Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper offers a critical exploration of Shibboleth, a 548-foot-long crack sculpted at Doris Salcedo’s workshop in Bogotá and exhibited at London’s Tate Modern in 2007. The first part of the presentation analyzes how Salcedo articulates a critique of modernity by aesthetically hinting at its dark side, which the artist associates with the pervasiveness of exclusion, racism, and xenophobia in contemporary Western societies. By revisiting Bauman (1997), I suggest that, since those traits are in fact constitutive of the modern State, Shibboleth can be interpreted as a critique of the modern project itself. The second part explores Salcedo’s vindication of Rilke’s modest and yet powerful definition of works of art as nothing more, nor less, than “strangely silent and patient things that stand around in all their otherness” (On Completing the Circle 37). The paper concludes with a reflection about the way in which Salcedo approaches artistic creation as an ever-unfinished attempt to trace the scars of history in contemporary societies.