Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has made lots of outrageous art. For example, he's tattooed pigs with elaborate Harley-Davidson symbols in order to save them from the slaughterhouse. He's also carved a life-size cement truck out of teak. But he's known everywhere for Cloaca, an elaborate machine that replicates the human digestive system. It has a mouth, a stomach, a duodenum, a pancreas, bottles of various enzymes and a conveyor belt that delivers daily a turd, or 'output’ as it's more clinically referred to. Recently, Delvoye founded Cloaca Ltd., a fully fledged company he started with Cloaca output as collateral. In the near future, when company bonds become available, Cloaca Ltd. will be the first work of art ever to gain corporate status.
Delvoye's latest machine (he has made three so far) is now being fed at the Power Plant.
National Post: Wim, how do you decide what to feed Cloaca?
Wim Delvoye: It is an omnivorous machine. Myself, I am vegetarian, but I wanted this machine to include all human beings, so the machine had to eat everything from every culture. I feed it everything: except curry is a bit difficult. Curry is very acidic, so you need a lot of stomach salts to compensate. Leeks are not good. And certain foods give the machine bad breath.
NP: How much does it eat in a day?
WD: This machine has a capacity of one or two human beings. Two meals a day. To be practical with museum schedules, breakfast is at 11 a.m.
NP Does it get constipated?
WD Sometimes, for the same reasons we do. Sometimes for trivial mechanical problems. The machine can also vomit. It can do that in two ways. Vomit from the stomach or vomit from the duodenum; which is very smelly. Humans have more ways of vomiting. The machine doesn't suffer from anxiety, or nausea, or from other psychological states. In this way, this machine makes objective poo. It doesn't protest what it is fed.
NP So it mimics exactly how food is digested by a human?
WD The enzymes we use are pharmaceutical. One is biological enzymes, one is chemical, and the third part is purely bacterial. So the stomach breaks things down with acid. It's pretty chemical. But the big secret is the small intestine. That's the bile and the pancreas. The pancreatic fluids bind all the enzymes together.
NP You must find people either really love or really hate your work. You're putting “outputs" into an art gallery. I can see people thinking you're saying art is crap.
WD I think the machine somehow agrees with people who feel left out of the art world. People who watch TV and who see contemporary art, they think art is crap. But in a way, when they see me or my machine on TV; they like it. They identify with me because, myself, I come from a small village. I do not come from an art background. I'm very, very sensitive to certain problems in art. Art always hides its real nature, which is showing off status. It’s always hiding status, but it always wants it. I refuse to think that an Impressionist painting is more amazing I than a guy from Vancouver with lots of tattoos; So I tell people who think contemporary art Is crap, "You're right, it's crap,” They think, “OK, yeah, he's with us. He's one of us.” They see me as a Robin Hood.
They also adore that Cloaca is technically difficult; What many people hate in art is that artists are all saying things they don't understand but in the end they see something they could make in an hour,and this is what they hate.
NP But artists making art that says “art is crap” - that's been done many times before.
WD Cloaca is all the people I admire of the 20th century. It's like a geneology of the super avantgarde; it's so coloured by the icons of the avant-garde. You can see Marcel Duchamp. You can see 1960s artist Plero Manzoni, who sold cans of feces. Then you think of the Basel artist who made "suicide machines" in the 1950s. Actually, it was not artists who influenced me, it was a film. My favorite is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I have collected every cover of the book. I've got hundreds. Every language.
NP You seem very affectionate toward the machine.
WD Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because to, me It's not an art piece any more, it's a child. I saw guards in museums weeping when we were breaking the machine down and putting it in cases. For three months, being with a machine that shits every day, it's like a car you like: There is not much difference between this machine and a human being. I would go so far as to say that it is life. I don't see differences between myself and the machine. Emotions, consciousness, these are very trivial differences. Maybe that it doesn't reproduce itself, that is a big handicap, but the ides of consciousness is very overrated.
NP That's funny because it's somehow true.
WD You know, every week I'm surprised that I thought of this machine.
NP Why is that?
WD The shocking thing about Cloaca is not that it's an art piece or that it is poo, It’s that it is artificial. There is something very weird about making the digestive system artificial. It's like you rob the humanity from the human. It's like you come into the gallery space and you feel like something is stolen from me now, an intimacy, a kind of dignity. It's very private, and then suddenly there it is so open and professional, and transparent. That's what's shocking. You don't have to be an art critic to be more shocked or less shocked. It's a human reaction. Even now, when there has been so much liberty in the last 20 years, people do whatever they like, and still that poo thing has evolved the other way.
-Catherine Osborne
