No Spasms, Just Chasms
The latest installation in the Tate Modern gallery's massive Turbine Hall is a 550-foot crack in the floor. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's work "Shibboleth" starts as a hairline crack and widens to about a foot across. It cost about 300,000 pounds and took more than six months to complete. Salcedo, 49, refused to say how she managed seemingly to crack open a concrete floor but said it involved delicate and intricate sculpting. Asked how deep the fissure goes, she replied: "It's bottomless. It's as deep as humanity."
FOOTNOTE: King fissure.
9 comments:
Is it a co-ink-a-dink that YesBut also has a post of this artwork? He and I have been discussing it.
YesBut Thinking Aloud
Shibboleth. Clever name for a great divide.
Is it only me?? Am I the only philistine around here??
If I want cracked concrete, I can look at my path. (Stomps off muttering..)
Hey don't stomp... the ground's already cracked...
How long before somebody drops a set of keys down there?
Damn, that's where I lost my keys!
Where's the link? I want to see it but not so badly that I will actually look on the internet. Cracked concrete? I get that artists have to express themselves but cripes that's a lot of money for an old driveway.
Thank you shrink, I to would refer to this as 'wank'. And it cost 300,000 pounds.... pay me I'll crack some concrete for you.
On the news last night there was a report, that three people had been hurt after they managed have accidents with the crack.
I hope the Health & Safety Brigade do not go into action and have the work roped off.
It didn't take six months to make, it took a couple of months for workmen with pneumatic chissels to cut the crack (actually strictly speaking its not a crack but a groove).
I've been having an exchange of views with Chewy on the artist attributing a high-faluting deep philosophical meaning to the work.
Its more than a crack but to claim it addresses a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world, come on! More cr*p than crack.
One think, like all the previous works installed in the Turbine Hall, as part of the Unilever Series, it has generated discussion, and put art on prime time TV news.
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