Deep Shit: Thoughts on Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Project

10 Deep Shit: Thoughts on Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Project Isabelle Loring Wallace Introduction This chapter establishes the relevance of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca project, 2000– 2007, to three classical myths that are themselves provocatively entangled: Medusa, Narcissus, and Pygmalion. Building on the fact that each myth turns on the relationship between an individual and an image or visual art object (Perseus before the shield, Pygmalion aside his statue, Narcissus at the water’s edge), my analysis points to essential ainities between these spectatorial scenarios, while at the same time revealing a multifaceted relationship between these mythological encounters and the complex experience of beholding works in Delvoye’s series, most notably, the work known as Cloaca New & Improved, 2001. To elaborate, my essay is concerned with the entirety of Delvoye’s series and with one work in particular; in other words, I take seriously the fact that there is a series (rather than a single work) and think carefully about what the series’s trajectory implies about Delvoye’s project as whole.1 At the same time, I oten turn to Cloaca New & Improved because, from my point of view, it is this particular work that thematizes most directly and self-consciously a set of ideas that are germane to the entire series and the classical myths it invokes. Thus, by way of introduction, some general remarks about the works in Delvoye’s series, ater which I begin my analysis in earnest. Described by the artist as a “shit machine,” Cloaca Original, 2000, like the seven works that followed it in rapid succession, is just that: a computerized machine designed for the purpose of manufacturing real, machine-made shit in the open context of the gallery or museum (Fig. 10.1).2 Perhaps more impressive is the fact that Cloaca Original achieves this end by faithfully replicating the human process of digestion from mouth to anus. Designed by the artist in consultation with a team of scientists from the University of Antwerp, Cloaca Original is thus impressively complex. Fed human food twice a day, it consists of a garbage disposal and extruding mechanism (the mouth 218 contemporary art and classical myth 10.1 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca Original, 2000, 1,160 × 170 × 270 cm, mixed media. Exhibition view: Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. and anus respectively) and, in between, a formidable tangle of tubing, wires, and six large glass jars full of computer-monitored enzymes, bacteria, and acids that together fulill the digestive roles of the stomach, pancreas, and small and large intestines. As an object (but also as an installation and performance), Cloaca Original is similarly impressive: it is over thirty-eight feet long and over eight feet high and typically ills an entire gallery or museum loor, which is just enough space to accommodate both the trailer-sized machine and, in the fall of 2000, the spectators who gathered daily at the Contemporary Museum in Antwerp to see marketable “evidence” that the irst machine in Delvoye’s series had punctually completed its digestive cycle.3 As one might expect from its title, Cloaca New & Improved is similar to the irst machine, although in keeping with the trajectory of the series as a whole, Cloaca New & Improved is more compact and seemingly more high-tech (Fig. 10.2). Whereas the aesthetic of Cloaca Original recalls an overly ambitious science project, Cloaca New & Improved has a more industrial, streamlined design, its sloppier bits (tubing, wires, etc.) elegantly encased in squared-of, stainless steel vitrines that hide, rather than confess the process’s details. Still, the output of the irst and second machines is essentially the same: as with its predecessor, Cloaca New & Improved produces between 200 and 400 grams of shit on cue each day in the mid-aternoon. Likewise, the logos for these two works (each sculpture in the series has one) are also similar. Cloaca Original’s logo is the more simple of the two, despite being provocatively multivalent. Best described as a graphic rendering of a shiny blue oval inscribed with the word “cloaca,” the original logo conjures, in its shape and letering, not only the Ford motor company with whom the idea of mass production is forcefully and foundationally aligned, but also, as Delvoye has noted, Coca-Cola, with which Cloaca shares all four of its leters.4 To this, the Cloaca New & Improved logo adds the recognizable igure of Mr. Clean (both his torso and, beneath the blue oval, a schematic drawing of his intestines), who Isabelle Loring Wallace 219 notably looms over the series as a whole from this point forward, whether in the context of the voluminous drawings that accompany each work, or as part of subsequent logos within the series (Plate 12). Consider, for example, the third and fourth works in the series: Cloaca Turbo and, its successor, Cloaca Quatro. Completed in 2002, Cloaca Turbo is, at twenty-seven feet long and six and a half feet tall, still more compact than its predecessors; likewise, its appearance seems more industrial and utilitarian when compared with the irst two Cloaca machines, their elegant and arguably feminine glass vessels here replaced with three units that ironically conjure the idea of a heavy-duty washing machine. Accordingly, the logo for Cloaca Turbo recalls the expressly macho emblem of the Harley Davidson Company, featuring an eagle and, beneath it, a shield illed not with the word “motorcycle” but instead, a schematic rendering of Mr. Clean’s intestines. Completed in 2004, Cloaca Quatro again features Mr. Clean in its logo, but here combined with the igure of Popeye, whose muscle-bearing pose Mr. Clean adopts in this context. As for the work itself, it exaggerates further the masculine aesthetics of the former (its form less elegant and more utilitarian) and, perhaps relatedly, it assumes, for the irst time in the series, a vertical format, which it will in turn share with its successor, Cloaca N˚5, 2005, despite the incongruous reference made by this title to the legendary Parisian perfume. And, if the proportions of 10.2 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca New & Improved, 2001, 1,000 × 75 × 200 cm, mixed media. Exhibition view: Migros Museum, Zürich. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. 10.3 Wim Delvoye, Personal Cloaca, 2006, 100 × 68.5 × 100 cm, mixed media. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. Isabelle Loring Wallace 221 Cloaca N˚5, make the ith machine the most anthropomorphic in the series (like Coco Chanel, it might be described as tall, slender, and androgynous), it is the signiicantly smaller sixth machine, Personal Cloaca, 2007, that forges an intimate relation to the spectator—both because its streamlined logo mimics exactly the logo for Durex condoms and because it is, at irst glance, indistinguishable from the commonplace washing machine it resembles (Fig. 10.3).5 The inal machines in the series to date, Super Cloaca, 2007, and Mini Cloaca, 2007, break with the ironic concept of the washing machine, the former resembling a freight car stranded on a fragment of track. Accordingly, Super Cloaca is monumental in both scale and capacity; at nearly ity feet long, it is by far the largest machine in the series, consuming in a single siting roughly 300 kilograms of food, approximately the daily input of 250 people. In turn, and as underscored by the work’s Superman-inspired logo, Super Cloaca’s output is also super-human (between 250 and 300 kilograms)—one of several facts that make this work the polar opposite of the inal work in Delvoye’s series, the recently unveiled Mini Cloaca (Figs. 10.4, 10.5). Returning spectators to the laboratory aesthetic of Cloaca Original, Cloaca Mini is by far the smallest work in the series and is typically displayed atop a table, its spindly forms at once intimate and, in their delicacy, unnerving. Appropriately, the small, aqua-blue logo for the work recalls another logo charged with the responsibility of branding something small (I refer here to the sticker aixed atop every Chiquita banana), only in this case, one inds Mr. Clean’s face and implied torso in the place of Miss Chiquita Banana (Fig. 10.6). Not surprisingly, the machine’s input and output are comparably modest; Cloaca Mini is capable of digesting only one meal at a time, a quantity the press release described as a “French style breakfast” or, if one prefers, a banana imported from Central America.6 As this inventory of the Cloaca project makes clear, Delvoye’s works are as much about the biological process of digestion and defecation (what it is, how it works, what fears atend it, and, likewise, what fantasies) as they are about the commercial process of marketing. Indeed, given Delvoye’s reliance on logos and frankly commercial titles, and given also the rapid succession of machines designed as if to accommodate a variety of constituents (personal, clinical, corporate) as well as, with increasing eicacy and convenience, the demands of the individual consumer, one is tempted to interpret these works as the ongoing efort to realize and concretize human desire as it pertains to the overdetermined subject of shit. As such, my own essay considers Delvoye’s series with an eye to determining what those desires might be and how the prospect of their realization might impact upon culture and man, more generally. That these issues are productively engaged through the unlikely lens of classical myth and, in particular, three tales that are themselves concerned with the relationship between people and their two and three-dimensional counterparts, is a fact Delvoye acknowledges most forcefully in Cloaca New & Improved, even as this work easily maintains a clear relation to the series as a whole. Mindful of this dynamic, I now take up Delvoye’s series in more detail, 10.4 Wim Delvoye, Super Cloaca, 2007, 1,470 × 211 × 307 cm, mixed media. Exhibition view: Mudam, Luxemburg. