LAV LAB
Adrian Dannatt
'I feel, against the stupidity of my time, floods of hatred which choke me. Shit rises to my mouth as in the case of a strangulated hernia. But I want to keep it, fix it, harden it; I want to concoct a paste with which I shall cover the nineteenth century, in the same way as they paint Indian pagodas with cow dung.' - Gustave Flaubert There are two remarks, not quite cliché and not exactly folk wisdom, that need to be brought together in connection with Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca". The first holds that human beings are merely machines made to process waste, that our lives consist of nothing more than eating comestibles, processing and passing the results, that any grander or more metaphoric claims on our nature can always be reduced back to simple functions of mastication, digestion and excretion, an endless circuit of self-sufficient repetition. The second remark claims 'art' can always be distinguished by the fact that it is useless. Art is never necessary, practical or required for physical life to continue, and this definition, of all the many on offer, remains surprisingly accurate. For it is hard to think of any work of art which is actually useful or essential for everyday existence rather than remaining a surplus luxury, visual or tactile. Delvoye's new Cloaca-device, his 'lavatory-laboratory', immediately prompts the question: 'But what is the point of all this?' Exactly the same question can be applied to human life and art, both of which may seem entirely pointless or brimming with meaning, depending on philosophy, theology or just how one feels at the time. There is no point to Wim Delvoye's machine just as there is no point in spending seventy years eating in order to excrete and excreting in order to be able to eat more. Likewise there is no point to the Mona Lisa; even she serves no actual practical purpose in this world. Thus though Delvoye's mechanical enterprise seems related to a whole art microhistory of excreta it actually is closer to something like Robert Morris's Metered Bulb of 1963, a seminal work whose ludicrous circularity, an electric bulb whose sole purpose is to illuminate the meter that measures how much electricity this has taken, is as comically and conceptually rich as Cloaca. Both Delvoye and Morris's sculptures function as critiques of machine-age scientific systems while also paying homage to their technical logic and delicious rigour. As Emily Dickinson put it: 'Success in Circuit lies...' - a nineteenth-century phrase which could well be the motto of our own interconnected digital age. Morris's metered light bulb and Delvoye's Cloaca are equivalent to hi -tech, laboratorydeveloped versions of the Ouroboros snake of mythology, whose tail enter its mouth and thus forms a perfect, unbroken circle without beginning or end, the chicken-and-egg question rephrased in a climate of cloning. But Cloaca operates on such a variety of levels, playing off everything from advanced science (and the fears which accompany these advances) to up-market product merchandising, IPO fever and the inexact mechanics of the art world itself. Just as significant to the meaning of Cloaca as the actual generation of faeces is the packaging and marketing of these end products. For it is thus that Delvoye so cleverly echoes current systems of distribution and consumption, not parodying or critiquing such business systems (that would require a very different artist from a very different previous decade), but actively adopting and extending such practices. For Delvoye's chic sealed crap parallels the current trends in fashion retailing. Barbara Bui in SoHO displays her garments vacuum-sealed in plastic like any other mass-market commercial product, a fashion trend begun by Comme des Garçons with their perfumes and garments sealed to resemble IV bags or other medical-industrial products. There is a painful logic by which one can end up buying shit smartly wrapped in equally perfect packaging, the 'consumer' purchasing the end products of consumption, a reductio ad absurdum of Freud's equation of money and excreta and an entire subsequent psychoanalytic-sociological analysis of shopping's primal gratifications. Indeed, the vast literature of excreta, almost as extensive as the bibliography of erotica, and most recently exemplified by Histoire de la m erde (Prologue) by Dominique-Gilbert
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Laporte, has detailed this complex exchange between cash and crap, fashion and faeces. If money is shit and vice versa, what could be simpler than looping the loop of this logic and trading one directly for the other, t hus making overt all the curious, hidden corporeal dynamics of shopping. Of course Delvoye's vacuum-sealed selections of shit are genuinely mass-produced (albeit by only one machine for the moment) and genuinely ubiquitous in output, perhaps the most ubiquitous of human productions, but at the same time they are objects of potential financial value because of the name, the name of the 'famous artist' attached to them. They can be marketed as items of worth within what is a very small market, that of contemporary art, but a small market with a very large amount of money. Such shit will not sell without the right name attached. Manzoni was himself playing with the ironies of literally being able to sell shit to rich collectors and proved that it was all too possible because the idea itself was worthy of approval and commentary. Indeed, as it has been established from Marcel Duchamp onwards that art to qualify as 'art' only requires the signature of a sufficiently famous artist, Delvoye could actually rent out his Cloaca machine to other contemporary artists, whose products would then sell for more or less depending on the importance of the artist whose name is proudly printed on the package of excreta. Thus, say, a Jeff Koons brand of poo could achieve twice the price of perhaps a Marc Quinn poo, even if they were actually made by the same machine. The name displayed boldly on the front would determine its cost and subsequent resale value on the market. The importance of Delvoye's machine's products depends upon them being genuinely fake excreta: if they turned out to be real poo they would have no meaning or value, so we have to trust Delvoye and the complexity of his scientific process and assume that the end products really are fabricated and entirely non-human. Delvoye is giving us not 'the real shit' as hip-hop parlance might have it, but rather 'real fake shit' valuable for its inauthenticity. Of course the could in fact be basic, ordinary human excreta hidden in the machine which is ejected at the end, as if it were the result of a whole complex system, much as in The Rake's Progress