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Suppositions: the Art of Wim Delvoye

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Suppositions: the Art of Wim Delvoye — isabelle loring wallace — Suppositions: The Art of Wim Delvoye I. In 2012, in conjunction with his solo exhibition together at their broad ends to form a menacing, if at the Musée du Louvre, Wim Delvoye installed a arrested, torpedo. Indeed, a threat is implicit here, large work of art beneath I.M. Pei’s iconic glass pyr- and, if Delvoye’s sculpture served to anticipate amid. Visible from the courtyard and, once again, other gothic works in the show — secular stained upon entry to the museum, the sculpture marked glass windows, lacey metal dump trucks with beds the Louvre’s main entrance, while granting visitors in the shape of a nave, a gothic tower curved in on a preview of the work in Delvoye’s show, much of itself in the shape of a nautilus — this comparative- which used gothic architecture as a subject and ly more abstract sculpture, made of stainless steel medium. If representative, the object in question and perforated by glassless arched windows, also is not easily described, and for all the immediate served as a worrisome foil for Pei’s glass and steel impact of its installation, digestion takes time. One pyramid, which was likewise perceived by some as a notices first its shape and scale, also its reflective threatening intervention in its own right. material, exaggerated at the Louvre by the light that poured down on all sides through Pei’s dia- Commissioned to accommodate the Louvre’s daily mond-shaped windows. Conical and tapered at onslaught of visitors, the pyramid complex, which both ends, the work is eleven meters tall and has opened to the public 1989, appeared futuristic to the contours of a missile or un-husked ear of corn, traditionalists and, at the same time, Pharonic — though the light might initially obscure this fact, as an interloper from a distant, pre-classical past and, well as the debt this form owes to gothic architec- simultaneously, a suite of alien objects, recently ture. Once the details of Delvoye’s work come into landed from an encroaching, post-classical future. focus, they facilitate an economic, if perplexing, Of course, in time, Pei’s pyramids would find ac- description: two twisted gothic spires, as if sutured ceptance and even admiration, and, for some, the 64 < Suppo (scale model 1:2), 2010, laser-cut stainless steel, ø 75 × 620 cm, mona, hobart, 2011 65 logic of their installation was always apparent. For the Renaissance would return Western civilization the oval, the vertical with the diagonal, and the or embodies a certain restraint and sobriety, with although Pei’s pyramids are both pre- and post-clas- to the “to the purer style of the antique”3 and put cylinder with its more dramatic cousin, the spiral. most of its details deriving from classical architec- sical, their symmetry, triangularity, and transparen- the style of the late medieval period in its place as a With this in mind, let us return to Delvoye’s instal- ture and seeming to serve assorted architectural cy established unexpected affinities — not only be- debased, graceless form of expression. lation at the Louvre. needs (pediments, columns, etc.), so do the forms tween Classicism and other, pre-classical cultures, and materials of Pei’s pyramids, which lack super- but also between high Modernism and the staid clas- There’s much to say about art history’s investment At first, there is the simple fact of the opposition fluous details and seem as if an austere solution to sicism of the Louvre. Hence, we might say of Pei’s in the ideas of antagonism and renewal, but in the Delvoye’s work stages between the Gothic and the a complex architectural problem. pyramids that they created alliances that Delvoye’s context of this essay there are two major points Classical, and the pointed suggestion that the one gothic sculpture would then solidify and exploit. worth underscoring. First, if key to art history, the serves as a threat to the other. Jagged-edged and Of course, the problem Pei faced was light — its opposition between the Classical and the Gothic possessed of a needle like nose at each end, Del- capture and passage through architecture — and For although “gothic” is an unruly term with di- is also key to Delvoye’s installation at the Louvre, voye’s work literalizes the notion not just of differ- if he managed a technical solution to this prob- verse connotations in a variety of fields — a fact and key even to the sculpture when seen in isola- ence — an elongated, dramatic, and ornamental lem late in the twentieth century following in the to which I’ll return — it first emerged as a stylis- tion. Second, within art history, Gothic is not the form in stark contrast to the Louvre ‘s classical footsteps of other modern architects and their fa- tic concept in conjunction with architecture and only style charged with possessing an anti-classical structure and façade — but also the notion of risk mous, stripped-down experiments with glass and was used as a pejorative in an effort to mark some- aesthetic; in