The Body as Machine, Taken to Its Extreme

[Dave Monroe]

>From Michael Amy, "The Body as Machine, Taken to Its
Extreme," Sunday, January 20, 2002 ...

N 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet and author
of the "Futurist Manifesto," proclaimed, "A racing car
whose hood is adorned by great pipes . . . is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." Within the
next five years, artists as diverse as Fernand Léger,
Kasimir Malevich, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp
all used mechanistic imagery in their paintings to
allude to the body — the central icon of Western art —
in motion or in repose. A more literal use of machine
iconography followed, in, for example, the work of
Jean Tinguely, who produced sculptures that could
move, make noise, draw or self-destruct, like us.

"Cloaca" (2000) represented a conclusion of sorts to a
century of development in machines that could
duplicate human activities. This vast contraption —
comprising an In-Sink-Erator, a computer-controlled
reactor, peristaltic pumps, an intricate electrical
system and glass jars containing acids and
micro-organisms — ingested and digested food with the
sole purpose of generating feces. It was a brainchild
of Wim Delvoye, 36, the enfant terrible of the Belgian
art scene, and was realized with the help of
gastroenterologists, computer scientists and engineers
in an extraordinary feat of artistic collaboration.

What humans produce effortlessly, "Cloaca" fabricated
at considerable cost, thus raising important questions
having to do with consumer society and the art market
in particular. All art is useless, Mr. Delvoye
claimed, and this project underscored the futility of
art and life.

Now "Cloaca — New and Improved" has arrived. This
room-size intestine, which was specifically adapted to
fulfill sanitary requirements of the United States
Department of Health, will be featured at the New
Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo starting on Friday
and will be fed twice a day, courtesy of several New
York restaurants, through April 28.

Mr. Delvoye, who lives in Ghent, was raised in Wervik,
a small town in West Flanders. His upbringing was
nonreligious, he says, but growing up in a Roman
Catholic society, he was struck by the power of
images.

[...]

Now that his ultimate machine, "Cloaca," has arrived
in New York — new and improved or not — a practical
question arises. What happens to the resulting waste?

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium,
where "Cloaca" was first exhibited in the fall of
2000, the end products were suspended in resin inside
large glass jars, which were displayed on stainless
steel shelves, with menus hanging beside them
documenting what "Cloaca" had been fed. The jars and
their accompanying menus sold well at $1,000 apiece.

In New York, the end of "Cloaca" will be enclosed in a
glass dome, and its daily output will be scooped up by
a gloved attendant and flushed away. In art as in
life, value is relative.

http://nytimes.com/2002/01/20/arts/design/20AMY.html

Condemnation from "America's" ex-mayor forthcoming,
I'm sure ...



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