Art theory

That John Milton, the blind epicist of the Commonwealth, and Mary Poppins, the airborne governess of Edwardian London, should ever be mentioned in contiguous breath may at first seem a grotesque category error. Yet recent work in comparative para-literary hermeneutics has begun to expose the curious lattice of parallels between these ostensibly divergent personae. Indeed, as Professor Hilary Quillsworth has argued in her much-contested monograph Milton and the Nursery Sublime (Oxford, 1998), the intertextual kinship is so robust that one may reasonably suspect a hitherto unacknowledged genealogy of influence stretching from seventeenth-century epic to twentieth-century children’s literature.

The motif of descent provides the most conspicuous hinge. Milton’s Satan, “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” (Paradise Lost I.45), anticipates Mary Poppins’s umbrella-borne entry upon Cherry Tree Lane. Both are figures of vertical rupture, marking the narrative with what Bakhtin (albeit apocryphally) termed the “aerial grotesque” (Notes on the Vertical, unpublished seminar papers, 1937). Even the mechanics of their descent exhibit symmetry: Satan’s fall is facilitated by divine expulsion, Poppins’s by meteorological opportunity, yet both are punctuated by a curious serenity, as if the laws of gravity themselves were complicit in dramaturgical necessity.

The question of authority by voice deepens the resemblance. Milton’s grandiloquent imperatives, “Awake, arise”, function as ontological commands; Poppins’s laconic decrees, “Spit spot!” achieve an analogous performativity in the realm of the nursery. Dr. Leonard Frobisher has persuasively argued (Transactions of the Society for Applied Philology, 2004) that Poppins’s syntax is, in fact, “Miltonic compression in miniature,” a condensation of the epic imperative into the clipped idiom of Edwardian domesticity. Frobisher’s claim, dismissed by some as “parodic scholarship,” gains traction when one recalls that P. L. Travers was educated at a convent where Paradise Lost was used as a disciplinary text.

Even the iconography of objects betrays startling convergence. Milton’s archangel Michael guards Eden with a flaming sword; Poppins wields an umbrella whose ferrule is crowned with the head of a parrot. Both function as hybrid emblems,part weapon, part sceptre. A little-known article by Marguerite Doncaster in Studies in Sacred Implements (vol. 12, 1974) traces the parrot-headed handle to apotropaic charms of the Levant, suggesting that Travers may have unconsciously reactivated a Miltonic archetype: the guardian object which is simultaneously ornamental and punitive.

Moreover, both Milton and Poppins are fundamentally engaged in the pedagogy of paradox. Eve and Adam, like Jane and Michael Banks, are granted provisional liberty only to be sharply chastened by figures of authority. Edenic liberty ends in exile; a chalk-drawing holiday ends with an abrupt admonition that “enough is as good as a feast.” In both cases, pleasure is permitted only as a prelude to prohibition. As the critic Otto Blenheim observed in his Paradoxologies of the Domestic Epic (Vienna, 1922), “Discipline masquerades as delight, and delight is but the sugar that makes discipline palatable.”

Finally, there is the melancholy of departure. Milton ends with Adam and Eve walking “hand in hand with wandering steps and slow” out of paradise; Poppins concludes her sojourn by slipping away, unannounced, leaving the Banks children bereft. Each figure inaugurates a world, reshapes it through authority, and then absents themselves at the very moment continuity seems most desirable. It is the logic of the deus absconditus, albeit refracted through the lens of children’s literature.

To claim that Mary Poppins is, in essence, a late modern reimagining of Miltonic angelology may be to court scholarly ridicule. Yet the uncanny lattice of resemblance, fall, voice, object, pedagogy, departure, resists easy dismissal. As Quillsworth concludes in her later essay “From Pandæmonium to the Playroom” (The Journal of Impossible Genealogies, 2007), “Between umbrella and epic stretches not a gulf but a bridge, and upon that bridge walks the figure of authority, whether Puritan or governess, always airborne, always departing.”

I love art of almost all kinds, but there is one type that continually leaves me horrified rather than inspired. That is hand-painted cars. While hand-rendered visual art is celebrated in galleries, murals, and domestic decoration, its application to automobiles often provokes, for me at least, discomfort, even disgust. Why is this?