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. 10.5 Wim Delvoye, Mini Cloaca, 2007, 221 × 90 × 185 cm, mixed media. Exhibition view: Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. Isabelle Loring Wallace 223 considering through its irst and second incarnations, the relationship that exists between the series and the well-known story of Perseus and Medusa. I. I begin with a simple observation. Works in Delvoye’s series stage publically an activity that is typically hidden from view, both because the digestive process is internal and therefore invisible, and because social squeamishness about shit and the means of its excretion has kept even the visible aspects of this process under wraps. A unifying atribute of humanity (shiting is an activity from which no one is exempt), defecation may also be regretable evidence of our kinship with most other creatures.7 Freud certainly thought so, and in Civilization and its Discontents he goes so far as to say that civilization depends upon the suppression of excrement and the body parts with which it is associated.8 In other words, Man and animal may both excrete, but, as far as Freud is concerned, Man diferentiates himself from animal by suppressing this essential and universal fact. Likewise, Julia Kristeva makes a similar argument at the level of the individual. In her well-known theory of abjection, she argues not only for a lifelong process of casting of materials associated with waste (feces prominent among them), but also for a developmental phase that precedes the Lacanian mirror stage and is a precondition of its narcissistic dynamic.9 During this inaugural phase of development—a phase that follows upon and terminates a blissful sense of boundlessness in which the concepts of both self and other are unknown—separation from the maternal begins, albeit in its and starts. For Kristeva, it is this struggle, this “primal repression” of the material, maternal body, that constructs, or is the essential precondition of, the autonomous human subject, which is inally achieved only later, between six and eighteen months of age, in the course of the Lacanian mirror stage. In sum, abjection is for Kristeva the developmental process by which the Subject comes to be; accordingly, it is also the means by which man diferentiates himself from animals and is thus, as Kristeva puts it, the “the primer of culture.”10 As noted, for Kristeva, the phenomenon of abjection also informs the lifelong relation of the Subject to substances (shit, vomit, puss, the corpse) that are subsequently aligned with the maternal precisely for their capacity to return the Subject to the now traumatic prospect of undiferentiation. Called abject by Kristeva, these materials are negotiated by the Subject through a process of abjection by which the unrepresentable Real is cast of and, with it, various threats to the Subject’s borders and coherence.11 As bodily excretions are demonstrable, daily evidence of our border’s violation, and as they are thus also a daily threat to the basic constitution of the self as sovereign, they are recurring subjects in Kristeva’s discussion of this distressing psychic phenomenon. Even so, it is important to bear in mind that the abject is less an object than a force that draws one to the place where the very idea of a concrete and deinable object and, along with it, a discrete and deinable Subject, are traumatically undone. 224 contemporary art and classical myth Hence, for Kristeva, the profound prescription and regulation of scenarios likely to trigger this destabilizing force; indeed, from a Kristevan point of view, civilization is nothing if not the ritualistic management of the material body to this end, from birth to bathroom to bier. Of course, other writers will see things diferently: Marquis de Sade, Salvador Dalí, Peter Sloterdjk, and, the so-called excrement philosopher, Georges Bataille will variously insist that such disavowals are symptoms of a diseased and delusional culture, one whose rehabilitation requires an unashamed reengagement with certain essential excremental facts.12 Arguably, it is just these facts that Delvoye’s series puts on display; indeed, it is not for nothing that writings by these same igures oten accompany more conventional arthistorical accounts in major catalogues devoted to the Cloaca project.13 Yet, is it really fair to say that Cloaca follows in the spirit of such maverick theorists, artists, and philosophers? Admitedly, the Cloaca project does succeed in returning spectators to aspects of existence that culture works hard to suppress. Even so, can Cloaca really be aligned with the impulse to re-engage the excremental act? And, if so, does the type of re-engagement it afords so alter the act as to make it something else altogether? Ater all, what the Cloaca machines show us, at considerable expense and labor, is not digestion, but digestion’s facsimile, not shit, but shit’s representation, and it is in this regard that a correlation at last emerges between the Cloaca project and the myth of Perseus and Medusa.14 The basic narrative of Perseus’s encounter with Medusa is well known: under the watch of Hermes and Athena, and wearing a cap of invisibility purloined from nymphs with the aid of the daughters of Phorcos, Perseus sets of in search of the Gorgons, with the aim of retrieving for Polydectes, the king of Seriphos, the mortifying head of Medusa. Upon arrival, Perseus inds the Gorgons asleep, and although he is unable to gaze upon them directly for fear that he will be turned to stone, he sees, in the relection of Athena’s polished shield, their horrible hair of snakes. His gaze locked on Medusa’s relected image (among the Gorgons she alone is mortal), Perseus uses the unbreakable sword of Hermes to sever her head, collecting for his return this most famous of spoils. Variously delayed in his journey, Perseus eventually arrives in Seriphos only to discover the many cruelties performed by Polydectes in his absence. Using Medusa’s head to turn the evil king and his followers to stone, Perseus then bequeaths the head of Medusa to Athena, who henceforth wears it aixed to the center of her formidable shield. As many commentators have observed, the myth of Perseus and Medusa turns on a crucial distinction: as with Cloaca, there is, on the one hand, the impossible and unbearable Real and, on the other, its tolerable re-presentation as image.15 In the case of the myth, the Real takes the form of the once beautiful Medusa at whom no person can look; in the case of Cloaca, the Real takes the form of human excrement, from which civilization turns in order to gaze upon its manufactured, and thus bearable, simulation. That science and technology play a key role in Delvoye’s project—these being for the modern West what the Gods were to the ancient Greeks—makes the analogy between Delvoye and Perseus all the more compelling, as does the fact of Delvoye’s Isabelle Loring Wallace 225 invisibility within a artwork that bears no trace of his hand.16 Of additional interest—and here we ind ourselves returned to both Freud and Kristeva—is the fact that this monstrous or otherwise unbearable realty (as symbolized by either the face of Medusa or our own bodily waste) was once a positively valenced thing.17 As noted, Kristeva maintains that the Subject abjects any material that threatens to return it to a once blissful state of boundlessness; likewise, Freud reminds us that excrement is, in the irst instance, a source of pleasure and pride.18 Provocative then, the ot-forgoten alignment of Medusa with both pride and beauty—the punishment of which some sources atribute to Athena, arguing that in addition to facilitating the Gorgon’s murder by Perseus, Athena also efected her hideous transformation precisely because Medusa claimed to rival the goddess in beauty.19 