Wim Delvoye - Belgian Artist

Check out Beligan Artist Wim Delvoye. He has some incredible original and extremely disparate pieces of work. His projects include sawblades and gas canisters that are decorated in a classical porcelain styling (pictured), incredibly ornate laser cut steel installations, bizarre x-ray stained glass, pigs with Louis Vuitton tattoos, machinery that emulates bodily processes, and innumerable other projects, often with controversy à la Damien Hirst. Find out for yourself and enjoy his well-designed site.

In Never Leave Well Enough Alone, (the memoir of one of the founding fathers of Industrial Design) Raymond Loewy constantly attacks “decalomaniacs.” That’s his term for “designers” who “improve” an object by painting some flowers or a landscape on a product or piece of machinery. He believed that the aesthetic nature of an object should be intimately related to the object’s functionality. The visual cues of an object should be regarded at the same level as the usability, interaction, and functionality of a product. This Wim Delvoye adorned gas canister is interesting to me on many levels. It’s a utilitarian object that is designed for low cost and safety. An object like this does not make emotional bonds with the user and these things are generally returned to the filling station and forgotten. The classical adornment of the object offers immense perceived value and make the gas canister essentially unusable since it is a presumably expensive museum-worthy piece. Wim Delvoye’s gas canisters also embody the period of decalomania in product design. Here, the decoration adds some high-brow humor to a common object, but it also harks back to the concept of branding- how adding something like the Louis Vuitton logo to anything makes an object generally more desirable, more expensive, and more symbolic, whether or not that object is an authentic Vuitton piece.