Wim Delvoye. Cloaca.

A body without a body

In early 2002, from 25 January to 28 April, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York showed a machine more than thirty feet long. It was a chain of glass vessels linked by tubes and pumps, monitored by computer. Inside were enzymes, bacteria, acids. It was called Cloaca.

The Belgian artist Wim Delvoye built it with scientists at the University of Antwerp. Its aim was simple to state and hard to achieve: to reproduce the human digestive system, from mouth to exit.

Cloaca has no skin, no face, no hands. Only gut. A body stripped of everything except its lowest and most basic function.

Two meals, one movement

Twice a day, someone climbed a staircase beside the machine carrying a three course meal, donated by local restaurants sponsoring the show. The meal went into a grinder, was pulverised, and was pushed into the system.

Digestion inside the machine took about twenty two hours. The food passed from vessel to vessel, meeting each enzyme, each colony of bacteria, at each preset temperature. Finally, once a day, the machine defecated.

In an earlier version, the output was sealed in resin jars and sold as art. At the New Museum it was kept in a closed compartment and removed by a trained attendant.

The compartment did not hold the smell. The Brooklyn Rail's reviewer noted a foul odour, recognisable in a very intimate way. Everyone in the room knew it. No one needed it explained.

Technology and the question of the real

Estimates of the cost of building Cloaca ran as high as 200,000 euro. A large sum, a scientific team, a computer system, all to make what any body makes every day, for free.

That absurdity is part of the work. If a machine can do the work of the gut, what remains that is ours alone? If the body is only a food processor, where does the rest of us live?

The Brooklyn Rail review reads the work in two directions at once. Cloaca reduces the human to a processing unit. Yet the clumsiness and expense of the machine also affirm that people are far more complex than their biology.

Cloaca is also about value. In the art world an object becomes precious when it is rare, when it carries a signature. Delvoye took the most ordinary thing, the thing everyone wants hidden, placed it in a museum, and once sold it in jars.

The nose as witness

Looking at Cloaca, the viewer sees engineering. Tubes, vessels, wires, screens. The eye might think it is a model, an illustration of digestion.

The nose is not fooled. When the smell spreads, the machine stops being a model. It becomes a real process happening in the room. Smell confirms what explanation can only describe.

That is why Cloaca belongs to the history of art that uses smell, even though Delvoye did not make it as a work about smell. The odour was not a chosen material. It was an unavoidable consequence, and because it could not be avoided, it became the strongest proof.

Cloaca sits well beside Pope.L's peanut butter painting, where smell also comes from a material changing on its own. In both, smell is the part of the work no one fully controls.