AN ENCOUNTER BETWEEN BATAILLE AND DOCTOR FRANKENSTEIN
Catherine Francblin

"Our tragedies, our comedies are the extension of ancient sacrifices"
(George Bataille, Literature and Evil)

To an art critic that blamed him for having painted one of his paintings “in one night”, Turner replied that, certainly, he had painted it quickly, but that he had thought of it all his life. Contrary to the Work Time Reduction (WTR), from which French salaried employees recently benefit, the artist’s Work Time Reduction is no new data: it is even one of the main benefits that come with modernity. If the notion of spending evoked by Georges Bataille can be evoked here or there, it is particularly the notion of economy ("Economy of means,” one says) that guides most twentieth century artists.
Making a sculpture by fixing a bicycle wheel on a stool, that is economic. Dropping three black dots on a blue background, that is economic. Defining as a painting subject the day’s date on which it is painted, that is economic. Using a paintbrush of identical width for years in order to paint the same imprints at regular intervals on different types of surfaces, that is economic. When artist FranÁois Morellet declares that his sole line of conduct since thirty years is to "make the least possible”, one can believe it in a mere whim. In their near to intolerable radicalism, these words however express a desire shared by a lot of his colleagues, and to which Wim Delvoye’s work opposes his outrageously decorated objects, his perfectly executed assemblies, his expensive and precise machine designed to manufacture human excrement.

Whereby by provocation and reference to a controversial book (which presents no other real interest): La peinture moderne ou l’art sans mÈtier, the ‘designer’ of the New Realism Jacques VilleglÈ describes himself as "a man without a craft.” Wim Delvoye, with a similar cheerful spirit, rehabilitates in his work the notions of the beautiful craft, the notion of well-made work, and re-examines the tradition of fine arts, stained glass, and woodwork. However, as he does not cultivate nostalgia nor is he prisoner of any particular historic period, he does not hesitate to explore, with the same energy, the field that has today been opened by modern technologies or traditional body marking practices that have been revisited by the youth of the large contemporary urban centres.
Because he turns his back to the stylistic values of modernism - to its straight lines, its simple shapes, its pure colours -, Wim Delvoye’s art can be qualified as kitsch. One sees the ironic load implied by such a term. Connected to that load is the idea of an overhanging vision, of everyday art glared at by Sunday art, the idea that great culture will always be recognizable amongst all others, whatever the efforts deployed by the popular classes to imitate it may be. Envisaged under the angle of parody, the work of the Flemish artist has often been brought back to his origins and associated with a well-known ensemble not far off from the ‘Belgian joke’, or at least in the lineage of some famous compatriots, such as Marcel Broodthaers or Magritte. The arrival of Cloaca in his work, of which a first version is presented in 2000, seems susceptible to generate another reading of his artistic project, to modify his troublemaker’s image, the image of an inconsequent joker that his previous production could well have shaped. If every major work resembles a diamond whose facets come to life according to the orientation of light, Cloaca places a sparkle of exceptional density on Wim Delvoye’s work, sparkle that reveals the deep thought behind it and that stresses its philosophical and cultural dimension.

There is no question of denying the pleasure, the joy even, which is brought on by the precious wood Concrete Mixers that were sculpted by the world’s greatest cabinetmakers. By the butane Gas Canisters, decorated in the tradition of Delft ceramics. By the frolicking pigs, tattooed on the hock like suburban yobs; cranes as slender as a gothic cathedral’s spires, the fake geography maps, the porcelain football goals, etc. There is no question of forgetting the parts played by humour and mockery in this work. It is merely a question of observing that the critical will of the artist goes well beyond a simple analysis and criticism of the forms of modernism to embrace, in the same gesture, a criticism of the underlying content, beliefs, and prejudices.
With Cloaca, there is no need to resort to the antiquated techniques of objects kept in museums of arts and popular traditions; no reference is made to the old Europe’s art designs, to the regulation of an outdated beautiful that has become vulgar. Quite to the contrary, Cloaca is an object of the twenty first century. One could even say that it is a real-life small factory that uses the most advanced technologies. Wim Delvoye elaborated Cloaca with the collaboration of researchers who are at the leading edge of progress (biologists, gastroenterologists, bacteriologists, etc.). He worked on the realisation of the project for eight years, and dedicated a lot of energy and money to it. The ‘seriousness’ of his enterprise is perceivable to the naked eye: destitute of flourishes, Cloaca is not a spectacular work, but an austere, essentially functional machine, extremely anti-aesthetics. How is it that such a non-playful work (distinctly sterner than a machine by Tinguely) should nevertheless provoke fun? How is it that this laboratory object, this instrument of precision, should pretend to the statute of art and claim a place in a museum? To these questions, it is evidently possible to answer while convening the history of art and particularly the work of artists (from Manzoni to Gilbert and George, from Gasiorowski to Mike Kelley) that compete in the development of a ‘history of shit’. In relation to these works of art, it would seem that Delvoye gives much less importance to the end product than to the machine, and that he insists more on the complex function of digestion than on the excrement itself. Certainly, the fetishist dimension of the work, notably extricated by Manzoni, is another dimension of Cloaca too, as the final product can be kept in transparent boxes (that deliver to the eye what the Italian’s containers steal from it) and thereby be cashed and collected. Nevertheless, the essence of the project lies elsewhere. Leaning much more on the mechanical and clinical aspects than on the organic aspect that has been explored by artists who were more or less linked to the body-art movement, Wim Delvoye’s project relates to Doctor Frankenstein’s enterprise, except that - giving proof of more modesty and humour at the same time, modesty and humour that are probably at the root of his success - he does not pretend, as opposed to Mary Shelley’s hero, to reproduce a complete human being in a laboratory, but only one of its essential daily functions, a function - it is fundamental - that brings it closer to the animal and that strikes the hardest blow to the anthropocentrism of western metaphysics.

