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Of course artists have been elevating low culture to the status of art for some time, with the definition of what is a suitable subject changing over centuries. But Delvoye goes beyond mere recontextualisation of object or expansion of subject matter; he meddles with artworld behaviour and economic structures as if they were quantitative values and qualitative matter in themselves. Take, for instance, his tattooed pigs. Originally, in 1994, the skins were tattooed after the pig had been slaughtered and pinned to the gallery wall as straightforward, desirable objects. In 1997, however, Delvoye started working with live piglets. Collectors, dealers, artists, critics and the gallery-going hoi polloi were brought, like bewildered Alices, into contact with live, squealing, traditionally unclean animals and required to reconsider them as high-end commodities. As in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, the madness was soon assimilated and the mayhem was accepted as art. The tattoos themselves stretched as the pigs grew, like a crass analogy of market inflation and the indexical relationship between prices and reputations. Yet the tattooed image fades as it stretches and the hair grows through the skin, as if time were a process of dilution – perhaps another spiky comment on artists’ career trajectories. One piglet had Jesus tattooed on its rump, which ‘grew up’ to look like late-career Elvis.





Delvoye thinks of tattooing as the male version of knitting and reckons that if he were ever imprisoned he’d be untouchable because of his advanced, macho skill. He began experimenting in the early 1990s on chickens and squid, with poor results, until he considered the human-like skin of the piglet. The live pig presented practical problems though. Each animal could be under anaesthetic for just two hours at a time without risking its health, so each elaborate design took months to complete, with the artist and a team of four other men, all ex-offenders or street artists, working on the animals together. Livestock also raised issues of animal rights, although in the agricultural business a pig’s life span is around three months, while Delvoye’s pigs grow old and fat. He says he feels like Oscar Schindler when he visits the farm to pick out his half-dozen animals, experiencing guilt for the ones left behind, not only because they will have much shorter lives, but because they will only be valued as butchered meat, they will not bear the price tag of art. (Also, Delvoye is vegetarian which, he says, is an attempt to atone for all the wrong he perpetrates as an artist.)

The tattooed pigs represent a double-edged iconoclasm, a simultaneous pollution of street-cool and ‘high’ culture; the pigs might be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or the art parading as a bit of rough. As a cultural symbol, the pig blurs the boundaries between animal and human: certain tribes refer to the white man as ‘long pig’, while George Orwell evoked their anthropomorphability in Animal Farm. Delvoye’s humanising tactics imply the debasement of man as well as the promotion of the pig. You can almost imagine one of them propping up the bar and ordering a pint and pork scratchings, like a working-class hero. The tattoos are even desirable by street standards – rarely is a bicep pumped enough to accommodate such a large design.

Status-enhancement is a recurring theme in Delvoye’s work. A series of manipulated photographs in which mundane messages such as ‘DARLING – I’LL BE BACK AROUND MIDNIGHT. DAVID’ appear to have been carved into the side of mountains, Mount Rushmore-style, are a virtual monument to the banal. Elsewhere, charcuterie is arranged to look like elaborately inlaid marbled floors and presented in large, luscious photographs; cement mixers and bulldozers have been dressed up to the nines, their utilitarianism camouflaged by encrustations of carved arabesque; similarly, gas canisters have been painted with traditional Delft pottery designs. Twelve Ironing Boards sport heraldic designs – eagles, lions en passant, crosses, swords and familial colour schemes. The formal parity of ironing board and shield plays up the conflict of status – like T-shirts that say ‘Cocaine’ in the Coca-Cola typeface. Pared-down material truth upsets the hierarchical world of surface, decoration and utility, creating an absurd but poignant clash between domestic drudgery and heraldic chivalry.