Thus, both myth and machine participate in a circular dynamic: having made the beautiful horrible and the pleasurable a source of punishable pride, Athena (via Perseus) then inds a way of reforming the horrible, transforming it into something symbolic, domesticated, and tolerable. Similarly, through Delvoye’s machine we are reminded that civilization is responsible both for the banishment of excrement and (via Delvoye and others) its paciied, aestheticized return. Interestingly, representation and, along with it, aesthetic concepts such as visibility and beauty play a key role in this complex process, just as they do for Kristeva with regard to her theory of abjection. As she observes throughout her writing on this subject, the abject is hopelessly entangled with two things— religion and art—each of which serves to purify the abject, allowing us a glimpse of it, on the condition that we irst look awry.20 Needless to say, it is precisely this theory that the myth of Perseus and Medusa anticipates with startling economy, as it is both art (in the reductive form of Athena’s relective shield) and religion (the form of the Gods who oversee Perseus’s project) that facilitate Medusa’s domestication and subsequent death. Taken further, one might even say that the myth anticipates the alignment Kristeva makes between art and religion, since Athena’s relective shield is simultaneously a rudimentary form of art and, at the same time, a concrete emblem of the divine. Turning to Cloaca with this in mind, two things are of interest beyond the obvious fact that Delvoye’s hygienic shiting machines literalize the concept of art as a form of puriication: 1) Delvoye’s decision to exhibit Cloaca Original at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf in front of twelve stained glass windows of his own design, such that the gallery was transformed into a temple and Cloaca a puriication ritual staged within its walls; 2) the relective, ovoid logo that everywhere accompanies Delvoye’s project and which oversees its remarkable feats as facilitated by the twin gods of technology and capitalism.21 I have said already that a relationship exists between Perseus and Delvoye, each of whom functions as an invisible hero in the quest to conquer and domesticate the Real. What I have not said is that Delvoye’s project references both the form and function of Athena’s protective shield (Fig. 10.6). Ater all, what is Cloaca’s metallic logo if not a relective shield, and what is Cloaca if not a means of protection from the Real and, at the same time, a means of 226 contemporary art and classical myth 10.6 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca Original Logo, 2000, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. facilitating its oblique re-engagement? Yet, if Delvoye’s work is a shield—an idea its metallic logo seems to facilitate—and if, like its mythic counterpart, it is both a form of art and, simultaneously, the emblem of various technocorporate deities, then what are the consequences of proceeding under its aegis? In the case of the myth, the answer is clear: a mediated engagement with Medusa as facilitated by Athena’s shield allows for the illusion of mastery over the Real, while ultimately underscoring the absence of the Real from the Symbolic spaces of culture. It is worth repeating, two things happen in the myth once the unbearable Medusa is transformed into an image: in the irst instance, she becomes a controllable, manageable entity, and, in the second, she is destroyed, such that only her image or symbolic dimension remains. Murdered and then transformed by Athena into an apotropaic symbol worn on her shield, Medusa remains to this day a visible feature of the landscape but only in a domesticated, symbolic state. Put otherwise, representation happens at the Real’s expense, or, as Lacan (following Hegel) would put it two-thousand years later, “the symbol manifests itself irst of all as the murder of the thing.”22 Mastered, controlled, banished: such is also the fate of excrement in the imaginary world of Wim Delvoye. In fact, the hygienic and eicient excretion of waste and, along with it, the efective elimination of shit as abject Real is perhaps the most basic fantasy to which the Cloaca project appeals.23 Closely entwined with this fantasy is the idea of a human Subject altogether liberated from such functions—hence within the series a push toward smaller and more personalized applications of Delvoye’s concept. With this very possibility in mind, consider the logo that accompanies Delvoye’s next machine—a logo that looms over Delvoye’s work and is arguably itself a “new and improved” meditation on the ideas under consideration here (Fig. 10.7). As noted previously, it includes within it, as both model and surrogate, the igure of Mr. Clean, whose presence within the logo will further illuminate the meaning of Delvoye’s series, while at the same time solidifying the concept of the corporate logo as modern-day shield. Isabelle Loring Wallace 227 Mr. Clean has been associated with cleanliness and the act of cleaning since the 1950s, when he irst appeared in the context of television commercials for an all-purpose cleaner marketed by the Procter & Gamble Corporation. Bald and muscular with hands folded across his chest, Mr. Clean appears in Delvoye’s logo as he has in commercials over the last half century, save this important distinction: Delvoye’s Mr. Clean has a botom half from which he is separated by the ovoid form of Cloaca’s metallic label. In contrast, the original Mr. Clean is traditionally shown only from the waist up, and, in that sense, he is clean both by choice and by deinition.24 In fact, because he typically lacks any anatomy below the waist, Mr. Clean is clean twice over. Deprived of a lower half, he is visibly stripped of sexual functions and desire (this, a useful safeguard for a igure originally designed to pass the day with women home alone), just as his anatomy also spares him any association with digestive functions that might likewise compromise his squeaky-clean image. Of course, this is how it ought to be, since the essential point of Mr. Clean and the products he endorses is the efective management and eradication of ilth. An agent of abjection, Mr. Clean, like the products (both real and ictional) for which he stands, helps the consumer negotiate the unwelcome presence of dirt, such that he or she might notionally become a botomless igure, a igure precisely deined by an armcrossed refusal of all substances associated with waste. Turning to the logo for Cloaca New & Improved, we might say that it brings this discussion full circle, as this particular emblem self-consciously thematizes not only the concept of the logo and the product for which it stands, but also (via Mr. Clean) the relation of the spectator/hero to Delvoye’s would-be product. Consider again the three elements that make up the image: an iconic rendering of Mr. Clean’s head and torso, the Cloaca Original logo which bisects Mr. Clean at his middle and, beneath it all, a schematic drawing of Mr. Clean’s intestines. Referencing a long-standing opposition between mind and body, the logo for Cloaca New & Improved maps atop it a related distinction between clean and dirty. Maintaining the diference, and brokering any relation between them, is the Cloaca Original emblem, suspended as if a shield across the midsection of our hero and surrogate. A succinct articulation of this essay’s irst thesis— namely, that the spectator is to Cloaca as Perseus is to Athena’s shield, with artwork and shield each functioning as the tolerable relection of a traumatic and unbearable reality—the Cloaca New & Improved logo nevertheless draws atention to an important distinction between the myth and Delvoye’s machine. For what we ind atop the surface of Delvoye’s modern-day aegis is not the tamed image of a snake-headed monster but, instead, the corporate name of Delvoye’s ictive product. Recalling Marx’s equation of Medusa with, for him, the intolerable realities of capitalism, Delvoye’s modern-day shield expands upon the psychoanalytic discourse of Freud, Kristeva, and Lacan, adding to this mythologically resonant nexus an ideological critique in which the spectator/consumer is likewise implicated.25 Indeed, as the New and Improved logo illustrates through the bisected igure of Mr. Clean, the Subject’s relation to the world and himself is mediated by art, by language, by capital—these the 228 contemporary art and classical myth 10.7 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca New & Improved, 2001, 1,000 × 75 × 200 cm, mixed media. Exhibition view: Ernst Museum, Budapest. Image courtesy of Wim Delvoye Studio. modern-day means by which the Real is both puriied and banished beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. Thus, like Mr. Clean and Perseus before them, Delvoye’s spectator looks, but on the condition that he irst turn away. That the spectacle from which he