my name is mwd

I’m a big fan of Tate Modern, and it’s always fun to see what they’ve got in the Turbine Hall. Currently the work on display there is called Shibboleth, and is essentially a large crack in the building that runs along the length of the Turbine Hall:

And both times Laura and I have been past it’s been very busy:

Like a lot of people, we spent the first while trying to work out how they did it, and we think we’ve got a pretty good idea, but I’ll not spoil it for those that want to have that fun themselves :)

Of the crack as art itself? You can read about what Doris Salcedo intends for the art to represent, but I find that I tend to find my own meaning in things, which may or may not match what the artist intended.

When I first saw it, I felt that it was so busy that I couldn’t begin to try and take it in. Most of the time you could see at best a metre or so between other visitors standing over the crack. I felt this stopped me from appreciating it, but I was wrong. We went back one evening when it was very quiet, and there we could see Shibboleth for its entirety, but it suddenly seemed very inert. With Shibboleth I found very little meaning in it when it was alone, probably as I’d understood (or at least I think I understand) how the crack was made in the building, so there’s no magic to it from that point.

But what is spellbinding about Shibboleth, and I think about things in the Turbine Hall in general, is watching how people react to it. They stand over it. They lay across it. They ponder how it was done. They look to see if anything has dropped in it. They seem particularly interested in sticking cameras in it. Some people even take along plastic dinosaurs to it. Shibboleth is a very odd piece of art, and as such it creates a wonderful range of reactions in the people viewing it. That to me is where the magic is.

Of course, it’s hard to mention Shibboleth without commenting on the weird set of stories about people losing small children or grandparents down the crack, as articulated in this BBC news story. I have to say it’s not that deep – I was most disappointed in its inability to swallow up people whole after hearing all the scare stories. You may trip on it yes, but then you might do that on the stair case next to it too.

Of course, this being the UK, there’s lots of polite signs about to warn you about it, which kind of spoil it:

You have to worry about people some times, and I mean the sign makers rather than the people who fail to spot a very large crack in the floor that they presumably came to see.

I went to the other extreme of course – the Turbine Hall makes a fantastic place to heely about in :)