Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, ☭☭☭, ⚑, collective amnesia, doris salcedo, el otro lado, eyal weizman, gentrification, green scare, istanbul biennial, postco, postracial scars, property not people, racism, RAF, rupture reveals structure, sds, seattle, shibboleth, violence, weather underground, western freedoms
A lot of things can happen between the gaps, and down little alleyways and other narrow spaces between one building and the next. Like this installation by Doris Salcedo at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which fills a gap between buildings by lowering in 1600 chairs. Or this ridiculous house in Seattle, found by Kyle Gabouer. He says that it was owned and inhabited by an elderly woman, who “was so insistent on living her last days in the home that no matter the price, she refused to sell it in order to make way for construction. The contractors decided they’d build around her. I heard that she recently passed, and the building isn’t even finished yet…” Something to think about with “Manhttanville”, perhaps?
At that, Colombian artist Salcedo definitely seems like someone to look more into. Above is her 2007 piece “Shibboleth“, found at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. At the opening, she refused to discuss the technical specifics of the crack, but noted that it was “about the experience of being a third world person, here, now, in London.” Unlike more conventional installations or sculptures however, this work does as far as to intervene directly in its fabric itself, creating a rupture that reveals structure – not just of the building, but of all that it symbolises.
The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built. In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.
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‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
| What I love about this perhaps is exactly is the way it visually represents both the idea of ‘rupture reveals structure’ – kind of what groups like the RAF and Weather Underground tried (and perhaps failed to a large extent) to do, on a larger societal fabric scale. And along with it, maybe even more so, the question of destruction and violence in the movement – against property, against people. |  |
I’ve especially been thinking about this lately with the Gaza massacre, and Hamas’ policies, not to mention the current neo-McCarthian green scares. Most striking for me perhaps is the Nicholas Serrata of the Tate’s comment, that “Once it’s over, a scar will remain, and both we, and subsequent artists, will have to walk over it”. The idea of walking directly over these ‘postracial’ (as the US clearly is, now, with a Black president) scars and even making contact with them is interesting though, when compared to the collective habits of skirting carefully around periods like that of slavery, or the Holocaust. Hopefully this, as opposed to Eyal Weizman’s (incredible piece), Walking Through Walls instead.
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