'Too close' she hissed, appearing out of nowhere. It was rather impressive, upon reflection, for her to have found a secluded somewhere to emerge from; the Tate Modern is white and angular with halls opening upon halls upon halls. You could be fooled into seeing all the different flat planes and empty spaces as sedimentary, but all that gives you is the false promise of a burrowing retreat. There isn't anywhere to hide here, and the public view is all encompassing. Except it seems, for those select few who can duck and weave amongst the crowds with verbal talon readied to pluck up the wayward visitor who dares to encroach upon sacred ground.
I had said, in that sort of hasty expletive way that preceded thought and proceeded from a desire to be cool in front of my cousins, that galleries feel rather like liminal spaces. When the security guard told me to back off from Betye Saar's Mti all I could say was '...'. Liminality requires borders. You can't exist in between nothing. There's nothing special about that. Instead, testy and difficult a place as it is to find, you must sequester away little zones of un/inhabitability through which you can express liminality, and the museum, to my mind, is one such place. Its well-defined borders - its apparent inescapability - create those places we can't reach.
A shrill shriek hails my trespass. I trip the wire, attempt to cross the thin rope that separates myself and the shrine and expect my summary expulsion from the Tate Modern and all its subsequent entities. Mti exists in tandem with the US Black Arts movement - it is a shrine that deifies and incorporates the Black experience, swallowing up racist depictions and cultural iconographies in one. It is fascinating, and now, in the Modern's unavoidable walls, it is enclosed within the borders of liminality. Unreachable, untouchable. Both it and I find ourselves unable to intrude upon each other. You will be reverent, it seems to say. You will see that I am in a place you cannot reach. This museum rope ensures it. Divinity via bureacracy: enforced by the museum itself. The topographies of the liminal have been sketched in the spaces that can't be reached, and I am the observer, watching from a space that similarly, exists from in-between a border.
Pictures
