Doris Salcedo: The Meaning of 'Jagged'

Doris Salcedo: The Meaning of 'Jagged'

Time Out, May 6 - 12 2010, insert, 'Tate Modern is 10'. A time-line ribbon takes us through the Unilever Series of installations in the Tate's 'Turbine Hall' (sculpture as the absence of turbine?), and remarks of Doris Salcedo's work: 'From a hairlike crack to a deep rupture in the floor, this disturbing interruption, entitled 'Shibboleth', symbolised a dividing line between the haves and have-nots. Even now that the Colombian artist's piece has been filled in, a scar still remains' (6).

What determines that a line (in this case strikingly a line in three dimensions) should symbolise just this? Pre-eminently, the artist's statements.

And if I associate it (instead? also?) with Ezra Pound's 'Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel | but is jagged' (Canto 92)? Or if a parent photographs happy children playfully exploring the crack in the floor (as documented in the Tate's photographs of the installation)? (On the Pound, see

http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/, 'Ezra Pound: Farfalla in Tempesta', Tuesday 4 May 2010, not least for Clark's posting of beautiful photographs of the butterflies [farfalla] Pound identifies in that Canto.)