The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Doris Salcedo · an installation: a crack cut into the concrete floor of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, and running its length, about 167 metres by the figure widely reported, from a hairline at the west entrance to a fissure some centimetres wide, branching in places, its inner walls lined with steel mesh of the chain-link fencing kind · the eighth commission of the Unilever Series, on view from October 2007 to April 2008 · the unit scored is the installation as made and as recorded: at the close the crack was filled and a line was left in the floor where it had run, and what stands now is the record, the photographs, the film and Tate’s publication, and that line
Mode
Installation made for one hall: a negative sculpture, a crack cut into a museum’s floor and lined with a fence, nothing above the ground
Mythos
The fords of the Jordan and the word that sorts those who pass from those who are killed; the earth that opens; the wound
Phase
The eighth commission of the Unilever Series for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern; on view from October 2007 to April 2008; then filled, a line left in the floor
Presentation
One continuous crack along the floor of the hall, west to east, from a hairline to a fissure some centimetres wide, branching in places, its walls lined with steel mesh; the volume of the hall above left empty
Register
Quiet, low and cold; a line on the floor, then a dark with a fence in it, seen by bending down
Scale
About 167 metres, the length of the hall; some centimetres wide at the east end; nothing above floor level
Governing Proposition
Down the floor of the Turbine Hall runs a crack. At the west entrance it cannot be seen; a little further it is a scratch; further still it is a fissure a hand can enter, and inside its walls is a fence. Nothing stands above it, and the great hall is left empty. The wager of the work is that a division sunk into the ground, found only near and below the eye, will show what a raised wall cannot: that the house of a Western institution stands on a border it does not show, and that whoever bends low enough will see it. The title, a word from the Book of Judges, makes the crack a test.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Doris Salcedo, a Colombian sculptor born in Bogotá in 1958, made Shibboleth for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London as the eighth commission of the Unilever Series. It was on view from October 2007 to April 2008. It was a crack cut into the concrete floor of the hall and running its length, about 167 metres by the figure widely reported. It began as a hairline at the west entrance and widened and deepened as it ran east, branching in places, to a fissure some centimetres wide. Its inner walls were lined with steel mesh of the chain-link fencing kind, set into the concrete, so that the break showed a fence inside it. Nothing stood above the floor. The volume of the hall was left empty.
The unit scored is the installation as made and as shown, with its record. At the close the crack was filled, and a line was left in the floor where it had run. What stands now is the photographs, the film and Tate’s publication, which carry the line, the widening and the mesh, and that line in the floor, weighed as survival and not as the work. The making by the artist’s studio and Tate’s engineers is credited to the work. How the crack was made was not disclosed by the artist or by Tate, and nothing here rests on any account of it.
Little can be taken away. Without the mesh the crack is a fault, a piece of geology; with the fence inside it, the break shows what it is made of, and the border is in the foundation. Without the progression from hairline to fissure the work loses its time. Without the full length it is an incident, a feature in the building rather than a division of it. Without the title it is a wound with no language; the title makes it a test. The emptiness above is required as well, since anything standing in the hall would have given the eye somewhere else to go. What gives is the branching, which could be more or less without loss, and the exact length, which is the hall’s and not argued.
Movement II
The work was met as a walk. A visitor entering at the west end did not see it, then saw a scratch, then had to watch where he walked, and the division grew as he went further into the house, until it was a fissure a hand could enter, the fence glinting in its walls. It could not be seen from a distance. It lay below the eye, and to read it a visitor had to look down, crouch or kneel. The image the record keeps is a long line of people bent over the floor of the largest hall in British art, looking down into what the building stands on.
The commissions before it had worked the height of the hall, Eliasson’s sun the best known. Shibboleth turned the sublime downward. Its effect is a small vertigo repeated: a dark that seemed to have no bottom, the fear of a foot caught, the wide empty hall above it all, now a space over an abyss. The dread is real, the idea that the floor one stands on is broken all the way through, and it is cold: terror, not grandeur. It is also one effect, quiet and low, the same at the hundredth metre as at the tenth, and for many visitors a curiosity before it was a fear.
What the walk discloses can be stated. An institution of the West, a power station turned into a museum of modern art, stands on a division it does not show, and the division is a border, a fence inside its foundation. It is seen by whoever is low enough to see it. A border is not a line on a map but a break in the ground that some cross and some fall into. These are meanings, and they hold. But the work names the condition rather than particularising it: no one in particular falls into this crack, and much of its stated meaning arrived through the artist’s words and the label. Without them the crack discloses division and depth, which is less; a viewer who knows only the title still reads a fence broken into a floor.
