Coherence

The Tate Modern, conceptual art, politics, migration, Tania Bruguera, Cuban... Right up my street, I thought.

I went and laid myself open to whatever I might find. A shiny black floor. And a matt grey floor, heat sensitive, with schoolchildren using their bodies to make short-lived patterns on it and teenagers making their footprints appear then taking pictures of them to defeat the transitoriness. If an adult lay still on the floor for long enough then moved away, the floor showed the pattern in their belt and the seams in their underwear. Several parents were playing with their babies and trying to get their toddlers interested in making shapes. 

Well, OK, a kind of playground, and something to do with disappearing footprints, but a statement about migration? A notice on the wall informed me that if enough people get together and warm up the floor (then, presumably, coordinate themselves fast enough to get off it again) the image of a migrant - Yusef - will appear. So... if we take collective action we can make migrants visible?

I decided to try harder and went into the small room containing 'an organic compound that makes you cry'. To get in, I had to have a number stamped on my hand. It's the ever-changing title of this project/artwork: the number of people who migrated from one country to another last year plus the number of migrant deaths recorded between the start of the project and today. It was illegible on my skin. Was I supposed to find out the number or to understand that the number doesn't matter? Or both?

The small room, a notice says, is intended to combat a 'sense of apathy' and through group exposure to the tearing agent, to make us experience 'forced empathy' and 'a shared emotional response'. What I experienced from the intense eucalyptus smell was eye irritation, a welcome clearing of sinuses and increasing annoyance. This is crocodile empathy. I walked away.
 
It's banal. As it happens, I know there are painful reasons for migration worth crying about - fear, torture, bravery, loss - and there are also positive reasons. This installation told us, showed us, nothing of the variety of human experience of migration but tried to elicit an ersatz response to a word that had been abstracted into nothing.

Really disappointing.

If you've seen it, and especially if you disagree with me, please share your thoughts.



And my best pictures of the day didn't get taken because I hurtled past them in the train: luminosity on October fields, making lost straw in new-harrowed lines glint in the sun; glowing russet, yellow/lime and ageing green leaves on the trees on the Chiltern Hills; stacked sleepers in shades of faded creosote glowing like deep fire.