time, the Gothic will come to share and incipient violence, as if the Gothic’s resur- load-bearing steel (Mies van der Rohe and Philip thing off and differentiate it from the classical art this status with the Baroque, which was also (and gence might again derail Western civilization, shat- Johnson among others), it’s also true that gothic of the Renaissance, itself a revival of classical an- through its very name) demonized as an unwel- tering its very structure into a pile of irrecuperable architects engineered a solution of their own in tiquity. Entangled with the idea of various gothic come departure from the ostensibly normative shards. And yet, Delvoye’s sculpture isn’t simply the late medieval period, using vaulted ceilings tribes who were perceived as barbaric, by the seven- tendencies of the classical tradition. As we shall gothic, nor is its environment (the Louvre) simply and flying buttresses to open up the cathedral’s teenth-century “gothic” had come to connote cru- see, the Baroque is also an important aspect of Del- classical. Indeed, even if we set aside the majori- walls and in that way maximize the effects of light dity and excess in a stylistic sense, especially when voye’s recent work, including his theatrical installa- ty of the Louvre’s history and concentrate on the via the power of glass. Thus, even as Delvoye’s in- seen in contrast to classical art and its renewals. 1 tion at the Louvre. mid seventeenth-century structure and façade one stallation makes strange bedfellows of classicism The groundwork for using the term in this way was sees today, there is still the fact of Pei’s pyramid, and Modernism, uniting them against the per- laid by Giorgio Vasari, whom many take to be the II. the glass canopy under which Delvoye’s sculpture ceived threat of the Gothic, it also undoes their first art historian, thanks to the 1550 publication of The history and etymology of the term “Baroque” stands, poised like rocket before take-off. opposition to the Gothic, establishing a series of his famous tome, The Lives of the Artists. Therein, he is complex, but scholars agree that it derives from unwelcome affinities between the Louvre and the lamented the gradual decline of the arts following one or more words — the Portuguese word “barro- Directly situated beneath the main pyramid’s apex, primary style deployed in Delvoye’s promiscuous their early perfection in ancient Greece and Rome. co,” the Spanish term “barrueco,” and the Italian Delvoye’s sculpture was juxtaposed with Pei’s mod- object. After all, Delvoye’s sculpture echoes the The uncivilized Goths, for whom gothic art is even- word “barocco” — that denote irregularity and ex- ern addition as much as it was with the grounded materials of Pei’s pyramid and is a pyramid (or tually, erroneously named do not receive full cred- cess, originally in the context of jewelry, as in the classicism of the Louvre, ever-visible through Pei’s two) in its own right, albeit one that’s distended it for this decline, but Vasari mentions them often baroque or irregular pearl. Hence, when used sub- glass canopy. As an effect of this juxtaposition, the and busy with detail. Made of steel and perforated as contributing factors in his book’s first preface sequently, in conjunction with the visual arts, as it Louvre’s own internal differences began to recede by windows, Delvoye’s sculpture is in many ways an before suggesting that they ultimately deliver a was by the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in in favor of various commonalities that bring Mod- uncanny reflection of Pei’s central pyramid, which decisive blow to the progressive trajectory of West- his canonical text Renaissance and Baroque (1888), ernism and classicism together against an enemy is also both sculpture and architecture and a steel ern art. In fact, it is in the course of describing the the point was to insist on its difference from the deemed too emotional, ornamental, and excessive armature perforated by windows. What’s more, the many chapters of this protracted descent, egged sober classicism of antiquity and its revivals. 4 Char- by contrast. Again, if the structure of the Louvre is form of Delvoye’s symmetrical, self-mirroring ob- on, he says, by the fervency of Christianity, that acterized by a sense of drama and energetic move- rational and symmetrical with one side left open to ject echoes the forms and overall structure of Pei’s Vasari makes mention of Delvoye’s heroes — the ment, the baroque style, which begins for Wölfflin signal its status as the structure’s front, so is Pei’s complex, not only because it includes an inverted “new architects, [who] after the manner of their with various late renaissance or mannerist tenden- complementary installation, in which the view to pyramid that descends into the space of the Louvre barbarous nations, erected buildings in that style cies, is associated with dynamism, fluidity, and ex- the main pyramid is left open when considered but also because the reflecting pools on the main which we now call Gothic.”2 Fortunately, for Vasari, uberance.
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