Too Cool for Crack

Louise Bourgeois must have some seriously freaky dreams. If this building sized arachnid sculpture is anything to go by, I suspect David Lynch would pay handsomely to surf the sub-conscious of the diminutive artist.

We recently went to the Tate Modern to see "the crack", which (warning, excruciating pun ahead) is not all it's cracked up to be. I can muster a healthy respect for the architectural challenges the artist must have overcome to be able to introduce a massive fault into the foundations of one of London's most iconic buildings, but as an artistic device I think it falls somewhat short of it's alleged purpose.

The artist's intention, according the pamphlet we received at the door, was to describe the divide between wealthy and poor, the affluent West and the blighted post-colonial third world. In the turbine hall of the Tate Modern though, there is nothing to indicate that your experience of the world is at all different depending on which side of the crack you inhabit.

The differences between the first and third worlds are stark and they certainly merit public attention, so why present it in a manner so abstract as to make no attempt to describe the difference? Perhaps it was for the ironic enjoyment of the artist. After all, there I was, a warmly-dressed white middle class Westerner feeling that I didn't quite understand what to do about this chasm, or myself... a sentiment I feel whenever I read about the very distant but very real suffering of people in poorer parts of the world.

Either way, I failed to find a way to photograph the crack that didn't reduce it to an uninteresting documentation of the texture of concrete, so I concentrated on the massive and much more visceral experience just outside the entrance, Louise Bourgeois' Spider. This cold, metal monster speaks much more clearly of the dark side of the human experience.