Arthur Danto (1981) famously argued that art cannot be defined solely by perceptual properties; it is the artworld context that enables us to see an object as art. A painting framed and hung in a museum invites contemplation as art, whereas the same image painted on an automobile’s hood tends to be perceived as defacement or eccentricity. The automobile, as Adrian Forty (1986) notes, is not merely a functional object but an emblem of industrial modernity, precision, and consumer aspiration. To overlay such a symbol with hand-painted ornament disrupts its semiotic coherence, creating a clash between the cultural codes of “art” and those of “machine.”

The reaction of revulsion is also tied to material expectations. Works of fine art are typically situated in contexts that protect and preserve them, thus affirming their permanence and dignity. Cars, by contrast, are subject to weathering, abrasion, and obsolescence. As Glenn Adamson (2007) points out in his analysis of craft and materiality, the value of handmade work is often undermined when it cannot sustain itself against the conditions of use. A hand-painted car thus appears not as a celebration of artisanal skill but as an object fated to decay into chipped paint and rust, evoking not transcendence but futility.

From a design perspective, cars are already aesthetically saturated objects. Automotive designers carefully balance line, proportion, and surface to produce effects of speed, luxury, or power (Sparke, 2004). The addition of hand-painted ornamentation frequently creates aesthetic overload, producing what Theodor Adorno (1970) would describe as disjunctive form: elements that do not harmonize but instead collapse into visual cacophony. What reads as exuberant expressivity on a canvas may appear incoherent when stretched across bumpers, doors, and headlights.

Finally, the revulsion may be tied to perceived intention. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) observed that aesthetic judgment is as much a social act as an individual preference; what one classifies as “tasteful” or “vulgar” reveals embedded cultural distinctions. Hand-painted cars often carry connotations of eccentricity, kitsch, or subcultural defiance. Unlike graffiti, which frequently carries political or social critique (Lewisohn, 2008), the hand-painted car is often read as self-indulgent expression. The suspicion that such works lack depth or critical intention contributes to their marginalization as “bad art.

My revulsion toward hand-painted cars is thus not an inherent rejection of artistic practice but a complex reaction shaped by cultural context, material expectations, aesthetic coherence, and social judgment. They challenge the ontological boundaries of art by inserting painterly gesture into a domain of industrial uniformity. If they appear revolting, it is because they expose the fragility of our categories,art versus object, permanence versus decay, taste versus kitsch. In this sense, hand-painted cars may be truer to the disruptive essence of art than more conventional forms: they force us to recognize that our love of art is not unconditional, but mediated by context and culture.

References

• Adamson, G. (2007). Thinking Through Craft. Berg.

• Adorno, T. (1970). Aesthetic Theory. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

• Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.

• Danto, A. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Harvard University Press.

• Forty, A. (1986). Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750. Thames & Hudson.

• Lewisohn, C. (2008). Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution. Tate Publishing.

• Sparke, P. (2004). An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present. Routledge.

by Wilhelmina Anchovie

It is a rare art critic who can look at a sculpture made of condensed milk, nod sagely, and remark, “Yes, of course.” Yet that is increasingly the job description. This year, artists have outdone themselves in their pursuit of media that resist permanence, practicality, and sometimes common sense. The only constant is the confidence with which they insist these substances are the future of fine art.

Anaïs Joubert’s Fermenting Palettes

Parisian painter Anaïs Joubert has abandoned pigment altogether, working instead with oxidized honey layered across paper. The results are sticky, shimmering abstractions that continue to darken and mould in real time. Critics have praised the works for their commentary on “the perishability of beauty.” Gallery staff reportedly wear gloves and carry fly traps during installation.

Marco Ellini and the Magnetized Flock

Milan’s Marco Ellini has created an installation of suspended ball bearings held aloft by electromagnets. The spheres shift and clatter as viewers pass, producing what the artist calls “a choreography of anxious atoms.” The piece is visually elegant but blew several circuit breakers mid-opening, which Ellini cleverly recast as “a meditation on collapse.”

Tasha Rudd: The Bureaucratic Sublime

Londoner Tasha Rudd shreds government documents, pulps them into a slurry, and paints with the resulting paste. Her recent series, HMRC in Monsoon, features brooding washes of grey and ochre derived from obsolete tax forms. Rudd insists it’s about the opacity of institutions; critics suspect it’s also about not paying for art supplies.