turns is his own body is an idea at the heart of Section II, devoted, as it is, to the myth of Narcissus. II. Like many myths, the myth of Narcissus begins with the words of a prophet. Asked by Liriope if her son, Narcissus, will live a long life, the blind seer Tiresias replies cryptically, saying that he will on the condition that he not know himself. Despite these ominous words, Narcissus develops into a youth of extraordinary beauty and proceeds unscathed—that is, until he inspires the vengeance of several scorned admirers, whose prayers for retribution are eventually answered by Nemesis. At rest beside a silvery pool, Narcissus mistakes the image on its surface for the presence of another youth as beautiful as he, and, pining before his own relection, he is unable to tear himself away, even when he realizes that the visage is his own. Thus, having come to know himself, he dies of longing at the water’s edge and is subsequently transformed into the downcast lower that bears his name.26 Another myth about the relationship between representation and the Real, the story of Narcissus turns on their lethal confusion. Provocatively, this confusion Isabelle Loring Wallace 229 maps atop a second in Narcissus’s tale—that of self and other—and in this way the myth anticipates another famous story irst told by Jacques Lacan in 1936. Like its mythological prototype, this story is also a tale of self-as-other, and, likewise, it relies on the trope of mirror relection to tell the story of impossible desire. I am, of course, speaking of Lacan’s famous essay on the mirror stage, and if it aligns easily with the myth of Narcissus, it is partially because within Lacan’s framework it stands in for the Freudian concept of “primary narcissism,” which it reprises and to some degree transforms.27 First theorized in an important essay of 1914, primary narcissism is constitutive rather than aberrant; thus, as with Lacan’s mirror stage, it is a phase through which the Subject must go, rather than a perversion under which certain Subjects may labor.28 A preliminary moment in the Subject’s psychosexual development—one which precedes even the basic distinction between ego-libido and object-libido—primary narcissism can be further aligned with the mirror stage on the basis of what follows these loosely comparable moments. For, in either case, these phases precede and make possible libidinal investments in objects other than oneself. In sum, these phases are each requisites for normative psychology. To be fair, there are important diferences between primary narcissism and the mirror stage, just as there are important diferences between Freud and Lacan more broadly, some of which I return to below. That said, the point of this reading is less to diagnose Cloaca in speciically Freudian or Lacanian terms than it is to establish a basic psychoanalytic framework with which Delvoye’s project is in dialogue. To that end, a slight detour is required. As art historians know well, Freud’s discussion of narcissism does not begin with the 1914 essay, nor does it begin with the notion that narcissism is a requisite for a healthy emotional life. Instead, Freud’s irst forays into this topic aligned it with homosexuality (which Freud deines as a sexual aberration), as well as art and—provocatively for our purposes—anality. In this regard, there are two key texts: in the irst instance, there is Freud’s substantial essay on Leonardo da Vinci writen in 1910 in which Freud discusses art in relation to the entwined phenomena of narcissism and homosexuality, and, in the second instance, there is an extended footnote of 1910 and another of 1915 appended belatedly to the 1905 essay, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”—a text also engaged with the subject of homosexuality, “the essential characteristics of which seem to be a narcissistic object-choice and a retention of the erotic signiicance of the anal zone.”29 Narcissism (a phenomenon that is always at essence, homosocial), anality, and art: before proceeding further the obvious must irst be said. Freud’s writing in this period leads us to the very same terms conjoined by Delvoye’s Cloaca project, that is, provided that one accepts that this series of eating/ shiting sculptures functions as an abstract image of oneself. If one does, then the question becomes, to what end this parallel between man and machine? Freud’s essay on Leonardo ofers a comprehensive interpretation of a childhood memory recorded in one of the artist’s scientiic notebooks. Subjecting the artist’s recollection to rigorous psychoanalytic interpretation, Freud works to explain Leonardo’s sexuality (or sublimated lack thereof) and, by extension, 230 contemporary art and classical myth the phenomenon of homosexuality. This is not the place to rehearse the details of Leonardo’s dream or Freud’s sustained interpretation thereof.30 Instead, let it suice to say that although Freud does not use this term in 1910, what he describes in his essay on Leonardo is the phenomenon of “secondary narcissism”—that is, narcissism-as-perversion, from which the Subject sufers given certain formative experiences.31 In Leonardo’s case, those experiences relate to his loving mother, with whom he identiied to the extent of taking himself as his own object of desire. Unable to move beyond the initial satisfaction provided by the maternal dynamic—a dynamic that is considered a normal component of primary narcissism—Leonardo, Freud speculates, may well have found other libidinal objects, but ultimately they functioned as a means of securing and perpetuating a narcissistic loop, whereby Leonardo remained (with the unwiting consent of others) the object of his own regard. Thus, it turns out there are two forms of narcissism in Freud: on the one hand, there is the unproblematic and importantly temporary bliss of primary narcissism and, on the other, there is the disorder known as secondary narcissism, which is at essence the same dynamic, but as experienced by a mature Subject who is either stunted within or who, in moments of duress, regresses toward that initial moment in his psychosexual development.32 That Freud oten links this regression to homosexuality, and anality by extension, is all the more interesting when one bears in mind this last additional fact: for Freud, the anal stage is associated with both the active impulse to master and the comparatively passive pleasure of looking.33 At this point, the relevance of Freud’s thinking to Cloaca should be clear. Ater all, the Cloaca project is nothing if not evidence of an impulse to master—Delvoye himself says “it’s all about control”—and, as an art object, it is also clearly aligned with the concept of scopophilia.34 Of course, as already indicated, the pleasure involved in looking at these installations is of a narcissistic kind, and, as such, we might say that that the Cloaca project functions as symptom, or indeed, as a form of mirror in which the image of the spectator and, by extension, Western culture is relected. Standing before that mirror, entranced by the vision before them, spectators see an image of a society locked in the anal stage and locked, too, in the narcissistic dynamic with which this phase is aligned.35 Succinctly reiterating a critique made elsewhere by others, Delvoye accuses his audience of this regression, while at the same time theatrically suspending his spectators in its grip.36 Relecting back to beholders their obsession with technological mastery and surveillance, the work also exposes the narcissism that ostensibly underwrites such impulses and levies against its viewers an unlatering and seemingly irrefutable diagnosis. As such, we might say that the Cloaca project is ultimately an occasion to see oneself and, in keeping with the words of the ancient prophet, to know oneself, and one’s culture, accordingly. But what of primary narcissism and its Lacanian counterpart? Without discounting the reading above—again, the essential point of this essay is the polyvalence of both art and myth—I now work toward another reading, one Isabelle Loring Wallace 231 no less engaged with narcissism and the mythological igure for whom it is named. As is well known, the mirror stage centers on a moment of confrontation between individual and image, and functions as an important turning point in which ego takes shape against a fantasy of the body in pieces. In this regard, and in its essential vexedness, the mirror stage diferentiates itself from Freud’s notion of primary narcissism. Indeed, here it should be said that primary narcissism is a comparatively static concept, oten described by Freud’s commentators as Edenic and entirely free of the complex operations that will soon govern the Subject’s psychology.37 In contrast, the Lacanian mirror stage is, as the word “stage” suggests, an episode of high drama—the moment of the Fall and, concomitantly, the realization of paradise lost.38 Because of this, and because of its explicit