Ain't Nothing To It *

JJ and I decided to go along to the Tate Modern on Friday to fill our heads with culture. Well, it was my birthday and I wanted a treat. Now I adore the Tate Modern, thinking it to be a beautiful building and a marvellous use of its internal space. So we looked at the crack in the ground which is also known as Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo. JJ didn't take it seriously, in fact, she laughed quite a lot. "But JJ," I asked, "don't you agree with Martin Herbert, who says in the accompanying leaflet for the Salcedo piece that 'it prompts a broader consideration of power's divisive operations as encoded in the brutal narratives of colonialism, their unhappy aftermaths in postcolonial nations, and in the stand off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres'?" JJ replied: "No, it's just a crack in the ground!"
I pressed her again. "But surely, JJ, you would concur with Salcedo when she says that the crack 'reveals a colonial and imperial history that has been disregarded, marginalised or simply obliterated ... the history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity and ... its untold dark side'." "No," JJ declared again, "it's just a crack in the ground!"
I then thrust Herbert's text in front of her and demanded that she read the final paragraph, which goes:

"Through Shibboleth, these phantasmal pressures comprise and ineradicable faul line: one that now, it appears, is causing the building to seismically sundered. Gouging open the very ground that we walk on. Salcedo reminds us that these wounds can not be simply consigned to the past. She encourages us to confront discomforting truths about our world and about ourselves with absolute candidness and without self-deception."

"Martin Herbert is a twat," JJ screams. At this point, I could only agree. What a load of wank, indeed!

* The Stranglers