Mieke Bal on Doris Salcedo

The deep cut in the floor: the destructive act is to be seen as one of her aesthetic strategies, which is a form of (un)building. With this, she addresses and intervenes in architecture as much as sculpture. Salcedo’s aesthetic strategies are outlined by Bal, without being assigned to ‘‘periods’’ of her production, as they often coincide, and reinforce one another. Bal treats them separately, demonstrating the complexity of the aesthetics of an art that seeks to intervene in the world; an art, that is, that seeks to be political because it is aesthetic, and vice versa. There is no tension between art and politics here; in Salcedo’s work, art can only be art if it is political.