Blah Blah Flowers

It's nice to see the Tate continuing it's interesting tactic of putting artwork in a public space that invites the public to sue them, there's the woman who hurt herself on the slides last year so how long before someone finds they can't get their foot out of a hole they shouldn't have inserted it in in the first place, or who claims they tripped?

I'm artistically illiterate so I have no idea how this work 'prompt[s] a broader consideration of power's divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism', it instead reminds me of visiting Greenwich yesterday and the Royal Observatory, where the line that marks the Prime Meridian lies. The line of Shibboleth shifts, turns and runs all over the place (though rather annoyingly mostly down the one side of the hall), a more rough and ready Prime Meridian for something other than trade.

And how well does this make use of the space in the Turbine Hall? Well, for me, as it digs down, rather than rising up, it is again exploring negative space, in the same way as Rachel Whiteread's underwhelming collection of white boxes from a few years back. But, just as her display did nothing to address the space involved (and arguably no exhibitions since the Giant Sun have achieved this), so this also underwhelms. Presumably for safety reasons the crack mostly runs down the one side of the hall, doing nothing with the rest of the space. This could have been done anywhere else, which is a shame but still, following it from the top down to the bottom, once it becomes wide enough to see into it's reminiscent (geek alert!) of flying the X-WINGs down the trench in Star Wars, which is enough for me to like it.

Labels: art, Flickr, Tate Modern/Britain