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"Art is not eternal."
--Ken Kesey
"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return."
--The Bible
My vision of a yet unknown art would employ the medium of sand to
produce shapes, contours, structures, and figures. Sand is understood
to be a creative medium by every child who spends a day at the beach,
and sandcastle contests are held in many shore communities throughout
the world every year. But no one so far has elevated sand-scaping
to the status of an art. The closest thing we have is the sand painting
of Native Americans and Australian aboriginal peoples, but this
is really a form of painting. I am thinking of something that moves
towards three-dimensional, toward sculpture, architecture, and landscape
design. I also imagine it as an art form that could enlist the aid
of newer media (photography, film, the internet) to trace the whole
process of the work from its initial stages to its final dissolution.
One could, for instance, film the making of the work with web-cameras,
uploading it in real time to the internet, and archiving it for
future retrieval. Such a work would combine old and new media, figurative
and abstract composition, and performance, process, or procedural
art with multi-media documentation and interactivity.
An important feature specific to this medium is the enhancement of temporality and the rapid appearance and disintegration of forms. The documentation of the "decay" of the work, its quick dissolution back into formlessness would be a crucial element of the presentation. Architectural forms in sand tend to "age" very rapidly with wind erosion so that some early parts of the work will already be in a state of dissolution before the entire work is completed. There is also, of course, the question of completion, which tends to be quite arbitrary in the case of sandscaping. This "de-creation" of the work becomes even more dramatic when the structure is erected on a tidal flat. The entire life-cycle of the work, from its rawest first beginnings to its final annihilation, whether gradual or catastrophic, is accessible to observation with this as yet unknown art form in a way that is not possible in any other medium.
I attach a sample of a very recent pioneering effort in this medium by the author of this piece. This is not meant to be an example of the "as yet unknown art", but perhaps a beacon that might light our imaginations forward to possible futures.
W. J. T. Mitchell
Chicago, Sept. 3, 2002
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