reliance on the trope of mirror relection, the mirror stage (as opposed to the related, Freudian notion of primary narcissism) makes for a more exacting comparison with the myth of Narcissus and, in turn, the experience of beholding Cloaca New & Improved. Here are the salient, if well-rehearsed, details. Between the ages of six and eighteen months, the infant, with the necessary help of some external support, inds himself placed before a mirror. And, as with Narcissus, it will be this specular environment that provides the Subject not only with a tangled mixture of pleasure and pain, but also with some ultimate knowledge of himself. Physically uncoordinated and lacking any organized concept of himself— remember that as of yet the ego does not exist—the infant sees in the coherent form of his self-image a totalizing vision of himself freed of any such limitations. Thus, from an initial moment of incomprehension in which the self is both illegible and unknown, the Subject moves to a moment of comprehension that is at once jubilant and tragic: on the one hand, there is the satisfying process of identiication, the image providing for the Subject a masterful ideal-ego to which to the Subject in turn aspires. On the other hand, as that sense of self comes from without, this moment of jubilant identiication is also a moment of profound alienation, one which gives rise both to the ego and, retroactively, the fantasy of a forsaken, originary plentitude. In sum, a sense of self comes at a price: the tragic experience of oneself as other. Parallels to the myth of Narcissus are already evident, as both tales concern a painful process of self-discovery facilitated by the phenomenon of an idealized mirror-relection. Admitedly, the mirror stage lacks the carefully staged progression of Ovid’s myth, which moves from joyous ignorance to painful self-recognition across an unbridgeable gap. But it nevertheless shares with the ancient narrative, and in fact borrows from it, a vision of self-as-other, indeed, of the self divided, mediated by an image that is itself external. Of course, for Lacan, this Imaginary mediation is just the beginning; one might say, it sets the stage for another loss that it preigures. First sufering the loss of an unmediated relation to itself, the Lacanian Subject subsequently sufers the loss of an unmediated relation to the world. This second loss, Lacan famously equates with the Subject’s entrance into the Symbolic, ater which everything is mediated by language and signs. 232 contemporary art and classical myth With this in mind, let’s look again at the logo for Cloaca New & Improved. Already, we have considered this image in conjunction with the myth of Perseus and Medusa, reading Mr. Clean as a would be hero in the ight against grime, his chances highly fortiied by the commercial intervention of Delvoye’s product, the sign of which he wears as a shield across his torso. Without undermining this reading, let’s think again about the image of a man divided in two, a relective blue oval mediating between his nearly identical halves. One thing we have not said about Delvoye’s logo is that the form of Mr. Clean’s intestines plainly mimics the shape of the torso above it, and does so as if relected in a mirror the color of water. Note, in this regard, that the curvilinear form of Mr. Clean’s earring visible to our right is plainly echoed on the let-hand side of the drawing’s botommost quadrant. An image of Narcissus if ever there was one, the Cloaca New & Improved logo, like the spectatorial experience to which it refers, raises several provocative questions, especially when placed in dialogue with the myth’s psychoanalytic reprisal.39 That the experience of viewing works in Delvoye’s series is an experience of self-relection is obvious, as is the fact that this form of self-regard splits the subject into the I/eye who looks and the me who is seen. What is less clear and what is, in the end, most provocative is the possibility that the spectator’s experience of Cloaca—which is also to say the experience schematically rendered in the New & Improved logo—corresponds to the notion that the image, or as Lacan also puts it in his essay, the “statue” functions as an idealego to which the spectator asymptotically aspires. On one level, such an idea seems consistent with Delvoye’s series and observations made already about the fantasy implicit in these hygienic, computerized surrogates. What’s more, the fantasy of an antiseptic, mechanical body (as discussed in Section II) accords well with fantasies atributed to the infant before the mirror, who sees in his relection a set of characteristics also atributable to the machines in Delvoye’s series. Masterful, organized, and eicient: these sculptural portraits align with Lacan’s idealized specular image because they do what they do with enviable regularity and timeliness. Indeed, we might say that in this respect they outperform the spectator who is still deined by the limitations of his largely invisible and oten unreliable body. That Delvoye’s machines achieve this coordination with respect to the activity one is irst charged with controlling—an activity whose regulation roughly overlaps with Lacan’s mirror stage—makes the analogy between Cloaca and the mirror stage more convincing; and yet, on its own, this fact does not suice to explain how these sculptures function as idealized self-portraits. Ater all, if they are portraits, they are grossly reductive ones, ofering a vision of man reduced to the very thing he has tried to suppress. However much they conjure the appealing ideas of cleanliness and eiciency, can such objects really function as an idealized fantasy to which we aspire across a painfully unbridgeable gap? In order to answer these questions, and in order to bring this essay to a close, I turn to a third myth—one about aspirations and ideals, as well as the igurative sculpture that brought them to life. Isabelle Loring Wallace 233 III. Several things recommend the inclusion of Pygmalion in this discussion, not the least of which is the myth’s explicit foregrounding of art and sculpture in particular.40 Of equal interest is the myth’s relationship to the other myths we have considered thus far.41 For, if the lover Pygmalion seems to have more in common with the lovesick Narcissus, it will turn out that the myth of Pygmalion is equally aligned with the story of Medusa, whose radical alterity Perseus and Athena punish and expel with the help of a lifelike image. With the myths of Narcissus and Medusa in mind then, reconsider the myth of Pygmalion. Although not endowed with legendary beauty, Pygmalion shares with Narcissus an impressive capacity for contempt and autonomy. As Ovid tells it, the myth begins with this characteristic, informing the reader that Pygmalion has forsaken the company of women, whom he deems wicked and unworthy of afection. A sculptor by training, Pygmalion instead directs his atention to his crat, carving from ivory a statue of extraordinary beauty and realism with which he promptly falls in love. Dressing the object and undressing it, caressing the sculpture and lying with it in his bed, he desires his artwork intensely, but no amount of longing brings his sculpture to life. Thus, when the festival of Venus comes, the sculptor prays not for the animation of his statue—this being, he thinks, an unreasonable request—but instead for a girl possessed of her likeness. Venus, knowing the sculptor’s true desire, grants his unspoken wish: when Pygmalion returns home, the ivory at last warms to his touch, and the blushing maiden is at last his bride. Let’s start with an obvious point of contrast between Narcissus and Pygmalion: while the myth of Narcissus tells of longing across an unbridgeable gap, in the myth of Pygmalion, that gap is closed through divine intervention, and all due happiness is said to ensue. Hence a tragedy on the one hand, and, on the other, a rosy love story. Yet, what underwrites this diference in afect is a still more important commonality. At issue in both myths is the concept of the perfect copy—a phrase I use to invoke not only the aesthetic concept of a perfectly executed work (one whose realism efectively erases the diference between the real and its representation) but also the concept of idealism, which one can relate to both an idealized female form and the psychoanalytic concept of the ideal-ego which appears in the mirror during the course of the Lacanian mirror stage.42 Consider: in the myth of Narcissus, the mirrored surface of the pond produces a near perfect copy of his own perfect form; likewise for Pygmalion, his statue allows for the perfect illusion—and ultimately, thanks to Venus, a perfect copy—of a form he believed was ideal. To this intriguing commonality, I’ll add one more, which is, at irst glance, counter-intuitive: in both myths, the perfect copy (or near perfect copy) is a mater of mirror relection, even though it is only the myth of Narcissus that thematizes this idea expressly. As we shall see, such a claim will not only link together the three myths under consideration here, it will also ultimately reconcile the three readings of the Cloaca series that this chapter has endeavored to pursue. 