Has anyone told ‘Health and Safety’ ?

I don’t know about you, but I like my art in a frame hanging on a wall, not as a pile of crap in an otherwise empty room, which then has to be explained by some gallery curator; or as Brian Sewell said in a recent review of ‘The Turner Prize: A Retrospective’ … ”This is now what curators do - apply meaning to the meaningless”.

Well now another ‘work of art’ in to be seen at the ‘Tate Modern’. It’s a bloody great crack in the floor, is entitled ‘Shibboleth 2007′ and runs the full 167 metres of the cavernous hall on London’s South Bank.

I’ve searched for an explanation of this ‘masterpiece’ by a curator, but can find none, and must assume that they have all been struck dumb for a change.

However, as you would expect, the creator of this hole, Doris Salcedo, is full of the usual load of old cobblers …

“It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred … It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space … It’s bottomless. It’s as deep as humanity.”

The only quotes I can find from the gallery management are about their concerns …  

“… once the piece was created, would it damage the structural integrity of the building forever?  … There is a crack, there is a line, and eventually there will be a scar and that scar will remain.”

Perhaps the little bloke with the big tub of Pollyfilla will be one of those ’illegal immigrants’ doing his bit to …

… make his space a little more ‘positive’ !