Shibboleth at the Tate ModernLike most weekday Londoners, neither Rich nor I has much interest in a weekend commute. However, free tickets to the MPH Show, which would otherwise cost £33, lured us onto the trains and tube for a busy day in the city.The Show was good. It was an hour and a half live edition of Top Gear, more or less, punctuated at regular intervals by stunt driving, explosions and silly games. Ourside of the Show, the static cars were less interesting, so after an hour or so of walking around, jumping into and out of the dinkiest Italian motors, we took the Tube back into town to have a look at Shibboleth.It’s a 167-metre crack in the floor.Now you wouldn’t imagine that could be particularly impressive; you can see cracks that long all over the motorway. But this is different. For starters, it’s been dug - deliberately - into the floor of a gallery. The usually solid floor of the old power station’s turbine hall has been torn from end to end by a fissure that begins as a tiny hairline crack and widens and grows as it crawls down the lazy broad slope, splintering off here and there and pulling sharp jagged corners.At its widest point you can slip a hand or a foot down the hole, but you can’t see the bottom. Some clever sculpting of its internal walls means you’ll never know how deep it goes, and that seems to disconcert some visitors at first, as they stand back a couple of feet and gingerly lean towards it. A couple of minutes later, they’re poking in their feet like the rest of us.Whether it achieves its aim of talking about racism I couldn’t say, but it’s bizarrely impressive. Perhaps that’s principally because it is a technical desecration of an important London building, but for me it’s also because I can’t quite get my head around the work that must have gone into cutting such a long hole and then so effectively obscuring the bottom.It’s far more impressive than Louise Bourgeois’ fearsome spider standing out front, which by comparison looks positively pedestrian.Go see it now before someone trips on it and breaks an ankle and the whole thing has to be concreted in.Louise Bourgeois’ spider at the Tate ModernTechnorati Tags:london, shibboleth, tate, tate modern, louise bourgeois

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