Wim Delvoye’s Torre in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Wim Delvoye, Torre, 2009, Laser-cut Corten steel, 91.4” x 91.4” x 378”, Installation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Lara Pan in collaboration with Bjorn Scherlippens

Torre, the first piece of monumental architecture to come out of Wim Delvoyes’ workshop, has a made a strong debut at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Installed over the course of this year’s Venice Biennial, the 10 meter tall tower arose just a stone’s throw away from the tourist buzz at the Grand Canal, mockingly exemplifying what Venice is all about: grandiose picturesque scenery.

 If the fact that Venice in itself is a postcard needs any illustration, Canaletto demonstrated it. Moving from backdrop designs for opera to his famous capricci, the eighteenth century painter felt no need to romanticize his hometown for commercial sake: Venice was already photogenic and theatrical enough. It was an idea which Turner in later decades could only affirm, as he represented the city as a stage for age-old plays. On the whole, the painterly tradition surrounding Venice (Bellini, Tintoretto, …) is marked by this understanding of the cityscape as an artificial reality.

 It is the “pretty picture Venice” that the installation of Torre by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye touches upon. Located on the terrace of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Torre gains attention from tourist traffic near the Grand Canal, producing an idyllic sight by its placement near the water and by its ornamented structure.

 Torre brings a new development to Delvoye’s art, one that was rehearsed in earlier works. His life-sized caterpillars and the humanoid fecal machines, dubbed Cloaca, already gravitated towards the architectural. After being a painter, a sculptor and even a farmer and entrepreneur, Wim Delvoye has envisioned a new career for himself in building. He has taken on his new job wholeheartedly, stating that he only wants the finest in architectural engineering. But even within this new shift towards building, Delvoye’s art exploits the notions of formal repetition and perfection. The methods for producing his tower derive from his earlier Gothic works and are furthered in a more intricate manner. The design is computer driven and the steel laser cut. The results with Torre are a contemporary meticulous duplication of Gothic design and ornamentation, comprising ribbed vaults, ogival windows, turrets and tracery.

 The idea of repetition and perfection is considered formally as well as conceptually. Delvoye’s work derives from a strict formula, namely the irreverent and playful mixtures of binary oppositions. While earlier works in themselves have played out tensions between the old and the new, the sublime and the mundane, and the functional and ornamental, Torre seeks a more generous approach, taking into account its geographic context. The tower may then contrast its Gothic aesthetics with its industrial material and production; it also brings its placement into the equation. On the terrace of the eighteenth century Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the Gothic steel structure stands majestically as a paradox. Even more so, it arises as an illegitimate anachronism in Venice, which has been frozen in the time period of the Renaissance and Baroque, displaying Italy’s cultural history as an emblem - Gothic has little place in that. By positing Torre on the Venetian site as a stylistically foreign body, Delvoye creates an uncanny situation and renders critical the way in which the city itself has been constructed ideologically and commercially in terms of historical homogeneity.

 Delvoye’s love affair with the Gothic is a deep and intensive one, but his fascination does not fetishize the dark aspects. In fact, for Delvoye, the High Middle Ages were not dark at all. He argues that Gothic is a flexible state of mind, while the Renaissance was a firm world view, doomed to fail: “The Renaissance was a finite epoch lasting half a century before being succeeded by Mannerism. Gothic was an art outside of time. The human eye takes in detail like a stroboscope; glancing over lights and tracery, crockets and finials; it thrills to the joy of the tower’s soaring ascent.” Delvoyes monumental tower in Corten steel seeks just that: a structural aesthetic of linear forms which interact with light and shadow play generating a creation of artistic fantasy.

 The claim of Gothic as the European springtime seems particularly in tune with Ruskinian thought; Delvoye’s research of architecture as a study of society combining aesthetic, economic and political perspectives develops along the same lines. His latest works, from the caterpillars on, embody Ruskin’s aphorism that life without industry is a sin and industry without art a mere brutality.

 While Delvoye’s work is haunted by the constant need for progressive, repetitive research, his artistry seeks to go beyond the repository of accepted beliefs and preconceived notions about culture. He connects different elements with reciprocal evolutionary adjustments and aims to transform aesthetics. His Gothic Torre and its site-oriented integration at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection shift between the past, the present and the future.

Lara Pan is an independent curator and art critic, who lives between Brussels and Paris. She is the exhibition curator of Torre, a new sculpture by Wim Delvoye at Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Björn Scherlippens is a PhD fellow at the Department of Art Sciences of Ghent University in Belgium.