Wim Delvoye: Towering Ambition

By Paul Laster 6/16/09

Celebrated or reviled for his “sex-rays” (X-ray images of sexual acts), tattooed pigs and digestive-tract machines that eat food and produce shit (Cloaca Machines), Belgian artist Wim Delvoye thrives at the center of controversy. Given the challenge of creating a monumental work for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection during the 53rd Venice Biennale, Delvoye has come up with what he considers the ultimate artistic statement, a tower. Paul Laster recently sat down with Delvoye at his studio in Ghent to discuss his Venice project, its relationship to his previous works, and a newly acquired castle in Kwatrecht, Belgium, about 10 miles from Ghent.

View Slideshow Wim Delvoye: Digital rendering of Torre, 2009, laser-cut Cor-Ten steel, approx. 33 feet high; for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.; Pages 14-15 from the 64-page Wim Delvoye Colouring Book, 2009, showing (foreground) Cloaca No. 5, 2006, and (background) Super Cloaca, 2007.;

PAUL LASTER: Tell me something about your exhibition for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

WIM DELVOYE: My project, Torre, is up during the Venice Biennale, so lots of people will be there. And when it gets really hot, people won’t bother much with the satellite exhibitions, but they’ll still visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I had to consider what I could do in a museum where the modern masters rarely get moved. Everything in the collection was Peggy’s. The bookshop is all about Peggy—Peggy’s collections, Peggy’s life and Peggy’s lovers. But she did live in Venice and the Guggenheim has the highest status there, even during the Biennale. That put pressure on me, but I did not want to do anything inside the museum. It’s extremely small. I don’t even know what other artists previously did there, because every time I was in Venice for the openings I never managed to get in. It’s such an elite place.

I flew to Venice twice, and then a year ago I started building something ambitious: a Gothic tower. Making a tower is the ultimate expression of ambition. Making art is usually more about movable objects that you can buy and sell. I like to avoid that kind of thing, plus I’m interested in architecture. I decided to adapt the tower idea to the first opportunity that came up, and that turned out to be the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

PL: Where will the tower be located?

WD: I originally thought of placing it on the ground level of the atrium, from which it would rise 10 meters [33 feet] above the roof, but the floor consists of stones on sand, which would not be able to carry the weight. I then conceived it for the roof, with a steel grid structure to support it above the open atrium and four large pinnacles surrounding it. With that plan, people would have been able to walk up on the roof to view the tower and pinnacles, and the canal below. After lengthy discussions and engineering studies, the director of an urban council voiced objection to its placement because of a rule that forbids alterations to the Venice skyline. My third proposal, which has been approved, places a 10-meter tower on the lower terrace closer to the canal, and two 4-meter [13-foot] pinnacles on the roof. It’s actually a very elegant solution.

PL: How did you decide on the style and scale?

WD: I tried to integrate the tower with the building, but the architecture of the building is Neo-Classical. My project is another style completely. The way I designed it is also very unorthodox—from the top down rather than from the base to the peak.

I want every detail to be perfect. My design team has incorporated the Gothic style and Gothic Revival into the tower. These are architects who have worked with me for years and totally understand what I want. I’ve constructed other towers, but they were mere exercises in relation to this one. Last year I exhibited a couple of 6-meter-tall [20-foot] maquettes in Moscow and Basel, but the tower for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a scale model for a tower that I hope someday to build. It’s one-to-four, a quarter of the size, which is still huge.

I’ve designed towers 80 meters [262 feet] high. One is 325 meters [1,066 feet] high to match the Eiffel Tower. They remain maquettes, but with the Venice tower I’m very motivated to push the design into reality because I’m satisfied with what we’ve done. It starts where Gothic stopped. We somehow ate it all, we assimilated it, and now we’ve done a Gothic style that has never been done. It’s like we’ve continued a long tradition, but we are not just copying other people—we’re inventing.

PL: What materials are you using for the sculpture and how will it be constructed?

WD: It’s all Cor-Ten steel, which is laser-cut, folded and welded. It’s layered and very sculptural. The surface will be rusted, but we’ll varnish it to keep it from bleeding into the stone of the historical building. By making it in this steel we can do things that the Gothic builders couldn’t do. Some of those things are more beautiful in steel than in stone.

The designs are computer-generated. Since 2000 I’ve created 3-D images so I can see how my works might look in real life. We have several different programs and we play with their limitations. I’m always reminding my staff about the great cathedrals of Strasbourg, Cologne, Canterbury and Paris, which weren’t built with computers, cameras and helicopters.