Wim Delvoye

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye: I have been here before when I had an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. What I like about Sydney is that it gives a different view on contemporary art from the documenta or the Venice Biennale.
I think the selection of European and American artists is very different to how an American or European director would choose. We were speaking earlier of cultural mixtures and I very much like the pot-pourri here which sets artists from Thailand, or Poland, or Brazil mixed in with those from Paris, New York and Cologne. The whole Biennale has been done in a more focused way, perhaps a more extreme way, than it would have been done in Europe where there is still tokenism regarding, say, female artists or artists with certain ethnic backgrounds. Tony Bond has pushed this idea to his own personal boundary with a heap of non-Western artists, and I like that.

PH: How much of this is an influence from Jean Hubert-Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre?

WD: That is of course an important precursor to some elements in this exhibition. It also helps illustrate my point. When Kabakov was shown in Paris at Magiciens many people would say ‘why show a Russian here?’, but since then it has been happening all the time and now no one questions it. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky are both showing separate installations here in Sydney, for example. There artists have produced an enormously important oeuvre in the last few years, so it gives other cultures who are more classical, like the Europeans, a good injection of ‘other-ness’ from the boundary. Otherwise the art becomes inbred and we become like rabbits, not artists. In the same way cross-radical marriages always produce the most beautiful kids. I think it should be the same for art.

PH: The work you are exhibiting here is part of your on-going collaboration with Indonesian craftsmen. How did that come about?

WD: The connection is quite strange. The Indonesians imported a certain kind of 17th century baroque wood carving from the Dutch. I have now employed them to carve me a life-size concrete mixer from teak, so in a way I am taking back to the West what was already given to them three centuries ago. Prior to the Dutch influence, Indonesian wood carving had been quite superficial in terms of surface treatment.

PH: I have seen a number of examples of your work in different parts of the world, from the circular saw blades in the cabinet at Cologne to the titles at documenta and the goal-posts in Sydney. Do you always use craftsmen to execute your work?

WD: I make all the drawings and they are usually very big, on a scale of 1:1. That takes a lot of time. Then I get the specialists to make the work. On such large projects it would be impossible for me to do everything myself.

WD: I started those in 1986 and they were the first body of work to make me quite visible as an artist. At that time I was exploring the idea of my ethnic identity as a Belgian.
Nowadays, since Magiciens, there is a lot of curatorial interest in what Third World and non-Western countries are doing in their art. As a reaction to this I think that Americans and Europeans also have to redefine what they are. They cannot pretend to control any longer an international iconography and pretend to be internationalists like they were in the sixties. They too become ethnic within this ever-broadening context.

PH: A lot of work in this biennale involves wood carving. In addition to your own there is Kane Kwei, Martin Kippenberger, Jean-Baptiste Ngnetchop, Katsura Funakoshi, and to a lesser extent Giulio Paolini….

WD: But each of us is very different from the other. Ngnetchop is more craft-minded than I am. He is less naïve. I use craft, through others, in a very ironic way. I rape it, whereas he creates beautiful bank-notes in wood.
In my piece here, although it is still wood carving it becomes a concrete mixer and traffic barrier. It also becomes totally raped.
You must imagine that a lot of people in that part of Indonesia have never seen a concrete mixer in their entire life. And the nicest thing is that they find the original concrete mixer very beautiful and think that what they have done with their carving for me ‘as a job’ is awful. So the whole thing stays a very European way of working and seeing.

WD: Yes, it symbolises our century. The concrete mixer has taken us form the Stone Age to the Concrete Age. There is also the metaphor of cultural mixing. As an example, here I am from Belgium talking to someone who lives in Tasmania, but was born in Scotland. You are wearing Italian shoes and mine are from Sweden but they are an English brand. So we have this constant mixing in all aspects of our lives, like zapping a TV from one channel to another. One day we will all get up in the morning and brush our teeth with Chinese toothbrushes.
I wanted to celebrate all this with the concrete mixer, although at first I had considered a soup blender, but that is too cute and too small. I think the final idea is more monumental.

WD: Yes, that is a pre-industrial thing that rapes the industrialist character.

WD: No, not for me. A lot of Belgian artists are quoted in the light of Magritte. While he had undoubtedly been an influence on my work I feel closer to Rubens. What I like about Rubens is that he is celebratory and I like to celebrate in my work too. I do not like to pass on a very negative critique of life. I criticise through celebration without getting angry.

WD: I see that as a problem because it is so temporary and when the problem you are criticising becomes solved then what happens to the art? Does it still have a reason to exist? I prefer the more universal, shared, problems of the human condition.

WD: To me art is not like a series of breeze block concepts that can be pushed together and made to follow each other chronologically. Some of my projects are additive. I may take something I have done two or three years ago and interpret it in another form.
The latest new idea I have started involves bronze figures which are very classical with nothing oriental about them. They are classical male 19th century figures and they are watching the sky and closing their eyes, nose and ears against the universe. Their mouths are wide open and in each mouth is real telescope that crosses through the whole upper body and emerges from the ass. The figures are on plinths at a certain height and the spectator has to look through the ass to see the universe.

WD: Yes, they are and the ass is just below real eye level so that people have to take on the same posture as the sculptures when they look through the telescope. It is a little bit allegorical.

PH: Can you speak a bit about this ‘trans-nationalism’ that you mentioned earlier?

WD: The fifties, sixties, and seventies were about inter-nationalism. The eighties went back to a sort of nationalism through much of the neo-expressionist painting. Although it was a global movement it contained within it the new Italians, the new Germans, the new Americans, or the new British sculpture that was around Lisson Gallery in London. In the sixties Clement Greenberg and others were always worrying about being ‘internationalist’. I hope that the nineties will pick up the idea of trans-nationalism. Let’s exchange, let’s trade, let’s mix up.

PH: Finally, do you think there will be aboriginal influences entering your work, or other influences from your travels here?

WD: So far it hasn’t been a culture shock for me being here. After having stopped in Thailand and Indonesia on my here the big Australian cities remind me more of Europe or America. I like it here. A trip to the red centre or the Great Barrier Reef would show me a whole different side to the country. But I must say that what I really object to is when aboriginal art is shown by white curators with a feeling of guilt. You should never show an artist, say from Columbia, because of guilt. You should show them because of genuine artistic or thematic concerns. To me artistic concerns are more important than ethical or political ones, in the field of art. A friend of mine in Indonesia is thinking of starting a Jakarta Biennale which I think is fantastic. I have been warning him not to make it some kind of South-East Asia extension of an American or European theme. I am more concerned that Indonesian artists can be appreciated on an international level than I am that certain New York galleries get a toe-hold in South-East Asia just because of its huge economic growth. It would become very unhealthy if this all became part of a strategy to expand the Western art market.