Can a Feces Machine Be Art?

Posted by Mary Rayme Aug 17, 2006

Wim Delvoye is a Belgian artist with an international resume and was born in 1965.

Wim Delvoye also has a wicked sense of humor and likes to poke fun at the institution of art and art collecting. One of his current projects involves a pig farm in Beijing where the pigs are tattooed and filmed. Eventually the living pigs or dead pig skins are sold to collectors as works of art.

Perhaps his most famous piece are his cloacas. These are huge machines that take us through the distillery process of the human digestion system on a large and stainless steel scale. You really must look at all of these machines in their various incarnations and locations to get the idea that the cloaca is always being tweaked and altered to perhaps better suit its environs.

The cloaca exists in a room presided over by a smiling Mr. Clean genie and the cloaca logo which is in the style of the Ford logo. The symbolism of the Mr. Clean perhaps implies that this excrement is clean since it is not going through a real organic human body. The Cloaca-Ford logo implies assembly line and branding all in one fell swoop.

The end result of the cloaca is a sausage-like turd that is then packaged by weight for art collectors. You can read an excellent interview with Wim here.In the interview, Delvoye claims to have been most influenced by the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (Presumably, the original version with Gene Wilder, not the new icky version with Johnny Depp.)

So is it art? Is it satire? Is it in bad taste? Clearly, Delvoye is a serious and engaged artist, but the vehicle of his medium, the cloaca, is tongue-in-cheek fun.