially in its sexual form, and the oxymoron becomes clear. Finished are the dark patches of nodules, growths and cysts as Wim Delvoye turns the radiologist into an artist who captures in black and white the inside of a kiss, the material of fellatio, the intromission of sodomy, the shadows of masturbation, the carnal volutes of caresses and other love games. Thus appears the hoped for oxymoron in which the artist shows x-rays of life in transparency… X-rated x-rays, benign tumours instead of the usual malignant ones.
And then there are the stained-glass windows. This new sequence therefore obviously allows the oxymoronic jingle. There are plenty of self-quotations: bodies again, flesh (as always), but this time there is the inversion of Cloaca which presented faecal matter without intestines and intestines without faecal matter. There are also the photographed mosaics of meat, in other words, etymologically written in light. Once again, there are x-rays that are dislocated from their usual medical use for aesthetic reasons which are also ethical and political, as if created by some post-modern Situationist. All of this is arranged in a composition of stained-glass.
This pagan stained-glass window (or, better still, “atheist”, because this aesthetic form has only existed over the centuries within the framework of sacred religious art) is certainly oxymoronic. An art of light (recalling photography again, writing in light, the shroud of Veronica, the true icon), the stained-glass window obeys symbolic laws: light is solicited as a physical fact for metaphysical ends. Platonic and neo-platonic light: the shining of the One Good, radiation emitted by the essences, radioactivity of pure ideas. The metaphor of the divine associated with light finds its way into Christianity which, in turn, transforms the Messiah into an opportunity for renewal, a return to clarity in a world of darkness. The celebration of the solstice, of the sol invictus – the unvanquished sun – rapidly becomes that of the Nativity of Christ... Platonic dualism, when recycled by Christianity, provides a series of fundamental western propositions: on one side there is the sky, the soul, the elevated, clarity in light, ideas (the true, the beautiful, the good, the just), Paradise, Ascension, transcendence and angels; on the other side there is the earth, the body, the flesh, the low, obscurity, darkness, matter, error, shadows, Hell, the Fall, the ground, the underworld, demons and death. God or the world. Light descends, it falls, it comes from above and beyond itself. The stained-glass window filters, sculpts and carves it with prisms of coloured glass of fleeting chromatic ethers which are mobile and change in accordance to variations in the intensity of light. Coming from the sky, clarity reveals the nature of the metaphysical world in a metaphorical way. Falling in the nave, flooding the aisles, enveloping the pillars and shimmering in bright flashes of colour, it is mediated by the stained-glass window. So what is its function? It is to materialise the immaterial, express the unspeakable, and to show the invisible. This is the oxymoronic nature of the support, of the material.
What is the message? As nearly always in art, it is a question of celebrating power: religion, political power and its subsequent economic formulation, and, later on, nature – before the recent continents of modern art. The stained-glass window remedies the illiteracy of the faithful: it shows scenes from the golden legend of Christianity with pious and edifying images and colour used existentially. Annunciation, Nativity, Passion, Crucifixion, Ascension, Resurrection, etc. The populace does not know how to read, so images are presented to it and the stained-glass window serves this purpose, bringing down divine light and placing it on a human scale. We can imagine Wim Delvoye’s efforts to subvert the sacred stained-glass window and submit it to his oxymoronic dialectic. He retains the principal of the stained-glass window: a window with a Gothic arcature, a panel of transparent material (black, grey-white and coloured), rails which support the panes, networks of lead, and square eyelets which receive the curved keys that serve to fix the panels of stained-glass. All of these elements are used by the artist but even if the technique remains the same, what is expressed is a bit different, as you might imagine! The x-ray theme is present: sex and death, kisses and human remains, post-modern variations on the classic Vanity with its cortege of skulls and femurs, skeletons and danses macabres. You can almost hear the silent rattle of the merry dead swathed in flesh, transformed by the x-ray into white shadows. The life of death, the dance of bones, the interior of flesh, the transparency of matter, the luminous sex. The intestinal garland creates blooms and buds of what we imagine to be sweetly perfumed flowers. The soft areas of surgery are transformed into concretions of light, all in a network of geometric arrangements and compositions based on symmetry, mirror reflections, wheels within wheels and everything that makes up an apparently classic stained-glass window...
Wim Delvoye’s oxymorons make him a cynical artist in Diogenes’ sense of the term. Philosophical cynicism offers an antidote to the vulgar cynicism of our times (vulgar because it is liberal, mercantile, consumerist, nihilistic, acephalous, etc). Reflecting on differences of degree rather than of nature between man and animal; considering the question of prohibition in the Muslim religion; addressing the question of the magnificent possibilities of biotechnology; rethinking Spinoza’s question concerning the body (what are we capable of ?) in a fresh way; giving sexuality a real basis in the life-drive; all in an atmosphere of full-blown Nietzschean laughter: this is the stuff of essential joy!
(Text written for the opening exhibition catalogue “Eldorado”)