234 contemporary art and classical myth Lore has it that the character of Mr. Clean is based on a sailor in the US Navy; yet, two other readings come easily to mind. In the irst instance, there is the association of Mr. Clean with homosexuality on the basis of various stereotypes having to do with both costume and character (the single earring, the shaved head, the tight t-shirt, the muscle-bound physique and, of course, Mr. Clean’s signature fastidiousness). In the second instance, many of these same characteristics (again, the bald head, the single earring, the musclebound torso), especially when seen in conjunction with Mr. Clean’s folded arms and his propensity for doing things in a magical, sparkly lash, align him with the concept of a wish-granting genie whose botomless, overbuilt physique typically emerges from a brass oil lamp, the form of which is vaguely recalled by the curvilinear form of the logo’s botommost region.43 If nowhere acknowledged, the appeal of such associations to Procter & Gamble is obvious; as noted already, the prospect of male (cleaning) power divorced from any heterosexual threat is useful, as is the suggestion that a fastidious, wishgranting genie lives inside every botle of Mr. Clean purchased by an individual in pursuit of an efortlessly meticulous home. But what about the usefulness of such associations for Delvoye? It goes without saying that the possibility of cleanliness as wrought by (technological) magic is of interest to Delvoye, but what other wishes might be granted by the Cloaca series, and how might they square with the homosocial subtext of Procter & Gamble’s product? To answer this question, it is necessary to return to Pygmalion, a igure whose desires were also realized by the intervention of a wish-granting deity. Taken at face value, Pygmalion’s wish is a straightforward one: he wants a girl who matches exactly his ideal, as realized in the form of his sculpture. But what is this ideal? And in what sense does it depart from the intolerable reality of the women categorically scorned by Pygmalion? Of Pygmalion’s ideal sculpture we know very litle, save the fact that it was made of ivory and was given “perfect shape, more beautiful/than ever woman born.”44 The other thing we know—and this only by implication—is that this object in some way avoided the pitfalls of real women, with whom Pygmalion had found no communion. Indeed, this last detail cannot be overlooked, as the myth begins with the assertion that women are, as a group, unbearable to the sculptor. The precise reasons for Pygmalion’s misogyny are unknown, although the verse does mention the vice of women and, more generally, their wickedness—negative atributes the chaste sculptor presumably lacks. In the absence of further details, we can perhaps leave it at this: lacking anything in common with women, and unable to relate to the female sex in its entirety, he saw in them a vision of radical alterity which was for him monstrous and intolerable. In their place, he erected his statue, the form of which somehow assuaged this terrible predicament. With these last two sentences, the myth of Perseus and Medusa is already back upon us, but before exploring that link and returning to Delvoye another detour is required—one equally related to mirrors and the peculiar relation they bear to the concept of alterity. In the 1970s, the French writer Luce Irigaray Isabelle Loring Wallace 235 published two books that together make a compelling argument about women, alterity, and relection. The core of her argument is this: Western culture is a specular one in which woman is constructed by men as man’s opposite: where men are intellectual, women are corporeal, where men are rational, women are emotional, where men are strong, women are weak, and so on ad ininitum.45 In short, woman is man’s inversion; she is as he would be, were his image relected in a mirror. For Irigaray the political implications of this system are clear: women do not as of yet exist within representation (both visual and verbal) and will never exist so long as they are relected through this reductive, misogynist discourse. I leave aside the question of whether or not women exist in the sense described by Irigaray. What I will say, without any pretense of originality in doing so, is that classical myth anticipates and preigures Irigaray’s argument through the igure of the Medusa who can be seen to stand for the notion of woman’s intolerable diference and, via Perseus, the heroicizing of her specular exorcism.46 With this in mind, let’s return to the myth of Pygmalion. There is no mirror involved in the story of Pygmalion (just as there is none in the “story” told by Irigaray), but its efect is everywhere present and is the engine that drives not only this narrative, but also the other two narratives reviewed in the course of this essay.47 Note again: because he is unable to tolerate the horrible reality of women, Pygmalion joins Perseus and Narcissus in turning his back on the Other. While Narcissus setles by the pond and Perseus raises Athena’s domesticating shield, Pygmalion sets out for his studio where he produces a work that absorbs him, while simultaneously safeguarding him from the reality he has shunned. Entirely divorced from the unhappy facts of the women outside, Pygmalion’s sculpture is, we are to assume, a pure invention—an object borne solely of Pygmalion’s mind. She is, we could say, its calciied and inverted relection—a dream come true, and, equally, a blueprint for Irigaray’s argument. As such, it turns out that the myth of Pygmalion shares with the myths of Perseus and Narcissus not only an emphasis on spectatorial dynamics, but also, through them, an emphasis on sameness at diference’s expense. And, while the myth of Medusa allows us to see this emphasis as a form of defense against otherness, the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion, like the psychoanalytic myths of primary narcissism and the mirror stage, allow us to think of sameness as the Subject’s most profound and long-standing desire. Read in this way, the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion reconcile the homosocial subtext of Procter & Gamble’s icon with the concept of a wish-granting genie—sameness apparently is our innermost wish—while at the same time bridging the gap between Delvoye’s reductive portraits and the concept of the ego-ideal. Described in the press as a dream come true, Delvoye’s sculptures, it turns out, are equally concerned with sameness and, relatedly, the exorcism of diference.48 Indeed, how else to explain portraits devoid of not only subjectivity and cognition, but also the expressly divisive atributes of sex and race.49 A “universal” portrait of man reduced to his essential functions—those 236 contemporary art and classical myth that exclude no one and from which no individual is exempt—the Cloaca project is, as Delvoye will put it: “both beter than a human being and worse than a human being … The machine is not as sophisticated as the body but in that it is less sophisticated there are beneits.”50 Thus, like Narcissus’s image on the surface of the pond and like the object-turned-bride in Pygmalion’s studio, Cloaca is reductive and, because of that reduction, ideal. As such, the Cloaca project, pace Lacan’s anticipatory ideal-ego, may be said to align with a broader impulse to regress.51 For, while other contemporaneous technological and cultural developments (cloning, mass-media, globalization) suggest that we may look forward to closing the gap between self and Other, perhaps even to the point of the Other’s extinction and the extinction of man, as such, they also suggest that as we look forward, we also look back—not only to the Imaginary moment of the mirror stage (perhaps, even beyond it, to the undiferentiated bliss said to lie on its other side) but also to a moment in our evolutionary history in which we likely shared with other species the oriice known as cloaca.52 Indeed, as the myth of Narcissus long ago made clear, the quest for the plenitude of the perfect copy is intimately tied to death—a fact that at last explains how works in the Cloaca series can be both the longed-for ideal (at once narcissistic and reductive) and, at the same time, the relection of the deadly Medusa, whose transformation from idealized beauty to mortifying monster symbolizes yet again the link between death and idealism.53 Summarily put, Delvoye’s spectators are Narcissus at the pond and Pygmalion in his studio, fascinated by the spectacle of their own image, at once simpliied, inverted, and perfected. At the same time, they are also Perseus before the shield, suspended in contemplation of death, even as they are, for