Wim Delvoye: Cloaca – New & Improved

Borrowing its name from the ancient sewer in Rome, Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye’s new and improved “Cloaca” is a room-sized shit-making machine whose bowels process two meals a day, serving up a mouthful of complex themes: scatalogy and disgust, high and low culture, man as machine and vice-versa, and the inversion of art semiotics. Many of these same concerns are processed in Delvoye’s other work, like the life-sized carved walnut replica of a cement truck, the wood cabinet stocked with 32 circular saw blades painted with scenes in Delft China blue, and a herd of pigs tatooed by Antwerp’s finest needle-men. Feces and other anal subjects are parsed in accompanying essays by such luminaries as Milan Kundera, Gerardo Mosquera, Dan Cameron, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dali.