by Auden and Chester Kallman the fake machine for turning stone to bread is little but a simple box with all the trappings and tunings of a serious scientific device. We have to believe that Delvoye's machine is actually doing all this elaborate work, we have to trust the artist's guarantee of his own integrity. Perhaps the ultimate conceptual irony, the final joke, would be if we were being presented with the real shit instead of fake real shit and would be incapable, of course, of testing or tasting the difference. In Aspects of the Novel E.M. Forster famously asked why no novels (other than perhaps Ulysses) feature characters going to the bathroom and suggested that this was a m ajor flaw in the authenticity of literature. The same criticism could not be applied to contemporary art, where excreta and its rituals have been a regular theme throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, it would be easy, perhaps all too easy, to assemble a large group show on the theme of both urine and faeces in art history, a show which perhaps could be mounted by the lavatory company Kohler of Wisconsin, known for their generosity to the contemporary arts, who even offer artists scholarships and residencies in their toilet-manufacturing plant, for artists to work with the ceramics and mechanics of the trade. And as modern-contemporary art seems often like a game of upping the ante, taking an idea and seeing just how far one can push it, Delvoye has created the final endgame, ultimate statement on excreta-in-art, just as Reinhardt was so proud of having produced 'the last possible paintings', unaware of just how many other impossible paintings were to follow his full stop. The long, endless list of such work includes, at random and in no particular order: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, an example of which was recently sold at Christie's evening auction deliberately right next to Warhol's 'Oxidation' paintings made by urinating onto metal. Likewise there is the photowork of Gilbert & George peeing and numerous examples of their large photographs of their turds. But the tradition of such imagery stretches back to
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much earlier times - whether Rembrandt's peasant women peeing at the river bank or Lorenzo Lotto's peeing putto in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, which always attracts giggling schoolchildren. Nor should we forget the extreme Belgianness of the Manneken Pis. Called 'Brussel's Oldest Citizen', the small bronze sculpture of a boy peeing was designed by Jerome Duquesnoy in 1619; the original was kidnapped by French soldiers in the eighteenth century and has been replaced several times since, which in effect has turned it into an art multiple of unlimited edition. The fact that this image should be the trademark for the city of Bruxelles is almost as bizarre as the collection of more than 600 costumes in which he can be clothed, kept nearby at the Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles. Just like Delvoye's Cloaca, the Manneken Pis is a unique artwork which has developed a whole series of ancillary and auxiliary products around it. The choice of Manneken Pis as the central tourist symbol for Brussels in the way Paris has the Eiffel Tower or New York the Empire State Building, suggests the Belgians are rather modest when it comes to a phallic signifier to represent their capital. In the same debased cultural line as Manneken Pis are countless kitsch paintings, on velvet and otherwise, of winsome baby boys urinating, though why this is considered so charming while a girl of the same age is very rarely portrayed pissing is not entirely clear. Urine can also be used to create art in the most practical terms, as Paul Klee notes in his Italian Diary of 11 February 1901: 'Haller painted with watercolour nearby; having no water he used his urine.' In a very similar manner Richard Long was briefly notorious for using his own urine to make traces on the ground during his walks in nature, an image which subsequently spawned both Graham Durward's name written with urine in fake snow and an almost identical, later, work by Jonathan Monk, My Name Written in My Own Piss, a colour photograph from 1993. Most recently the young artist Knut Amsel, whose pee-stained crotch recently graced the front cover of Artforum, a detail from the video work Untitled; Pissing. This seems almost a response to Steve McQueen's video of a pissing man, peeing directly at the camera. In any such random art round-up there are also the faecal sculptures of Kiki Smith, the brown shit-simulations of John Miller or the urinal fetishization of New York performance artist Patty Chang. The project and accompanying book Collectors Shit by Todd Alden in January 1993 directly replied to Manzoni's idea of artistic uniqueness with the equally singular productions of contemporary art collectors. Alden's project reactivated Manzoni's attempted outrage, which has subsequently dimmed and dwindled due to his fame and the process of historicization, for the collectors were, for the main part, as scandalized by the notion of providing their own faeces to an artist as they might once have been by Manzoni's shit. Nor, most importantly, should the several examples of such excremental work by Wim Delvoye himself be overlooked in the tradition, whether his very Belgian peeing weather-van sculpture or the sublimely and deceptively shit-tiles of legend. Manzoni may remain, of course, the most obvious and well-known practitioner of faecal art, but his 1961 canisters of shit (which according to rumour may always have been empty or contained the excrement of someone other than the artist himself) are all about uniqueness, and thus exactly the opposite of Delvoye's machine-produced offerings which are all about sameness, the attractive neutrality of mass-manufactured products. What makes Delvoye's machine true 'art', by the ludicrously low standards we now use to identify such stuff, is the uniqueness of the idea, not the uniqueness of the final result, all of which will not only look more or less identical but cannot be easily distinguished from the 'real' excreta of humans. Manzoni's shit was the last grunt of humanism, Delvoye's by contrast is the first gasp of supra-scientific simulationism. In the final analysis the fame of Manzoni's shit is solely equalled by Duchamp's urinal, without doubt the two central twentieth-century masterworks of the excremental genre. They are only to be matched or even outbid now, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, by Delvoye's definitive 'Cloaca', which should provide this arthistorical trajectory with a much needed finale and full stop.
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