the moment, protected from experiencing its inevitable efects. Thus, if representation is a source of great misery, if the gap it enforces is, for Narcissus and Pygmalion, a source of unbearable pain, that same gap—the existence of which is representation’s precondition—also afords for Perseus and for us the luxury of contemplation, whether of shit speciically, or more abstractly, the mortiication it portends. Ater all, although Delvoye’s machines are in some sense sculptures brought to life, they are not perfect copies à la Pygmalion’s statue-turned-bride.54 Rather, as their seven-year reinement underscores, they are more like symbols of this asymptotic aspiration, which nevertheless warn against its fulillment. To date, their story, which is of course our story, has not achieved the eradication of diference (in this case, the sculpture is not yet the bride), and, as such, one might say that standing with a Cloaca machine in the gallery is rather more like gazing upon one’s relection, contemplating with Narcissus and the Lacanian subject he preigures, a gap whose elimination one is powerless to achieve. At once temporal and spatial, the gap that separates us from these objects and our long-standing aspirations is, as well, the gap between the spectator and his ideal, reality and its representation, the original and its perfect duplication. It is also the ultimate subject of the Cloaca project, and, likewise, the ultimate subject of the myths it conjures, confuses, and conjoins. Isabelle Loring Wallace 237 Notes The author would like to thank her husband, Christopher Michalek, and her co-editor, Jennie Hirsh, as well as various individuals at Wim Delvoye’s studio who helped procure illustrations for this essay. 1 Although the artist hopes to make a Cloaca Travel Kit at some point in the future, as of 2010 he considers the eight-work series to be complete. The recent Cloaca retrospective at The Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam Luxembourg), held between September 2007 and January 2008, exhibited all eight machines. Importantly, three of these machines were operational during the exhibition: Cloaca New & Improved, 2001, Personal Cloaca, 2007, and, for the irst time, Mini Cloaca, 2007. Images of all Delvoye’s works, including the Cloaca series, can be found on the artist’s website: htp://www.wimdelvoye.be/. For a useful contextualization of Delvoye’s work and the Cloaca project in particular, see Dan Cameron, “The Thick of It,” in Cloaca New & Improved, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art in association with Rectapublishers, 2002), 23–29. 2 Yonah Foncé, “Cloaca: receptacle of connotations, producer of … well, meanings,” in Wim Delvoye: Cloaca (Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion / Muhka, 2000), 9. Also, while the Cloaca series constitutes Delvoye’s most ambitious engagement with the theme of scatology and waste, his interest in this subject mater is long-standing and well documented in other works: Penalty II, 1992; Mosaic, 1990–97; Rose des Vents, 1992; Anal Kisses, 1999–2000. In addition, the intersection of modern art with themes of excretion is also long-standing. Well-known examples include: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917; Piero Manzoni, Merda d’artista, 1961; Andy Warhol, Oxidation Paintings, 1978; Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1989; Marc Quinn, Shit Head, 1997; Chris Oili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996, and various works by Lynda Benglis, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert and George, and the Vienna Actionists. For a sophisticated contextualization of the recent interest in abject materials, see Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 3 The dimensions of Cloaca and Cloaca New & Improved vary slightly depending on the circumstances of their installation. Also, it should be observed that feces from Cloaca Original were vacuum-packed, and, during the course of the work’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp in the year 2000, they were displayed next to a menu and sold for one thousand USD. This was not the case with feces produced by subsequent works in the series; for example, when Cloaca New & Improved was exhibited at the New Museum in the spring of 2002, the feces were lushed away by a gloved museum atendant. 4 See Joseina Ayerza, “Joseina Ayerza Interviews Wim Delvoye,” Lacanian Ink 19 (Fall 2001): 111. The word “cloaca” also inevitably references two additional things. First, “cloaca” is the name given to an oriice found within certain species of animals (birds, reptiles, and amphibians, for example). What distinguishes this oriice from the human anus is that both feces and urine are excreted through it; in the case of birds, it is also the oriice used for sexual reproduction. Second, “cloaca” recalls the ancient Roman engineering marvel known as the Cloaca Maxima, which was an impressive, early sewage system constructed in ancient Rome. 5 Although over twelve feet tall, the relation of height to width and the overall composition of Cloaca N˚5 conjures the human form. The logo for Personal Cloaca seems to have evolved from a logo that was virtually indistinguishable from the winged emblem of the US Air Force to a logo that closely resembles the Durex condom logo, which is now featured on the artist’s website. 238 contemporary art and classical myth 6 See the November 12, 2007 press release from the Casino Luxembourg–Forum d’art contemporain: htp://www.e-lux.com/shows/view/4851. 7 For a subversive history of cultural atitudes toward human excrement, see Dominique Laporte, The History of Shit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 8 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 100n. 9 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Kristeva’s thinking is closely aligned with Lacan’s and borrows a good deal of his language. For Kristeva, following Lacan, the Real is linked to the body (its materiality and its needs) and is associated with the concept of nature from which we are traumatically separated. It is that which lies beyond representation (whether visual or verbal) and is thus related to Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself. Importantly for Kristeva, the Real is also associated with the objet (petit) a, which cannot be reduced to the Mother, even if it is the mother who ills the position irst. The objet (petit) a is the impossible object of desire, the realization of which would result in the Subject’s death. 12 See, for example, Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5–9; Salvador Dalí, “Aerodynamic appearances of ‘beings-objects’” Minotaure 6 (1934): 33–34; Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1994); Peter Sloterdjk, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 147–51. For a general overview of this literature as it relates to Wim Delvoye, see Dieter Roelstraete, “Back to the Toilet: Truth and Fiction in Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca,” in Wim Delvoye: Cloaca: New and Improved, 49–57. It is in the “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” that André Breton famously calls Bataille an “excrement philosopher.” See Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 185. 13 See, for example, Wim Delvoye Cloaca; Wim Delvoye: Cloaca New & Improved; Wim Delvoye: Cloaca 2000–2007, exh. cat. (Luxembourg: Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’Art contemporain, 2007). 14 Reference is made to the myth of Perseus and Medusa in several ancient sources, the most comprehensive of which are to be found in Apollodorus’s Library of Greek Mythology and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. My own account draws most heavily on the former. A useful and comprehensive resource is The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003). 15 See, for example, Jean-Pierre Vernant, “In the Mirror of Medusa,” in The Medusa Reader, 222–31. 16 By way of strengthening this nexus, I would also note that Perseus is aligned with waste from the outset. Not only is he conceived when Zeus visits his mother in the form of a golden shower (oten interpreted as semen or gold, but just as easily associated with urine), he is also (with his mother) cast of (abjected) by his grandfather, who seals both of them in a trunk and sets them adrit at sea for fear that Perseus would kill him in accordance with the oracle’s prophecy. 17 For Freud, the head of the Medusa represents female genitalia and the threat of castration for which it stands. This reading is one that I do not pursue here, both because the anus and excretion are not gender-speciic and because works Isabelle Loring Wallace 239 in Delvoye’s series purposefully adopt aesthetics that might be described as alternating between a masculine and feminine afect. See “Medusa’s Head,” in Freud, The Standard Edition, vol. 18, 273–74. 