Delvoye's Tower in Venice, Paris and Brussels.
In the past he’s tattooed pigs and sold turds produced by his own defecating machine, Cloaca.
Now there’s a Gothic tower made by him in COR-TEN steel on the roof of the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, on the rue Royale/Koningsstraat side.
Travelling tower
In June last year the tower looked out over the Canal Grande near the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, in Venice. During the summer of 2010 it was in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. At each new destination a new floor is added to the bottom of the tower.
The Paris version measured ten metres, the Brussels one seventeen metres. In the meantime it weighs ten tons.
Wim Delvoye (Wervik, Belgium, 1965) always plays for high stakes. In Venice his tower had to compete with the whole city, in Paris it challenged the Eiffel Tower. In Brussels you can see it contending for the crown at the top of the tower of the city hall, one of Brussels’ Gothic pearls.
Architecture and ornament
Delvoye’s tower is architecture as well as ornament. As usual, the artist thought up the work and then left the execution of it to computers and craftsmen.
This is his scholium on the artwork: “While the Renaissance was a world view, the Gothic was a state of mind. The Renaissance was a finite epoch lasting half a century before being succeeded by Mannerism. Gothic was an art outside of time. The human eye takes in detail like a stroboscope. Glancing over lights and tracery, crockets and finials, it thrills to the joy of the tower’s soaring ascent.”
Much can be said about this idiosyncratic vision of art history. Is Delvoye a joker, an anarchist with a mission or a con man? In either case he dances through the art world of today and long ago, uninhibited and with mercantile success.
Foretaste of heaven
‘Toren/Tour’ is a foretaste of Wim Delvoye’s first solo exhibition at Bozar. Under the title of Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door he will present Gothic-inspired drawings, models, sculptures and towers. The artist will also do an intervention in the parallel exhibition The World of Lucas Cranach.
Delvoye in The Low Countries Yearbook
In 2000, The Low Countries Yearbook published an article entitled Everywhere a Tourist – The Lively ‘Almost-Art' of Wim Delvoye.
You can find that text in its entirety here.
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