Art Of The Day Weekly

#445 - from 20 October 2016 to 26 October 2016

Delvoye the dynamiter

The term that surely best defines him is iconoclast. He had every day objects as coarse as cement mixers, bulldozers or tires be sculpted out of precious wood, giving them the aspect of lace. He tatooed a portrait of Osama Ben Laden on a pig skin. He drew aChapelle (at the Mudam) where the stained glass windows are made with X-rays of kisses, of vulgar finger signs or of sexual acts. Lastly, what in great part made him famous, was to design an extremely complex machine, capable of reproducing the process of human digestion. In other terms, a machine that can create excrements: this impressive Cloaca, a sort of synchrotron of an ew era, has been enriched by new versions, exhibited in the retrospective the Mudam Luxembourg dedicates to the artist until 8 January 2017. A true business man, Delvoye has glass artists from Gand, earthenware artists from Delft, Iranian illuminators and Indonesian sculptors work for him, to animate a true "factory" in the same line as that of Damien Hirst, to create a world "brand", but more surprising than Nestlé or Unilever.
Wim Delvoye, directed by Enrico Lunghi, éditions Somogy, 2016, 224 p. , €35.

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