- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
The intriguing thing about Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the question of why it doesn’t work. That is, why an artist experienced in producing arresting installations in large architectural spaces has failed to turn an exciting idea into something convincing. The disappointment of Shibboleth is in both the installation itself and the surrounding rhetoric. The accompanying text, distributed by watchful invigilators, warns visitors to watch their step and keep their children under supervision. This understandably protective note is mirrored in Martin Herbert’s introduction to the work, which leads the reader gently through a distilled or distorted summation of Salcedo’s piece in the form of a very straightforward lesson in socio-political history. This is not the first time the Tate has been guilty of dumbing down or over-simplifying its accompanying text, nor is it the only institution to do so. As to whether there is any of Salcedo’s intention in the text, it is hard to say, but there is something even in her choice of title that is very reductive. Shibboleth is a word used to detect and divide people. Herbert recounts the story from the Bible in which the word is used by the Gileadites to detect their fleeing enemies, the Ephraimites, who did not have the necessary sounds in their dialect to pronounce ‘shibboleth’ and could thus be captured and executed. He later quotes Salcedo describing the condition of Modern art, for which she uses Shibboleth as a metaphor: ‘an ideal of humanity so restrictedly defined that it excluded non-European peoples from the human genre’. Undoubtedly, Salcedo has more to say on the subject, but it is not said with Shibboleth, in which the friction caused by this most basic dichotomy, of have and have-not, is the apparent cause of the rent in the floor.
The naiveté of Shibboleth finds a much more astute foil in Mark Wallinger’s recent State Britain at Tate Britain. Wallinger, like Salcedo, split the gallery floor with a line of mimesis, but where Salcedo ‘strikes to the very foundations of the museum’, Wallinger’s line (of reproduced placards and posters from Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest) strikes at its own ineffectiveness within the recuperative safety of the museum. Before long Shibboleth will be filled in to make way for the next Unilever Series project, and will be consigned to the same history it attempts to critique.
The dissatisfaction of the experience of Shibboleth stems from knowing that it should be great. An artist funded to tear apart the floor of one of Europe’s major museums should produce spectacular results. Salcedo’s previous work has often shown real drama, this is apparent even in the small, reproduced images in the exhibition leaflet.
She has worked in shocking scale before (Istanbul 2003 and Turin 2005) and has done so with sensitivity. Perhaps it is because there was too much expectation (at least from me) for this piece, too many reasons why it should work, that Shibboleth disappoints.
Likened to a ‘Harry Potter lightning bolt’, there is indeed, something gleeful, even juvenile, about the crack running down the length of the Turbine Hall. From the floors above it looks stylized, more notebook cover doodle than natural disaster.
One can imagine the conversations that preceded and will haunt Shibboleth, about logistics and health and safety concerns. Might the chance to taunt the latter of these considerations have proved just too tempting? Health and Safety procedures can be the scourge of installation artists, but in this instance, at least upon first view, there seems to be a real risk taken for the sake of the piece. There is however, something distinctly compromised about the crack – wide enough to be easily visible from the museum’s upper floors, but never too wide to step across. The danger to the public is never likely to have exceeded that of stepping from an underground train to the platform, and the warning on the leaflet plus a handful of reproachful invigilators are roughly equivalent to the famously British ‘Mind The Gap’ warning in London Underground stations. For an artist who has spent time interviewing victims of war, this is a remarkably polite installation.
Closer inspection of the split reveals no indication of force or trauma. Beneath the surface the sides of the divide are smooth, undulating, evidence not of irrepressible violence – the result of a spontaneous shift in a tectonic political underground, but rather of a contrived composition. There is no sense of cleavage, nor power or fragility. If the crack had remained just a hairline fracture it might have retained a sense of foreboding potency, or if it had been opened wider and with more evident violence it might perhaps of exuded more uncontrolled tumult. As it is, Shibboleth causes none of the arrest or interrogation that its biblical referent did so terribly.