Delvoye banishes the surface to reveal the lower levels of material truth of humanity in his stained-glass windows. The windows are made up of X-rays of people and animals blowing, fucking and sucking. The hallowed, ecclesiastical aura takes no time at all to fall away, revealing anti-creationist a priori or self-serving fetishism; the individual is reduced to sheer biological machine. Traditionally, an artist in the romantic tradition would assert their individuality to the point of alienation from mainstream society. Delvoye’s work, on the other hand, reflects the gradual marginalisation of man’s individual and collective importance since the Enlightenment. The history of science, as it is understood now, is less a series of discoveries than repudiations of previous theories. From Copernicus to Einstein, their theories have gradually undermined man’s perceived position at the crux of existence – Earth might not be the centre of the universe, man may have evolved from single-cell swamp creatures and perceived reality might not represent the whole picture. These were, of course, counter to the prominent teachings of the time and Darwinism isn’t universally accepted today. Delvoye, however, is brutally aware of the thinking that undermines our importance in the grand scheme. A Catholic schooling served him well in terms of a visual cultural grounding, the adoration of the painted image and worship before the sculptural icon; biology, however, takes over beyond the realm of aesthetics. Delvoye wants to be the boy that tells the emperor the truth, or Sancho Pansa, the pragmatist to Don Quixote’s dreamer. The X-rays serve this purpose, literally showing the skull beneath the flesh. Through the camera lens our psychology is masked; On the X-ray plate our identity is obliterated.

Similarly, the three versions of the cloaca machines – original, new & improved and Turbo models – are dehumanised portraits of sorts. They are partial reconstructions of the digestive system that, if fed and properly maintained, produce – yes – shit. As machines, the series follows the usual, marketing route from bricolage prototype with low capacity to a user-friendly version that is more efficient to the latest industrial machine with a huge output. Cloaca Turbo (2003) comprises three adapted washing machines; the first contains laboratory-produced acid and base, the second enzymes extracted from animals and the third bacteria cultures sampled from the human gut. This chemical progression from the synthetic to the human imbues the machine with an animal frailty. If the gallery attendant doesn’t feed the machine then the bacteria and, effectively, the whole ecosystem, will die and the shit will not be produced. This becomes a real problem when galleries close on Sundays and Mondays.

The cloaca machines are essentially automata, their only function is to emulate a fractional element of human biological capacity, independent of the psychological and societal aspects of existence. Like a dystopic pessimist, Delvoye is reminding us of our own construction and the futility and vanity of attempting to override biology. The gas canisters painted with windmills and flowers and the construction machinery carved with florid dexterity are follies to such vanity. In the book Ornament and Crime (1906) the architect Adolf Loos proclaimed: ‘The evolution of humanity goes hand in hand with the ordinary object's moving away from embellishment. Our artists working in applied arts may object as much as they want: for civilised humans, a nontattooed face is more beautiful than a tattooed one, even if the tattoo were done by Kolo Moser.’ (Koloman Moser was a popular Austrian designer and artist who Loos knew personally). Delvoye, in turn, ridicules this puritanical Modernist reductivism – perhaps itself an aesthetic affectation – by festooning the most pragmatic implements with Baroque excesses. He talks of the human need to collect trophies and how the art collection is like a peacock’s tail – a measure of success, a health determinant. He inverts the notion of the trophy by presenting the financially empowered with filth or kitsch (which, according to Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is the absolute denial of shit, the erroneous portrayal of perfection), and considers his work successful when he has achieved a profound breakdown between the fiscal and faecal categories. Recategorising things, decanting them from one value system to another, is like a mathematical approach to alchemy; but this is not a sealed, empirical laboratory in which Delvoye is working. Cultural associations ebb and flow through the work so that history itself becomes a medium with which to paint and society a catalogue of forms from which to sculpt.

Delvoye says he is a frustrated doctor, all too aware of the links between material fragility and human frailty, effluvia and equality (‘His shit still stinks, don’t it?’, as they say about society’s upper echelons). Football goals made from stained glass, floor tiles with a turd design, maps in which land masses look like a penis, snowman, sunglasses, a squirrel – the working practice is erratic, but the motifs distinct, easy to feed into a Freudian, Lacanian or whatever psychologist’s reading. Delvoye has retained childhood fascinations and bolstered them with knowledge of science, mythology, literature and art history. He has developed into the arch-enemy of constraint and order – upsetting the prim teacher and playing the psychoanalysts at their own game.

Sally O’Reilly is a Writer and Critic, and Trivia Editor for contemporary

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