Jinwoo Park’s Meteorological Stains

In Seoul, Jinwoo Park has been exhibiting canvases stained only with rainwater collected from disparate neighborhoods. From industrial zones come inky, soot-drenched blotches; from suburban gardens, pale mineral veils. His diptych Exhaust and Incense, contrasting rain near an oil refinery with that from a Buddhist monastery, was described by one visitor as “a weather report for the soul.”

Carla Menotti’s Rotten Still Lifes

Buenos Aires performance artist Carla Menotti produced Ephemeral Orchard, a gallery filled with arrangements of fresh fruit that aren’t replaced daily as they decay. Mould, collapse, and fruit flies are central to the piece. Menotti describes it as “Vanitas in real time.” One collector reportedly bought a week’s worth of rotting pears, only to be politely told there was nothing left to ship.

Elias Quade’s Breath of the Public

Brooklyn-based Elias Quade has made oxidation his muse. He frames polished copper sheets and invites viewers to breathe on them, leaving foggy halos and long-term patinas. The pieces accumulate stains of intimacy, disgust, and garlic bread. Quade describes this as “the audience immortalized in atmosphere.” His dealer calls it “interactive rust.”

The lesson from this year’s eccentricities is simple: art is no longer confined to canvas, clay, or stone. It will corrode, curdle, ferment, and buzz until it finds a medium stranger than the world it reflects. And when the critics finally nod and murmur “Of course,” what they really mean is, “Please let this not stain my jacket.”

It has always seemed to me that the problem with cool is ontological. To ask what is cool? is to place oneself in the same quixotic category as those who ask what is truth? or what is beauty?,worthy questions, but ones destined to collapse under the weight of their own self-consciousness. Cool is the most mercurial of cultural states, not unlike what Roland Barthes once said of myth: it exists to the extent that it is believed in, and it evaporates the moment it is explained.

I was reminded of this years ago, in a basement bar in Kreuzberg, where I had gone ostensibly to interview a DJ, but in truth to avoid the stultifying academic conference I was meant to be attending up the road. The DJ in question,an émigré from São Paulo with an encyclopaedic knowledge of French structuralism,looked me in the eye and declared, “Cool is the refusal to flinch.” He then proceeded to spill beer down his vintage Comme des Garçons shirt and not acknowledge it. And for a brief moment, I believed him.

Cool has always been about refusal. Think of Miles Davis, sunglasses in near-darkness, back turned to the audience as if to say, your gaze cannot touch me. Think of James Dean, smouldering against the backdrop of post-war conformity. Think of David Bowie, who,more than anyone,reminded us that cool could be constructed, demolished, and reassembled with every album sleeve. But refusal is never enough; cool also requires recognition. Without the hungry eyes of others, the refusal falls into obscurity.

The paradox, then, is that cool exists in a state of perpetual tension: between effort and effortlessness, visibility and withdrawal, performance and accident. It is not a fixed quality but a relation, a dance, even a duel. Susan Sontag, in her essay on camp, suggested that seriousness and frivolity can coexist in the same gesture. I would extend this to cool: the moment we decide something is cool, we are half in awe of it and half mocking ourselves for caring.

When politicians reach for cool, the results are often comic. One remembers Harold Wilson puffing his pipe in what was supposed to be a gesture of working-class authenticity, or Tony Blair grinning beside Noel Gallagher as though Oasis had been waiting all along to validate neoliberalism. Angela Merkel never bothered, which may be why she remains oddly untouched by ridicule. Cool, I think, is allergic to overt power; it thrives only on the margins.

Technology has, of course, accelerated the life cycle of cool beyond recognition. Where once the jazz club or the nightclub could incubate style for months, even years, now TikTok reduces every gesture to a fleeting meme. I have seen teenagers declare an item of clothing cool, kill it through ubiquity, and bury it in irony all in the space of a fortnight. In this sense, the internet is not a curator of cool but its embalmer. Baudrillard would no doubt have had a field day.

