Sex, Food, and Shit: The Art of Wim Delvoye

As controversial as he is clever, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has received broad critical acclaim, as well as public outrage, for projects that have included tattooing pigs or selling machine-made feces.  Bent on undermining common conceptions about what it means to be "human," Delvoye has utilized several imaging methods and concepts from science to drive his points home.

Controversial as they may be, Delvoye's projects go far beyond simple shock value.  The image on the left shows an example from his Chapel series, which consists of a number of x-ray and stained glass combinations that were installed in a gothic chapel.  He obtained the images by taking x-rays of two friends in various stages of love-making. This window, called Erato, tiles images of the same scene taken (or processed) at different x-ray opacities.

In this piece, Delvoye uses the cold, but beautiful, objectivity of x-ray imagery to "see through" one of humanity's most cherished acts, the kiss.  By presenting such sterilized views of such an intimate act, he suggests that despite any emotional or physical beauty and complexity, it all boils down to primitive activity among two bone and organ-filled organisms.  While Slow Moving Photon astutely proposes that the series may offer the possibility of "diagnosing true love," I see the beautiful stained glass windows as more of a cynical take on acts (kissing, loving) that we cherish as defining aspects of humanity.  In other parts of the Chapel series, Delvoye creates beautiful patterns from x-rays of skulls, teeth, and intestines, showing that underneath the human mystique lie the simple biological activities of sex, food, and shit.

While not directly about science, Delvoye's Chapel series (as well as his Cloaca project) uses scientific knowledge to show different ways of thinking about the human body.   In an age where we have discovered that we may share up to 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, Delvoye suggests that human activity may be no different than that of other life forms.

Image from Delvoye's website.  See more images here.