When one envisages Cloaca under this angle, all the pieces that make the artist's work appear to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The relationship that unites, for instance, this machine to the Concrete Mixers and other works with magnificent decors is strikingly revealed. Not so much because the Concrete Mixers are also, in a sense, digesting machines; but when one takes the opposite view to the forbidden as formulated by Adolf Loos, these works happily protest against a certain vision of the human being that is expressed by the Viennese architect who assimilated the need for ornamentation to a primary need, as essential as the need to defecate. We know that, according to Loos, "the contemporary man who scribbles on walls as a way of obeying an interior need is either a criminal or a degenerate." According to him, other than “for people affected by such a degeneration, this need most violently occurs in lavatories"; of such a sort that “one can measure the cultural degree of a country by the amount of scribble in its lavatories."
The floors decorated with excrement patterns, the ornate cement mixers, the Marble Floors, the tattooed pigs, the recent church stained-glass windows that impudently raise the veil on the secret of our innards, all testify the same mistrust that is exposed by Cloaca - that relates to an idealistic conception of mankind. It is a concept according to which humankind moves away from the lavatories as humanity ‘progresses’. For Wim Delvoye’s machine may very well make up – technologically and scientifically speaking – a ‘most modern’ machine, it does not fail to bring the spectator to that part of himself that idealism invites to reject as an alien element, a residue of ancient history, marked with the infamous stamp of ‘beastliness’ and vowed, to that effect, to always be observed, as Bataille indicates, “from the outside, under the light of the absence of transcendence."

If Mary Shelley’s novel is the tragic production, in a fictitious manner, of what Freud called the “return of the repressed”, Delvoye’s work is its comical representation in the real universe of the museum. One can explain the extravagant character of the gildings and marquetery that cover the Concrete Mixers while affirming, as children do, that these details "make it pretty". However, to use so much science and money to manufacture a robot capable to accomplish a universally despised function generally daily fulfilled by all human beings and animals, how does one justify the work other than by the positive effects of catharsis foreseen by this operation? Laughter is one of the most reliable indications of the cathartic virtues of Cloaca. However, to recognize such beneficial reaction to this work is to recognize its function, necessarily paradoxical, of purification. It is in this sense that while producing such a repulsive celibate machine, Wim Delvoye undertakes an action that – in George Bataille’s perspective – I would define as beneficial and that I would link to sacrifice.
“To sacrifice,” notes Bataille, “is to give as one feeds coal to the furnace." “Although,” he adds, “the furnace possesses an incontestable utility, to which coal is subordinated. (…) Whereas, in a sacrifice ritual, the offering is stolen from all utility.” It is this phenomenon of pure loss that Delvoye offers to the contemplation of spectators, when, in the course of a bi-daily ritual, he invites them to attend together to the “meal of the machine”. The ceremony, that makes one think of the meals served to lions in a zoo, in front of an audience that is both amused and worried, also evokes a religious service.
This service starts with the arrival of the officiant who presents the plates that contain the various dishes that have been learnedly and harmoniously cooked, which are intended to feed the machine. The man then goes up the few steps that allow him to reach the ‘altar’ where the ‘mouth’ of the machine is located, represented by a sort of basin in which he slowly slides the food before stepping down again. Delvoye could have very well done without this stagecraft, and Cloaca would have worked just as well. Nevertheless, by organizing a ceremonial based on the care lavished on to the machine, he places the visitor before the very spectacle of the gift to the furnace, of the offering, in front of the very spectacle that Bataille also calls "consumption”.

A biblical expression should be reminded here to stress, as a final act, the relationship that unites Cloaca to the work of the tattooed pigs that were presented between 1994 and 1999, and that were identifiable too by their names: Marcel, Eddy, Christopher, Josephin, etc. This expression: ‘to cast pearls before swine’ means, by allusion to a speech of the Bible, ‘to give something to someone that cannot appreciate its value’, reaches here a particularly amusing note. For the action of feeding a machine with the tasty dishes that a specialised dietician imagined for its intention, is obviously ‘to cast pearls before swine’.

From then on, Cloaca has been transformed into pork, the most libidinous of animals. They are in fact the living pigs that make up the work: Marcel, Eddy, Christopher, etc. – these works that must be cared for daily by a ‘curator’, Sundays and holidays included - that inspired Delvoye with such a similar transposition. The artist has already been associated with the pig, an animal that was declared impure by a great number of religions. This association saw the light in a shape that is familiar to the artist, (and that is near to the split between two far-away reference fields) the tattoos. These tattoos aim to allow the pigs to recover, by some kind of clothing or covering-up of their nudity, a little of the dignity they perhaps had before humanity, at a time when they shared the intimacy of our ancestors. Tattooed with the same images as the youth of today, and left (insofar as it is possible) in peace to walk about and around at ease in exhibitions, the peaceful swine were rendered similar to humanity. Cloaca resembles us too. This is why, more than a mere machine, it is like a mirror that opens a mesmerizing depth before us and invites us to know ourselves as we are.