And yet,despite the acceleration, despite the irony,we still pursue it. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin suggested of aura, cool reminds us of presence, of uniqueness, of being in a particular place at a particular time. To witness cool is to be part of a tiny conspiracy with others: to say, “we saw it, we felt it, we were there.”

I return, finally, to something the Japanese designer Yohiro Tanaka once told me in Tokyo: “Cool is the absence of sweat.” I laughed at the time, but the line has never left me. It speaks to that strange paradox of effortlessness,the countless hours behind every ‘spontaneous’ move, the artifice behind every ‘natural’ performance. Cool is not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity, staged so deftly that even sceptics (and cultural commentators) are seduced.

In the end, cool may be less about style, fashion, or sound than about connection. The neighbour singing Puccini on her balcony during lockdown was cool. The teenager who resurrects an obsolete dance move in defiance of trend cycles is cool. Even the shy glance across a crowded room,shared recognition, fleeting solidarity,is cool.

To call something cool is simply to say: I wish I could be inside that moment with you. And perhaps that is why, even in our endlessly mediated, algorithmic world, we still need it. Because cool, for all its slipperiness, is really just another word for longing. And longing, as Proust knew, is the only state that never goes out of fashion.

A Disquisition on the Infantilisation of Art Or why your child couldn’t have done that…

It has become, in our debased epoch of instantaneity and aesthetic illiteracy, a weary commonplace to hear the ignoble ejaculation, usually proffered between sips of tepid Chardonnay, “My child could have done that,and he is three, and cannot even feed himself.” To this pronouncement,at once smug, banal, and profoundly jejune,I can only reply with the most strenuous execration.

The phrase itself is the reductio ad absurdum of what the ancients termed homo incultus,the unlettered man, devoid of paideia, bereft of the capacity to discern between the puerile scrawl of a toddler and the deliberate, tectonic gesture of the artist whose hand participates in a tradition stretching back to Apelles and Giotto, to Caravaggio and Kandinsky.¹ That one should mistake apparens facilitas,the appearance of simplicity,for genuine simplicity is symptomatic of a civilisation in thrall to surface phenomena, blind to the depths of intentionality, and unwilling to acknowledge that behind every authentic work of modernist or postmodernist experimentation lies a palimpsest of discipline, negation, and historical dialogue.

To declare that “a child could do it” is, in fact, to unwittingly confess one’s own artistic nescience. A child cannot do it. A child cannot inscribe a line freighted with pathos and irony, with historical resonance and ontological inquiry. The child’s mark, however charming, is a-logical,a mere effusion of motor impulses.² The artist’s mark, by contrast, is logos incarnate: at once apophatic and kataphatic,³ speaking through silence as much as through form, a gesture simultaneously toward Being and beyond Being.

Nor is it accidental that the critic of the “my kid” variety nearly always couches his disdain in terms of alimentary incompetence,“he cannot feed himself.” What curious projection! As though the capacity to wield a spoon were somehow homologous with the capacity to negotiate the abyssal dialectics of colour, space, and negation. It is an argumentum ad culinarium, and thus doubly risible.

The barbarians at the gate imagine themselves defenders of common sense; in truth, they are the very enemies of sense itself. They resemble those Athenians whom Socrates rebuked for their incapacity to distinguish sophistry from wisdom. *Ignorantia artis non est argumentum contra artem.*⁴ To disparage what one does not understand is the oldest, cheapest, and most ignominious form of pseudo-criticism.

One ought rather to approach even the most seemingly infantile abstraction with reverence, or at least humility, recalling Aristotle’s admonition that wonder (thaumazein) is the beginning of philosophy.⁵ The great canvases of modernity are not playground scribbles, but metaphysical laboratories; they are sites wherein Being itself is interrogated with a force unavailable to the literal-minded bourgeois and his anecdotal offspring.

So let us consign this wretched cliché,“My child could have done that”,to the dung-heap of philistine platitudes, along with “It doesn’t even look like anything” and “I could have made that.” For in truth, you could not. And your child, tender though he might be, cannot. The work of art remains what it always has been: an impenetrable mystery, an object of numinous dread, a manifestation of the human spirit struggling against the inertia of the merely given.

Notes

1. Cf. Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), wherein even “natural facility” presupposes years of training.

2. See Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (1971), for the crucial distinction between spontaneous gesture and artistic symbolisation.