18 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” in The Standard Edition, vol. 7, 186. See also, “Civilization and its Discontents,” 100n. 19 This possibility is acknowledged in passing in Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, 67. 20 The phrase “looking awry” echoes the Lacanian discourse of Slavoj Žižek. See, for example, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 21 Relevant to the concept of art as puriication is Delvoye’s remark: “It’s shit, but it’s clean. That way, I get away without ofending anybody.” See Thomas Hirschmann, “Poop Scoop,” Now Toronto 30 (March 2004): 25–31. Executed in 2001, Delvoye’s stained-glass windows display X-ray photographs of bowels, sexual acts, and everyday objects. On this subject, see Jen Hauser “The Grammar of Enzymes,” in Wim Delvoye: Cloaca 2000–2007, 27–35. 22 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 104. 23 Of course, Cloaca Original is and is not eicient. On the one hand, because the machine’s processes are systemized, eiciency is a relevant concept. On the other hand, given the scale of the original machine, the work is notably ineicient when compared with the human body. 24 Some of Mr. Clean’s oldest and most recent incarnations are full-bodied; however, the vast majority shows only his torso. 25 Karl Marx, “Preface to the First Edition,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 13–14. 26 See Book 3.339–510 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1955), 67–73. This recounting is based on Ovid’s version of the myth and is not to be confused with another, earlier text about the origin of the Narcissus lower. In this story, relayed in an early Homeric Hymn of the seventh or eighth century, the narcissus lower is used by Zeus as a lure to bring Persephone to a speciic spot in the meadow. Once there, the ground opens up and she drops beneath the earth into the arms of Hades, according to Zeus’s plan. 27 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits, 1–7. (Note: although this text is not writen and published in its inal form until 1949, Lacan irst takes up the subject of the mirror stage in a lecture of 1936.) The essential text for understanding Freud’s concept of narcissism is “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 14, 73–102. For a useful overview of Freud’s shiting concept of narcissism, see Mauro Mancia, In the Gaze of Narcissus: Memory, Afects, and Creativity, trans. Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi (London: Karnac Books, 1993), 1–16. 28 As discussed subsequently, when narcissism is to be understood as perversion, Freud will use the term “secondary narcissism” precisely to diferentiate this pathology from the Subject’s initial self-involvement. 29 See Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 11, 63–137 and “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 7, 145–46. 240 contemporary art and classical myth 30 For a sophisticated account of Freud’s interpretation and Lacan’s response, see Steven Z. Levine, Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 1–30. 31 The phrase “secondary narcissism” appears for the irst time in the 1916–17 text “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” in The Standard Edition, vol. 16, 412–30. It is also discussed at length in the 1923 publication, “The Ego and the Id” in The Standard Edition, vol. 19, 46. 32 Distinctions between primary and secondary narcissism can be admitedly murky; as Freud himself notes: “We have, however, not concluded that human beings are divided into two sharply diferentiated groups, according as their object-choice conforms to the anaclitic or to the narcissistic type.” Freud, “On Narcissism,” 88. 33 Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 192; 198. 34 “I can control every litle system with a touch screen on the computer. So it’s all about control. Because you are asked as a baby to control yourself and then some people become control freaks and neurotic.” See Ayerza, “Joseina Ayerza interviews Wim Delvoye,” 122–23. 35 Here it might be observed that Cloaca also stages as spectacle the process of ingestion and thus may also be aligned with the oral stage, which is equally associated by Freud with primary narcissism. Also, it worth noting that Freud repeatedly aligns the development of the individual with the development of culture writ large—hence my reading is Freudian in content and method. 36 See, for example, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). 37 See, for example, Mancia, In the Gaze of Narcissus, 9. 38 In using these religious terms, I follow two examples: Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 85, and Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 21. 39 One objection to this analogy might be that in contrast to conventional representations of Narcissus, as in, for example, Carvaggio’s painting of 1597–99 (Fig. 7.2), Mr. Clean looks out at the viewer instead of toward himself with downcast eyes. This decision on Delvoye’s part allows Mr. Clean to play the part of the spectator’s mirror image as he looks head on at the work and/or logo. 40 For a wide-ranging assessment of the Pygmalion myth and the art and literature that invoke it, see Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Efect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a compelling contextualization of the myth within the broader phenomenon of moving statues, see Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Finally, see also, George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artiicial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 91–110. 41 For a sophisticated comparison of the Narcissus and Pygmalion myths, see Karsten Harries, “Narcissus and Pygmalion: Lessons of Two Tales” in Philosophy and Art, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 53–72. 42 For a more philosophical relection on the idea of the perfect copy within art history, see my “From the Garden of Eden and Back Again: Pictures, People and the Problem of the Perfect Copy,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 137–54. Isabelle Loring Wallace 241 43 Luis Camnitzer observes the similarity between Aladdin’s lamp and the colon end of Mr. Clean, although does not comment on the signiicance of this connection. See “Passing Breeze,” in Wim Delvoye: Cloaca 2000–2007, 13. 44 See Book 10.243–83 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1955, 1983 reprint), 241–43. 45 The key texts here are The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). For an analysis of these ideas as they relate to the paintings of Jenny Saville, see my essay, “The Looking Glass from the Other Side: Relections on Jenny Saville’s Propped,” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 2 (2004): 76–91. 46 For obvious reasons, Medusa has been of great interest to feminist scholars and theorists and is particularly associated with Hélène Cixous, given her landmark essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paul Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93. 47 In this reading, I depart from Karsten Harries, who juxtaposes the myth with that of Narcissus and reads it as an allegory about the embrace of otherness. 48 See Casino Luxembourg press release, November 12, 2007, htp://www.e-lux. com/shows/view/4851. 49 As Delvoye notes, Cloaca is “absolutely neutral … like Michael Jackson.” See Jens Hauser, “The Grammar of Enzymes,” in Wim Delvoye: Cloaca 2000–2007, 28. 50 Ayerza, “Joseina Ayerza interviews Wim Delvoye,” 116. As Delvoye will put it elsewhere, “Sexuality interests me less than digestion as a subject and a metaphor. I’m more interested in themes that unify.” See “Wim Delvoye: An Interview with Nicolas Bourriaud” (May 2007), Sperone-Westwater, htp:// www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/articles/record.html?record=554. On Delvoye’s interest in a “universal” human portrait, see Heather Sparks, “The Art of the Meal,” Wired, January 26, 2002, htp://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/ news/2002/01/49606. 51 The theorist most closely associated with the theory of devolution is Jean Baudrillard. See, for example, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 52 As Delvoye provocatively notes, “There is something very weird about making the digestive system artiicial. It’s like you rob the humanity from the human. It’s like you come into the gallery space and you feel like something is stolen from me now, an intimacy, a kind of dignity.” See Catherine Osborne, “Sure it’s Crappy—But is it Art?,” The National Post, March 27, 2004, Toronto section, Saturday Toronto Edition. 53 The link between Narcissus and death is further underscored in the myth by the fact that the name Narcissus is etymologically linked to the concepts of numbing and death. On this point see, Friedrich Wieseler, Narkissos (Götingen: Verlag der Dieterischschen Buchlandlung, 1856), 9, 79. 54 Delvoye notes “Once a machine is installed in a museum, it is a live thing.” See “Joseina Ayerza interviews Wim Delvoye,” 110.