Wim Delvoye, 36

Wim Delvoye’s latest work looks perfectly harmless in the middle of his chaotic studio in a nondescript part of Ghent. But that is only because it is at rest before heading off in May for the inaugural exhibit of Vienna’s new Kunsthalle, and then on to Zurich’s Migros Museum and then to New York. Normally it leaves no viewer unmoved. Called Cloaca, it consists of some $200,000 worth of chemical beakers, electric pumps and plastic tubing arrayed on a row of antiseptic stainless steel tables. When Cloaca is on exhibit, an attendant climbs the metal staircase at one end twice a day to offer up a good solid meal to the machine. The food is “chewed” by a garbage disposal before passing on to the first beaker, where it is squirted with pepsin and stirred, then on to the following beakers and treatment with pancreatin, hydrochloric acid and other digestive juices. The product finally goes through a separator and the remaining solids are extruded on to a revolving plate.

Et voilá: merde — an outcome that co-opts even the bluntest judgment about contemporary art. “We spend all this love, all this money and manpower,” says Delvoye with anarchic glee, “and we get something everybody flushed away this morning.” He has had to turn down several requests from science museums that just don’t get it: Cloaca isn’t meant as a didactic take on the human digestive tract. He insists it is a highly pungent comment on the folly of human achievement. Or as New York art critic Adrian Dannatt puts it, “a reductio ad absurdum of Freud’s equation of money and excreta.”

Whether by destiny or chance, Delvoye’s controversial art seems perfectly aligned with Europe’s current indigestion over what it ingests. He was born in rural Flanders where there are more pigs than people, and he says he has always felt a pull to the “agrarian tradition” in Flemish art. His studio walls bear ironic witness to that: photographs that seem to depict delicate inlaid marble floors are actually intarsia of processed meat, pork parquettes fashioned from deep scarlet salamis and delicate pink bolognas and hams. One previous succés de scandale was to tattoo live pigs with the kind of icons that normally grace the biceps of a Hell’s Angel. Thus converted to art, the pigs avoided the slaughterhouse; animal rights activists were nevertheless not amused.

For Delvoye, a teetotalling vegetarian, “Belgium is the studio, New York the exhibition place,” and he divides his time between the two. In Belgium, he says, the bizarre is normal. He can get Ghent’s master plumbers and professional biochemists alike to contribute to his excretory vision, and during last autumn’s show at Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art, he says, “everybody went with the kids to see the shit machine on a Sunday.” In Belgium, he can even find a clinic that lets him take after-hours x-rays of his friends’ sexual frolics, which he turns into stained-glass windows. Elsewhere he figures his work would be frustrated by scandalmongers and parsed to death by the politically correct. “In Belgium we’re not pretentious enough to think we can change the world,” says Delvoye. Much better, he figures, to gain acclaim by thumbing his nose at it.