It’s always a big event when a new contribution to the Tate Modern’s Unilever Series is announced. The idea is brilliant – giving an artist free reign in the enormous Turbine Hall on the gallery’s ground floor. So naturally, when Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth opened this October, I headed for London’s embankment.
Salcedo is familiar with large-scale projects. For the 8th Istanbul Biennial in 2003, she filled a gap between two houses with 1600 wooden chairs. At the Tate, she has carved out a gigantic crack in the cement floor that stretches from one end of the hall to the other.
As installations usually do, the crack comes with an array of symbolism. The big divide, segregation, separation, racial indifferences. The word Shibboleth in itself means, “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” (source: dictionary.com).
Still, standing in the Turbine Hall surrounded by school kids trying to stick their feet into the crevice, the installation seemed utterly pointless. And as I followed the snaky gap from one end to the other, it struck me that the big fuzz surrounding every new Unilever Series installation is due to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project from 2003/2004. The gigantic artificial sun was a huge hit with Londoners and tourists alike, and people would pay multiple visits to the Turbine Hall to have their sense of proportion shaken up by the big yellow disc at the far end of the room, and to spend time in the soothing light it provided. None of the other artists have managed to create the same public stir, and for a reason. Bruce Nauman’s speakers montage, Rachel Whiteread’s towers of white boxes and Carsten Höller’s spiralling slide were all dull contributions in comparison. Yet we all continue to hurry along for every new Unilever launch, hoping for a potential Eliasson experience.
The only clever thing about Salcedo’s Shibboleth is how it’s been designed. Angles are unnaturally sharp hence look very constructed, which in turn could be interpreted as social and cultural divides being man-made. Apart from that, Shibboleth isn’t particularly fascinating or, considering the space, overpowering. Nor is it irritating or provocative. It’s just a very, very big crack.