Movement III
The title comes from the twelfth chapter of the Book of Judges. The men of Gilead held the fords of the Jordan and made each fugitive say “shibboleth”; the Ephraimites, who said “sibboleth”, were killed. A word was used as a border. The title builds that archetype into the work: the ford where a people is sorted, by a word, into those who pass and those who are killed. The crack is the passage drawn in plan, a line to be crossed or not crossed, running the length of a house of the nation.
Two further archetypes are present without being built. The earth that opens, the chasm under the feet and the abyss of the old cosmologies are evoked by the image, and the work makes nothing of them beyond it. The wound in a body lives in the reception and in the line left after the filling. And the ford itself is load-bearing only through the title: no people, place or crossing is named in the object, only in the word, and the particular stays general.
One law governs the whole: division in the ground, given by a word. The two most distant elements are the hairline at the entrance and the mesh at the deep end, and both obey it, the one as the division not yet seen, the other as the division shown for what it is. The scripture of the title and the concrete of a London power station obey it too, a test at a crossing and a break in a house. The law holds without breach. It is narrow: one material, one gesture and one register throughout, over a small range.
Movement IV
By 2007 the Turbine Hall commission had a short tradition of spectacle filling the volume: Bourgeois’s towers, Kapoor’s red membrane, Eliasson’s sun, Whiteread’s boxes, and Höller’s slides the year before. Behind it stood the negative sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s, Heizer’s cuts into the ground, Matta-Clark’s cuts into buildings and Burden’s excavation of a museum’s foundation. The departure was to make nothing that rises in the largest showcase of contemporary art in Europe, to put the whole commission into the floor, and to show the institution’s foundation broken. The stake was real: a cut floor in a listed building, the risk to the feet of the public, and the risk that the public would walk past. The negative cut had its precedents, Burden’s above all, and Salcedo’s earlier installations had already set private grief into public architecture.
The form is the instrument. A wall would have been a monument, seen from far off, read at once, outside the viewer; sunk into the floor, the division is found only near, by the feet as much as the eyes. A straight cut would have been a design; a crack seems to have happened to the building. A uniform line would have had no time; the widening gives it direction, from the entrance into the depth of the house. Plain concrete walls would have made a fault; the fence makes a border. The making serves this and hides itself: a cut that reads as a fracture, with the irregular, branching edges of concrete broken under stress, a continuous progression from the unseen to the open, and a fence cast into the walls so that it reads as structure exposed. If the crack had looked made, the work would have failed. The command is of one effect, and the hand, invisible by design, cannot be weighed directly.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its form, its making, its inner law, its necessity and its swerve stand at or above 8.2, and its disclosure at 8.0; but its sublime is one low effect, its archetype is carried by the title, its reach is wide in discourse and not shown in practice, and its whole stood for one run. The Weather Project (7.7), made for the same hall four years before, stands below it: the sun elevated more and moved the commission further, and the crack is the more necessary and the more disclosing form. Sunflower Seeds (7.7), the commission three years after, stands level with it on disclosure and archetype and below it on most else. Fountain (8.0) leads it on the axes of consequence. The Jewish Museum Berlin (8.6), the nearest work in kind, a national institution built around a division and a void and read on foot, stands level on necessity and above on every other axis: its void belongs to a building in use, and its disclosure is particular, a people, a history, a city.
Movement V
The work turned the large museum commission from the volume to the floor, from spectacle to absence, and from the building as container to the building as the thing indicted. That is a real turn in the field of international installation of the 2000s, not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the negative cut and institutional critique were already there. Its reach is wide in discourse and in public memory: it is among the two or three Turbine Hall commissions most often recalled, and it fixed Salcedo’s international standing. Reach into the practice of others cannot be named in particulars; no line of artists is shown to have taken its turn as a starting point.
The questions it has sustained for nineteen years are real: whether it is a border, a wound, a fault or a grave; whether it is a critique of the institution or a commission by it, under a consumer company’s sponsorship; how it was made, a question the maker declined to answer and so kept open; whether a work that put its visitors’ feet at risk makes its point or betrays it. It holds a lasting place in the writing on art and the postcolonial, on borders and on negative monuments. But its central meaning is agreed and was supplied, and that writing returns more to its theme than to new findings in the thing.
