related artist
related exhibition

At age 36, Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye is no stranger to controversy—or to bodily functions. He first gained notoriety in 1992, when he displayed replicas of his own pinched feces on ornate tiles at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. This past winter, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, he presented his installation Cloaca, an agglomeration of pumps and tanks that mechanically replicated the digestive system’s production of excrement. Of this 33-foot-long monument to merde, Hilton Kramer, The New York Observer’s starchy art critic, wrote, “It is only as an example of the kind of psychopathology that is now deemed permissible in the art world that Cloaca is even minimally interesting.”

Whether art is the shit or simply shit has been a bone of contention ever since Marcel Duchamp transformed a common urinal into a sculpture. But there’s little doubt that Delvoye has breathed new life into this time-honored debate. His current show at Sperone Westwater’s gallery in the Meatpacking District displays the same in-your-face attitude as Cloaca, and then some.

On view is a taxidermist’s pig covered in biker tattoos that would fit right in at Hogs & Heffers, a Caterpillar tractor that thinks it’s a Gothic cathedral and bird houses outfitted in bondage gear. But the real showstoppers are backlit stained-glass windows and black-and-white Cibachromes, both feature X-ray views of people having sex. Utilizing mammograms, sonograms and MRI’s in addition to standard X rays, the artist captured himself and various models performing carnal acts—tongue kissing, fellatio, masturbation, fingers opening vaginas or probing assholes—in a way that gives new meaning to being bad to the bone. “The whole idea,” says Delvoye, “is that you come in the gallery and see this very abstract work. Then you start to read these things and find what’s really happening.”

To make the work, Delvoye transformed a radiological clinic in Ghent, Belgium, into a studio and recruited a group of doctors, radiologists and technicians to supervise. The key to getting such images of knocking pelvises was barium powder mixed with Nivea cream, which Delvoye slathered on himself and his subjects in order to “illuminate” the bones during x-raying—a step he likens to painting. (Which raises the question: What was it like to have sex while covered with the stuff? “It was sticky,” he says.)

When he wasn’t participating, Delvoye was looking at a computer screen in another room, allowing his subjects enough distance to perform naturally while observing their action as stylized, black-and-white radiographic images. “Just like John Woo,” he says, before adding that the whole operation was “very medical, very antiseptic.” Indeed, in a few cases, even arousal was administered. Some of the male models insisted on being injected with a Viagra-like medication in order to maintain “their perfect shape,” as Delvoye puts it.

For the X rays, the models dallied on a tiltable table. But the CAT scans proved to be more difficult, because of the narrow tunnel the machinery requires a patient to slide into. A couple would have a tight squeeze. “I had to find two extremely skinny people to do that,” Delvoye explains.

The artist’s sexy X rays continue the themes of Cloaca, especially the idea that the natural rhythms of life, as alimentary as pooping and as elementary as sex, are mirrored by death. But according to one item in the New York Post, Delvoye’s X rays are more than just symbolic brushes with mortality, the “Page Six” story claimed the artist had exposed those involved in the project to an increased cancer risk. “The guy who wrote it isn’t a scientist, and was looking for trouble,” Delvoye says in his own defense. “The doctor I worked with considered it completely safe.”

Dangerous or not, the result of the artist’s elaborate effort is certainly beautiful, especially the leaded-glass windows made with help from traditional craftsmen. But the point, he admits, is ironic, too. “The images are proof that these people did a dirty thing,” he says. But it’s a dirty thing that’s very aesthetic. It’s like an inside joke.”

-Paul Laster