"Do not ever go into Walmart, Home Depot, Eaton's, The Bay, Rona, Winner's and Home Sense to buy a work of art...Guess what? We have ways of finding out..."
Iain Baxter&
Delvoye emerged in the early nineties, a cunningly original, he takes ordinary working class objects and transformed them into luxury products. Like many other artists of the nineties, he has employed the strategy of constructing enlarged versions of familiar objects from unfamiliar materials to ironic effect. But while in the hands of so many other artists this subject-material dialectic has become a predictable, Delvoye used it to build a product range of the most morally ambiguous works of art of our age. Delvoye is unique in his ability to produce work that is remorselessly cynical (cynicism is the new ism) and hopelessly utopian at the same time. His tattooed pigs are the the most advanced formulation of this ambiguity to date. He began tattooing pigs in Belgium in the nineties, and taking advantage of the less developed regulation of economic activity in emerging capitalist economies, he moved his project overseas – a process which is known as ‘globalisation.’ Delvoye opened a pig farm on the outskirts of Beijing. There he has been breeding twenty pigs. Once a week they have been tattooed under mild sedatives with diverse motifs from Russian prison tattoos, Walt Disney or luxury brand. At first sight these works of art appear, like so much other nineties art, another dada-ist joke about the endgame of contemporary art : the pig as an artwork ; tattooing as the new painting ; farming as a mimesis of economics of the capitalist art market (Delvoye has sold shares in his artfarm). They are also, like other works by Wim, another mediavel symbol of human vanity – the fashion for tattooed self-decoration among young Western consumers, with its significations of physical power, sexual desirability and hipness, now mocked by its transferal to lowly animal skins. Yet the tattooed pigs are also a perversely idealist project. Delvoye’s pigs have been saved from China’s factory farms. The impoverished Chinese farmstead has become ennobled as an artist studio ; the farm hands have become artist’s assistants. Delvoye’s pig farm, it could be argued, is a prototype for a better world. In this way Delvoye has parodied what French theorists and German curators call ‘parallel structures’ – in which the artist uses his privileged position free from the constraints of consumerism and corporate marketing to create prototypes for a better world. Hence pigs as works, rather than pork. Elements of appropriation, he signs his name in the style of the Walt Disney logo, parallel structures/ utopianism, dada anti-art statements mediavelism (the gothic, symbols of vanitas, stained glass, scatology), industrial processes and computer-assisted design.
Art&Flux December 2008
ReplyDeletewww.wimdelvoye.be
Delvoye emerged in the early nineties, a cunningly original, he takes ordinary working class objects and transformed them into luxury products. Like many other artists of the nineties, he has employed the strategy of constructing enlarged versions of familiar objects from unfamiliar materials to ironic effect. But while in the hands of so many other artists this subject-material dialectic has become a predictable, Delvoye used it to build a product range of the most morally ambiguous works of art of our age. Delvoye is unique in his ability to produce work that is remorselessly cynical (cynicism is the new ism) and hopelessly utopian at the same time. His tattooed pigs are the the most advanced formulation of this ambiguity to date. He began tattooing pigs in Belgium in the nineties, and taking advantage of the less developed regulation of economic activity in emerging capitalist economies, he moved his project overseas – a process which is known as ‘globalisation.’ Delvoye opened a pig farm on the outskirts of Beijing. There he has been breeding twenty pigs. Once a week they have been tattooed under mild sedatives with diverse motifs from Russian prison tattoos, Walt Disney or luxury brand. At first sight these works of art appear, like so much other nineties art, another dada-ist joke about the endgame of contemporary art : the pig as an artwork ; tattooing as the new painting ; farming as a mimesis of economics of the capitalist art market (Delvoye has sold shares in his artfarm). They are also, like other works by Wim, another mediavel symbol of human vanity – the fashion for tattooed self-decoration among young Western consumers, with its significations of physical power, sexual desirability and hipness, now mocked by its transferal to lowly animal skins. Yet the tattooed pigs are also a perversely idealist project. Delvoye’s pigs have been saved from China’s factory farms. The impoverished Chinese farmstead has become ennobled as an artist studio ; the farm hands have become artist’s assistants. Delvoye’s pig farm, it could be argued, is a prototype for a better world. In this way Delvoye has parodied what French theorists and German curators call ‘parallel structures’ – in which the artist uses his privileged position free from the constraints of consumerism and corporate marketing to create prototypes for a better world. Hence pigs as works, rather than pork. Elements of appropriation, he signs his name in the style of the Walt Disney logo, parallel structures/ utopianism, dada anti-art statements mediavelism (the gothic, symbols of vanitas, stained glass, scatology), industrial processes and computer-assisted design.