At the close the crack was filled, and a line was left in the floor where it had run: a border papered over that still shows, which obeys the work’s law though the work did not make it. The walk beside a broken floor and the look down into the fence are available to no one now; the photographs and film carry the line, the widening and the mesh, but not the scale and the walking, which were the work. The orders it holds, the state and the border, colonial history and migration, the institution and its building, the body, language and the sacred, are held in one line, and held as ideas rather than lives: there is no person in it and no family, and labour only as the power station implies it. One gesture in one material holds this much, cut into the floor of a house and then closed.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction, part by part. Take away the mesh and the crack is a fault, a geology; with the fence inside it the break shows what it is made of, and the border is in the foundation. Take away the progression from hairline to fissure and the work loses its time: the visitor entering at the west end sees nothing, then a scratch, then has to watch where he walks. Take away the length and it is an incident; the full run makes the division the building’s own. Take away the title and it is a wound with no language. The empty hall above is required too. What gives: the branching, and the exact length, which is the hall’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated. An institution of the West, here a power station turned into a museum of modern art, stands on a division it does not show, and that division is a border, a fence inside its foundation. It is seen only by whoever is low enough: the crack lay below the eye, and visitors looked down, crouched and knelt to see into it. A border is a break in the ground that some cross and some fall into, and the title adds that the test is often a word. These are meanings, not moods. Held at 8.0 because the work names the condition rather than particularising it, and much of its stated meaning arrived through the artist’s words and the label.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The commissions before it in the hall had worked its height, Eliasson’s sun the best known. Shibboleth turned the sublime downward. The recorded experience is a small vertigo repeated: a long line of people bent over the floor, looking into a dark that seemed to have no bottom, the fence glinting inside; the fear of a foot caught; the wide empty hall above, now a space over an abyss. The dread is real, the floor one stands on broken all the way through, and it is the axis’s terror rather than its grandeur. Held at 7.4 for height and frequency: one effect, quiet and low, the same at the hundredth metre as at the tenth, and for many visitors a curiosity before it was a fear.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The title builds one archetype into the work: the fords of the Jordan in the Book of Judges, where the men of Gilead sorted fugitives by a word and those who could not say it were killed. The crack is that passage drawn in plan, a line to be crossed or not crossed, running the length of a house of the nation. A second archetype is evoked rather than built: the earth that opens, the chasm under the feet, the abyss of the old cosmologies; the crack carries the image and makes nothing more of it. A third, the wound in a body, lives in the reception. Held at 7.6 because the ford is load-bearing only through the title, and no people, place or crossing is named in the object.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is the hall’s own short tradition of spectacle filling the volume, Bourgeois’s towers, Kapoor’s red membrane, Eliasson’s sun, Whiteread’s boxes and Höller’s slides the year before, and behind it the negative sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s: Heizer’s cuts into the ground, Matta-Clark’s cuts into buildings, Burden’s excavation of a museum’s foundation. The departure: in the largest showcase of contemporary art in Europe, to make nothing that rises and to show the institution’s foundation broken. The stake was real: a cut floor in a listed building, the risk to the public’s feet, and the risk that the public would walk past. Held at 8.2 because the negative cut had its precedents, Burden’s above all, and Salcedo’s own earlier installations had already set private grief into public architecture.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute a different form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. Raise the division into a wall and it is a monument, seen from a distance, read at once, outside the viewer; sunk into the floor it is invisible from far off, found only near, below the eye, by the feet as much as the eyes, and the viewer must lower himself to read it. Cut it straight and it is a design; as a crack it seems to have happened to the building. Make it uniform and it is a line; the widening gives it time and direction. Line it with plain concrete and it is a fault; the fence makes it a border. Held below 9 because the knowledge, once found, is single: the form gives one reading, not an unfolding one.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: nineteen years, and the return has been real. Is it a border, a wound, a fault, a grave? Is it a critique of the institution or a commission by it, under the sponsorship of a consumer company? How was it made, a question the maker declined to answer and so kept open? Does a work that put its visitors’ feet at risk make its point or betray it? What is it now, a filled trench and a line in a floor? It holds a lasting place in the writing on art and the postcolonial, on borders and on negative monuments. Held at 7.6 because the central meaning is agreed and was supplied, the object as made cannot be returned to, and the literature returns more to its theme than to new findings in the thing.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is international installation of the 2000s and the large museum commission. Intrinsic force: a real turn in that field, from the volume to the floor, from spectacle to absence, from the building as container to the building as the thing indicted; not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the negative cut and institutional critique were already there. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in discourse and in public memory, one of the two or three Turbine Hall commissions most often recalled, and the work that fixed Salcedo’s international standing. Reach into the practice of others cannot be named in particulars; no line of artists is shown to have taken its turn as a starting point. Held at 7.6.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nineteen years. The work as made is gone: the crack was filled in 2008, and the walk beside a broken floor and the look down into the fence are no longer available to anyone. Form survives as record: the photographs and film carry the line, the widening and the mesh legibly, but not the scale and the walking, which were the work. Presence: nineteen years of steady citation, and a line left in the floor where the crack ran. Fabric: nothing of the work survives but its trace. A whole work of this age would stand at 8.3 to 8.4; the loss of the made work takes six to seven tenths, since nothing carries its form but pictures and a seam.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, with the making by the artist’s studio and Tate’s engineers credited to the work. The command is high and hidden, which is its achievement: a cut the length of a working floor that reads not as a cut but as a fracture, with the irregular, branching edges of concrete broken under stress; a progression from a line too fine to see to a fissure a hand can enter, made continuous; a steel fence cast into its walls so that it reads as structure exposed rather than material added; all in a public building kept open. The making is load-bearing: if the crack looked made, the work would fail. Held at 8.4 because the command is of one effect, the hand is invisible by design and cannot be weighed directly, and some of the credit rests on report.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law: division in the ground, given by a word. The two most distant elements are the hairline at the entrance and the mesh at the deep end, and both obey it, the one as the division not yet seen, the other as the division shown for what it is. The title from Judges and the concrete of a London power station obey it too: a test at a crossing, and a break in a house. Even the filling and the line left after it, which the work did not choose but accepted, obey it: a border papered over that still shows. Held at 8.3 because the law is narrow and its range small, one material, one gesture and one register throughout. Narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held are several, and they are held in one line: the state and the border; colonial history and migration; the institution of art and its building; the body, which can fall; language, as the test; the sacred, by the scripture of the title. They are integrated through the title and the site, not listed, which is the achievement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or present only as abstraction: no person and no family, labour only as the power station implies it, the natural order only as the earth that opens. The orders are present as ideas, not as lives. A single gesture in one material can hold only so much, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.5, then The Made at 8.4 and The Inner Law at 8.3. A form in which the division, sunk into the floor and widening from a hairline to a fissure with a fence inside it, is found only near and below the eye, so that the viewer must lower himself to read it; a making that hides itself, a cut the length of the hall that reads as a fracture of concrete under stress, with steel mesh cast into its walls; and one law, division in the ground given by a word, obeyed from the hairline at the entrance to the mesh at the deep end and by the scripture of the title.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: the state, migration, the institution, the body, language and the sacred are held in one line, as ideas rather than lives, with no person and no family in it. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.4: one low, quiet vertigo, the same at the hundredth metre as at the tenth. Then The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: an archetype load-bearing only through the title, a central meaning agreed and supplied, and a reach wide in discourse and not shown in practice. These hold the work below Tier IV: one gesture, exactly made, whose whole stood for one run.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Swerve at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Imperishable at 7.7, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.3, an average of 7.858 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work in its main facts and its documented history, from photographs, film and report, from Tate’s publication and from the critical literature; the crack was not walked beside for this reading, and its measured particulars are known less well than its form and its history. The work scored is the installation made for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, as the eighth commission of the Unilever Series: a crack cut into the concrete floor of the hall and running its length, about 167 metres by the figure widely reported, widening and deepening from a hairline at the west entrance to a fissure some centimetres wide, branching in places, its inner walls lined with steel mesh of the chain-link fencing kind; on view from October 2007 to April 2008, as made and as recorded. At the close the crack was filled and a line was left in the floor where it had run; the record and that line are weighed as its survival, not as the work. The loss of the made work is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes, and on no other axis. The making by the artist’s studio and Tate’s engineers is credited to the work. The artist’s earlier installations are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title and the two words of Judges 12 that give it; no statement of the artist’s is quoted or paraphrased. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact opening and closing dates, the depth and width of the fissure at its deep end, the number of its branches, how the crack was made and where any part of it was prepared, the artist’s own words on its meaning, how many visitors tripped or were hurt and what the press reported of it, the course of its critical reception, the present condition of the line in the floor, and which of the artist’s later public works it led to.