Borrowing its name from the ancient sewer in Rome, Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye's new and improved "Cloaca" is a room-sized shit-making machine whose bowels process two meals a day, serving up a mouthful of complex themes: scatalogy and disgust, high and low culture, man as machine and vice-versa, and the inversion of art semiotics. Many of these same concerns are processed in Delvoye's other work, like the life-sized carved walnut replica of a cement truck, the wood cabinet stocked with 32 circular saw blades painted with scenes in Delft China blue, and a herd of pigs tatooed by Antwerp's finest needle-men. Feces and other anal subjects are parsed in accompanying essays by such luminaries as Milan Kundera, Gerardo Mosquera, Dan Cameron, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dali.

Perpetrator, prankster, artful butcher, tattoo artist -- Wim Delvoye wears many hats in this book documenting his art projects involving pigs. Delvoye, a Post-Pop Belgian artist, devotes one section of this book to photographs of his tattooed pigs, the other to his elaborate faux-marble floors made with slices of assorted cold cuts. Saving them from their slaughterhouse fate, he uses these pigs as examples of exemplary cleanliness, as living canvases on which he doesn't even paint himself -- he contracts professional tattoo artists to do so. Also included are his original tattoo drawings, his tattoo series made on pigskins, a selected biography and bibliography, photographs recording the tattooing process, and three essays that delve into Delvoye's provocative past and present work.

This comprehensive volume reproduces in loving detail all of Delvoye's preliminary drawings for his infamous Cloaca project--in which a giant machine replicates the human digestive system by "eating" twice a day, digesting and eliminating.

Contemporary art is deeply engaged with the subject of classical myth. Yet within the literature on contemporary art, little has been said about this provocative relationship. Composed of fifteen original essays, Contemporary Art and Classical Myth addresses this scholarly gap, exploring, and in large part establishing, the multifaceted intersection of contemporary art and classical myth.

Wim Deloye cultive le paradoxe. Avec chaque parodie, il fait ressortir un thème profond ; avec chaque provocation, il exprime une affection profonde. Il utilise le terme "gothique" sous tous ses sens.

Summary: It is crucial to understand that our progression through the twentieth century towards our contemporary global Crystal Palace (Peter Sloterdijk) of purity and transparency has been constantly accompanied by an almost physical desire for the pure, not just Mondrian's crystalline structures, but also the addictive taste of white sugar and white bread. This book investigates this urge for the pure, but also advocates a much deeper need for the impure, not to reinstate a new organicism, one more back-to-nature movement, but to trace that progression to a point where all modernist values reverse, where technology becomes an agent for the impure and the imperfect. Technology, long an agent for homogeneity and purity, is now turning into one for heterogeneity and global contingency.

From style wilderness to height of cool, taxidermy has staged an extraordinary comeback. No longer confined to stately homes, stuffed animals are appearing everywhere from modern apartments to luxury department stores. High-profile artists have rejuvenated the medium and museums have dusted down their historic collections and put them back on display. Illustrated with stunning photography that explores this rich artform, past and present, this title is the most comprehensive and beautiful survey of taxidermy ever produced.

Edited by Francesca Richer and Matthew Rosenzweig.

Breaking the Mold of Convention Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on "Western" art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world's entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.