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WIM DELVOYE IS A MASTER OF THE IN-BETWEEN. For 20 years he has been making art that is (at least) two things at once, and in the process has produced a body of work that is uncompromisingly witty and irascible. There is, in his attitude towards art, a sense of intelligent impishness that shows no evident constraints. Whether he is supervising the production of tattooed pigs, combining gas canisters with Delft patterning, or turning ironing boards into heraldic emblems, Delvoye is always making connections between things that have no apparent relationship prior to his aesthetic hybridizing. So he combines the structure of a soccer goal with the decorated material of stained glass windows; or he makes a patterned floor out of hundreds of pieces of deli meat. The art that results from both these combinations is splendid, as is our sense of surprise when we understand the exact nature of his grafting. What is equally delightful is recognizing the absurdity of the relationship between the material these things are made from and the original function of the things from which they are modelled. What would be the effect of kicking a soccer ball into a net made of glass; how long would a marble floor comprised of slices of meat actually last; what could a life-sized cement truck carved out of teak wood carry? The discrepancy between the form of these things and the impossibility of fulfilling the function promised by that form is where Delvoye gets much of his aesthetic charge.
His interest is to capture the moment when identities shift and when meanings displace one another. He wants to register the before and after of these transformations, and his objects cany with them the range of whatever recombinant process is involved in making one thing become another. Do we read his gas canisters as functional or aesthetic objects; are his heraldic ironing boards domestic tribute or deflationary irony? Similarly, what is our reaction to the radical shift in scale that produces the Caterpillars-his cross between heavy equipment and gothic cathedrals?
The question for Delvoye is invariably a measure of limitations, of lines drawn and of thresholds crossed. So he asks in making his carved cement mixers, "How far can you go in doing...