Hooray for the Tate

I ended up at home this weekend, and therefore ended up London town. After watching Have I Got News For You the week before and finding out that several people had fallen down into the current exhibition in the Tate Modern, consisting of a crack in the floor, I decided to go, and dragged Tim along with me. The piece is called Shibboleth and it's by Doris Salcedo.
Looks impressive doesn't it? It's really not as vast as it seems in that picture. The crack is only about as wide as a person's leg in the widest sections, so to fall down it you'd have to be pretty determined.
I've seen some really amazing exhibitions in the Turbine Hall, and a piece has to be incredibly powerful to hold its own in the space there. I don't think Shibboleth really did it for me. The crack seems very unnatural, it has regular spacing and you can see the chicken wire holding the two sections apart. It does make sense as the piece is about separation in society, and therefore man made divisions, but it seems to distract from what should be a powerful reflection about nature. Tim spent the whole time trying to figure out how it had been created.

But even though Shibboleth was not all I was expecting, there was another nice surprise. This monstrosity, sitting outside the Tate Modern. Maman, by Louise Bourgeois. It's an amazing sculpture, alien yet so very rooted in the familiar. Kids were saying to their parents that they wished it were real while Tim and I just widened our eyes in horror at each other.
We also saw some people having to shield their view as they walked past along the river, probably due to arachnaphobia. It seems almost insensitive to have a sculpture which for some people is horrific, out in full view in a popular area. Even worse is the face that there are posters all over the London Underground with the spider on, advertising the full Louise Bourgeois exhibition.
Art is supposed to provoke a response, but if it is involuntary, and people don't want to be exposed to the art in the first place, is that fair? Should art be concerned with what is fair anyway? It's certainly not concerned with what is legal in many cases.
But anyway, the sculpture was certainly unexpected, and even helped me out with my drawing project a little bit.