Destroying Tate Modern

When I looked out our living-room window around noon today, I thought this cloud was a bit strange, considering the otherwise blue sky, and took this photo to show Bob later on.

At the time, I had no idea that the unusual cloud was in fact part of the smoke from a fire that had engulfed an abandoned east London warehouse. While no one was injured in the fire, which has initially been ruled accidental, the smoke lingered over London and it took firefighters more than four hours to control the blaze. In another seeming act of destruction, Tate Modern is sporting a large crack in its concrete floor:

Predictably, this isn't a structural flaw that will see Tate Modern going the way of Clissold Leisure Centre; it's art--specifically, Shibboleth runs the entire length of the Turbine Hall, branching off and changing width and depth, with pieces of chain-link fence embedded in its sides. We recently saw an exhibit by the same artist that was meant to complement the Tate Modern installation, and I think it's a shame that the pieces we saw last month aren't on display with Shibboleth. The White Cube show was disturbing in a visceral but almost innocuous way, and intriguing for that very reason--very much like our experience today.

Tate Modern is being rather coy about how the installation was made, and during its construction, the normally exposed Turbine Hall was completely concealed from public view. Doris Salcedo has said that the installation took a year to complete, with every aspect of it being intentional, rather than random, and that parts were shipped to the location for the five weeks it took for Shibboleth to be installed. All Tate Modern will officially say is that the "structural integrity of the building" has not been permanently damaged, and that the Turbine Hall will return to its normal appearance in April. If you're still curious about specifics, The Guardian took some experts to Tate Modern to try to figure out how the crack got there. After we joined everyone in looking down at the floor of a space where we would usually look all around, we headed to the upper exhibition halls for two new shows. The World as a Stage was pretty underwhelming, although I did like Mario Ybarra Jr's Sweeney Tate (modelled on the former Los Angeles barbershop where Ybarra runs an art gallery) and was sorry to find out that I had missed the haircutting competition that had been held in the space earlier this month. The next exhibition

showcased Louise Bourgeois's textured (in the metaphorical and concrete senses) meditations on memory, home, family, gender, and sexuality. Still producing work in her nineties, Bourgeois has led a fascinating life in Paris and New York, and is perhaps best known for her enormous Maman sculptures, like this one placed between Tate Modern and St Paul's for the duration of the exhibition:

Although sufficiently impressive from above, the real power of Maman comes from below: