About photographer/artist Wim Delvoye for sophomore year photography class.

1. Wim Delvoye
By: Megan Fowler
1965-present day

2. Early Life
• Raised in Wervik, Belgium
• Influenced by Roman Catholic society; not
religious himself
• Career marked by his ability to manipulate
objects.

3. With Wit & Humor
• Sculptures and photographs are driven by
visual punchlines.
• The witty combination of the grandiloquent
and the ordinary, public and private, carries
the works’ serious comments on our waste of
natural resources and the nature of
communications in contemporary life.

4. Career
• Delvoye considers himself an originator of
concepts—he is attracted initially to the
theory behind pieces, instead of the act of
painting itself.
• In 1992, Delvoye received international
recognition with the presentation of his
“Mosaic” at Documenta IX, a symmetrical
display of glazed tiles featuring photographs
of his own excrement.

5. “Mosaic” at
Documenta IX

6. • The organizer of Documenta IX, Jan Hoet
claimed, “The strength of Wim Delvoye lies in
his ability to engineer conflict by combining
the fine arts and folk art, and playing
seriousness against irony.”

7. Cloaca
• Delvoye is perhaps best known for his
digestive machine, Cloaca, which he
unveiled at the Museum voor Hedendaagse
Kunst, Antwerp, after eight years of
consultation with experts in fields ranging
from plumbing to gastroenterology.
• Cloaca is a large installation that turns food
into feces, allowing Delvoye to explore the
digestive process.
• Delvoye collects and sells the realistically
smelling output, suspended in small jars of
resin at his Ghent studio.
• When asked about his inspiration, Delvoye
stated that everything in modern life is
pointless. The most useless object he could
create was a machine that serves no
purpose at all, besides the reduction of
food to waste.
• Cloaca has appeared in many incarnations
including:Cloaca Original, Cloaca - New &
Improved, Cloaca Turbo, Cloaca
Quattro, Cloaca N° 5, and Personal Cloaca

8. Art Farm
• Though Delvoye started tattooing pig skins
taken from slaughterhouses in the United
States in 1992, he began to tattoo live pigs in
1997.
• Delvoye was interested in the idea that “the
pig would literally grow in value," both in a
physical and economic sense.
• He ultimately moved the operation to an Art
Farm in China in 2004 where restrictions
regarding animal welfare were less strict.
• The pigs have been inked with a diverse array
of designs, including the trival, such as skulls
and crosses, to Louis Vuitton designs, to
designs dictated by the pig's anatomy. The
designs are created by Delvoye and his three
colleagues in residence.
• In an interview with ArtAsiaPacific's Paul
Laster, Delvoye described the process of
tattooing a live pig, "we sedate it, shave it and
apply Vaseline to its skin". As another
manifestation of contradiction in Delvoye’s art,
he owns a pig farm though he is a practicing.

9. Gothic Works
• Additionally well known for
“gothis” style work
• Delvoye also creates
oversized laser-cut steel
sculptures of objects
typically found in
construction (like a cement
truck), customized in
seventeenth-century Flemish
Baroque style.
• These structures juxtapose
"medieval craftsmanship
with Gothic filigree".
• Delvoye brings together the
heavy, brute force of
contemporary machinery
and the delicate
craftsmanship associated
with Gothic architecture.

10. Other Interesting Facts
• In 2001, Delvoye, with the help of a radiologist, had several
of his friends paint themselves with small amounts
of barium, and perform explicit sexual acts in medical X-ray
clinics.
• He then used the X-ray scans to fill gothic window frames
instead of classic stained glass.
• Delvoye suggests that radiography reduces the body to a
machine.
• When he was not an active participant, Delvoye observed
from a computer screen in another room, allowing the
subjects enough distance to perform normally, although
Delvoye has described the whole operation as "very
medical, very antiseptic".

11. One Last Thing
• In a 2013 show in New York City, Delvoye
showed intricate laser-cut works combining
architectural and figurative references with
shapes such as a Möbius band or a Rorschach
inkblot.

12. Works Cited
• "Wim Delvoye." Wikipedia. Wikimedia
Foundation, 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Delvoye.