This morning’s Guardian hailed the fresh brilliance of the new Unilever Turbine Hall project at Tate Modern by Doris Salcedo.
It shows: “a laudable unwillingness to compromise, wanting to make a work about absolute indifference, and to address desolation and destitution…Shibboleth begins with a hairline crack in the concrete floor by the entrance. As insignificant as a flaw in a teacup, as telling as the build-up scenes of a disaster movie, the crack soon widens and deepens, a jagged crevasse making its jagged way the length of the Turbine Hall, 167 metres away, jabbing a fork of lightning and deepening as it goes. You can never quite see the bottom of it.”
The double page picture spread in this morning’s Guardian centrefold does give a good impression of just how massive this new work of art is, and how astonishing the feat of engineering.
But is Shibboleth really as, er, groundbreaking as it appears?
I haven’t seen the “piece” or the “installation” or whatever it is called, but I have been to the De
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