The mechanics of shit

Artist Wim Delvoye on high and low
culture, the human condition and his
emotional ties to Cloaca No. 5

NOT SO SHITTY: Cloaca No. 5

by STACEY DEWOLFE

The UQÀM gallery starts 2009 on a crappy note, opening their winter season with the Canadian premiere of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s controversial installation: Cloaca No. 5. Known colloquially as “the shitting machine,” this elaborately designed sculpture consumes real food and transforms it into excrement, resulting in an art-going experience that speaks to the eye and the nose.

This foray into the scatological is nothing new for Delvoye, a conceptual artist whose projects have long involved unorthodox materials, from saw blades and gas canisters to barium-painted sexual organs, live pigs and ready-to-pop pustules. “I’ve always been interested in the high and the low, and the juxtaposition of the two,” says Delvoye. “My focus shifted to shit because it has no value, but says more about the human condition.”

Delvoye spent eight years developing the first Cloaca and is still surprised by its success. “It’s been liked and defended by so many different people. Art critics and philosophers love the machine because it produces not just shit, but meaning...and crappy magazines can also inform their readers. The machine is intelligent or stupid depending on who’s looking at it: intelligence is in the eye of the beholder.”

The sculpture here is Delvoye’s fifth Cloaca, and each one is an aesthetic and technological response to the previous machine. But this is not his only motivation. “Making more than one machine protects you from the notion that it’s just one big mockery,” he explains.

But Cloaca has not always had an easy time. When the exhibit opened in New York in 2002, it was the height of the anthrax scare. “There was worry about the public and about the people who could shut the show down,” explains Delvoye. To allay fear, a rumour was circulated that Delvoye had worked with important scientists—but this was untrue. “I’ve not met any scientists,” he chuckles, “except for one, but he discouraged me more than he informed me.”

Yet the work is scientific. A series of vats and tubes contain the various bacteria and enzymes needed to mimic the human digestive system. But in order for it to shit, it also needs to eat—so it’s fed, twice daily at regular intervals. “We adapt to the local situation in a mocking way, and for practical reasons,” Delvoye says. In New York, its food was prepared by the city’s best chefs. In China, it had Peking Duck. The first Montreal meal was prepared by local artists.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Delvoye has come to see these machines as living creatures, but has never sought to humanize them—for example, giving them “a big pink ass where the shit comes out,” as was once suggested by an assistant. Yet he has described the act of unplugging the machine as akin to killing somebody. “For us it’s a human being. Thank God I won’t be here to pull the plug out. That would bring too much emotion.”

CLOACA NO. 5 AT THE
GALERIE UQÀM (1400
BERRI) UNTIL FEB. 14.