Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 14.59

The Red Moon, El Anatsui.

Act One hangs just inside the entrance to Turbine Hall, so close it comes as a surprise. Turbine Hall always veers towards the cathedral and this giant glowing red sail that seems to billow in the windless atmosphere adds to the spiritual dimensions of the space. Seeming it catches me unaware, making me worry I will cry. Could dismiss this as overtiredness but to do so would be to dismiss the power of the work itself, which unarguably, in its dimensions and its construction is intensely moving. As I walk around this red sail in the centre of which is a red moon, a blood moon, the reverse of the sail comes into view, constructed in many shades of gold. If the front of the sail speaks of the migration, forced movement, the blood of slaves, the reverse is blood turned to gold, as blood in the sugar trade literally was. The placing of this, the fuck you Mr Tate is bold and necessary. I should have been at a Fat White Family gig last night, I should be hungover this morning, I should be full of some sort of regret. But the storm, my tiredness, cancelled trains, all meant I didn’t go and so I’m there, in the Tate, in full possession of my senses as much as they are, unable only to look up at this dwarfing sail.

In the centre of the hall, Act Two, placed higher, consisting of woven or knitted continental type shapes, suspended from the ceiling and spinning; birds in flight, humans in transit. How beautiful something so ugly can become. The shame of it.

Turn to face Act One, viewing both together; the sail, the continents, the motion, the birds, the gold - it is all so alive, so delicate yet so strong, so huge I can hardly grasp what I’m seeing. This is the point. Turn, Act Three. The Black Wall, a piece so large all viewers are dwarfed. I think I might fall over. Recall Amy Liptrot writing about Stendhal Syndrome in The Instant, not for the first time I wonder if I have it. My daughter, aged three, fell over the first time she saw a Rothko, too much, she said prostrate on the floor, in worship or fear, although worship is fear, and said it later the first time she saw Cy Twombly, too much red, she said from her now customary vantage point, and she is right, sometimes, too much red although mostly the intensity of it is the intensity I find myself craving and today, this black wall rising from the floor or falling from the ceiling is too much but it must also be too much, look where our appetites have got us, it demands we ask. This desire for sweetness so strong we sucked on the blood of slaves just to bring it into being and look it screams, at what you have done.

Some shame should be dispensed with. Shame around our bodies and their appetites. Shame arising from complicated, long lasting systems designed to keep them in check, designed to allow the body to function primarily as capital; useful, productive, reproductive and if you deviate or certainly when we do, then the shame arising from this is only ever and always, corrosive. That’s why the Fat White Family are so good, besides musically, it’s the two fingers they give to shame that allow them to work on the level of punk, of subculture, when culture is in its death throes at best, they’re not just a welcome relief, but a vital way of strangling shame. Watch Lias Saoudi onstage in just his spanx, bringing all our shame out into the open, and it’s less easy to feel it afterwards. We’re as filthy as we are, simple as that. Sometimes I think of myself of a recovering shame addict, trying not to relapse. My flawed friends help. It’s more honest this way, to embrace the complexity of what we are than to pretend otherwise. Sanitise the un-sanitisable and all you get it more repression, more shame, moving in endless pernicious loops of self-loathing.

In a similar way, The Black Wall brings shame into the open. But this shame is shame that should not be erased. This is shame that in the west we tend to not let ourselves live with. The stain of colonisation. The history of our plunder. Easier to turn the other way. Easier to ask for figurative painting. Tolerable art. Easier to not decode this. Easier not to think what harm the sugar on the breakfast table? What harm our petty addictions, our tolerable desires, and who draws the line, who plays God? Who plays along with God?

Turn, see all acts in tandem. It feels like the end of the world as much as it feels like it might be the beginning of the world. Heavy week. Incomprehensible death tolls. Stupid stupid cruelty without reason, nothing tangible the artist can effect, stupid stupid words, doing nothing. I began writing a new fable. Stupid fable, does nothing. Final board ABOUT EL ANATSUI, you are not contributing to the world by replicating what is already there. This to carry away for another dark day.