3. On the apophatic/kataphatic dialectic, cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology (c. 5th century).

4. Loosely adapted from Cicero’s dictum: Ignorantia iuris non excusat,ignorance of the law excuses not.

5. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.982b: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.”

About the Author

Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)

Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,

Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.

The beach has long held an important place in art history. Turner’s vaporous seas, Courbet’s muscular waves, Whistler’s tonalist horizons, and the Impressionists’ promenades (Boudin at Trouville, Monet at Sainte-Adresse) made the littoral not merely a theme but a laboratory for modern vision. Today the shoreline is no longer only depicted; it is mobilized as studio, site, and substance. Out of this shift has emerged a new tendency,call it Abstract Sandcastling,in which artists work directly with tidal time, granular matter, and architectural logic to produce sculptures that are at once diagram, monument, and performance.

From motif to medium

If nineteenth-century beach painting transformed light into subject, late twentieth-century practices refigured site itself as medium. Robert Smithson’s entropic aesthetics and “non-sites,” Arte Povera’s embrace of humble materials, and the dematerialization of the art object traced by Lucy Lippard prepared the ground for works that could be both present and inherently provisional. Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” provided a theoretical armature for such practices, situating sculpture amid the coordinates of landscape and architecture rather than as a lone object on a plinth. The seashore,a threshold of land and water, law and leisure, geology and weather,now reads like the expanded field’s most literal grid.

Sand, once the pictorial ground beneath sunbathers in Boudin, becomes the sculptural ground and the sculpting grain. This move is not only genealogically plausible; it is materially cogent. Sand’s angle of repose, capillary moisture, and thixotropic quirks impose a grammar of stacking, undercutting, and slicing,constraints that are less a limitation than a syntax for form.

A movement coalesces

The term Abstract Sandcastling names a set of converging practices rather than an official manifesto. On one flank are architectural sand works: compositions of planes, voids, cantilevers, and stepped masses that cite Brutalism and Metabolism while exploiting sand’s uncanny ability to hold a sharp edge for a brief, ecstatic interval. Artists such as Calvin Seibert have become touchstones here, translating the rhetoric of béton brut into littoral ephemera. On another flank are non-figurative and geometric constructions,macro-minimalist stacks, lattices, torqued prisms, and eroded grids,kin to the logic of Sol LeWitt’s sentences and the seriality of Eva Hesse, yet resolutely site-driven. Parallel lineages include the large-scale raked geometries of Jim Denevan and Andres Amador, which treat the foreshore as a drawing surface whose erasure is part of the work’s completion.

What binds these approaches is not a shared iconography but a common ontology: works conceived to be undone. The tide is not enemy but collaborator, an agent of editing and return. Here the Tibetan sand mandala is a crucial precedent,an image made for dispersal,though the Abstract Sandcastling intensifies the interplay between designed form and ambient force.

Theory at the waterline

Three theoretical lenses clarify the stakes.

1. The expanded field and the “littoral”

In Krauss’s terms, the beach is simultaneously landscape (horizontal extension) and architecture (constructed verticals), a zone where sculpture becomes relational to ground conditions rather than autonomous. Miwon Kwon’s account of site-specificity helps too: the site is not a neutral container but a constellation of social and environmental relations. The public beach,commons, tourist stage, climate front,renders those relations explicit.

2. Phenomenology and making

Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space meet Tim Ingold’s notion of making as correspondence with materials. Sandcastle artists “think with the hands,” discovering forms in dialogue with moisture, grain size, wind. The result is a choreography of gestures: compact, slice, bevel, score. The work is as much action as object,a happening that leaves a temporary monument.

3. Entropy and the aesthetics of the Anthropocene

Smithson’s entropy is not mere decay but a principle of meaning. On a warming planet, the tide’s erasure reads newly: not tragic, not simply cyclical, but diagnostic. Abstract Sandcastling stages an aesthetics of accountability,beauty inseparable from loss, form inseparable from unforming. Wabi-sabi’s embrace of impermanence resonates here, reframed as coastal ethics rather than interior decor.

Architecture without concrete

One of the movement’s most generative tensions is its architectural imaginary without the material legacy of architecture’s carbon debt. Sand is geology at hand; water is the only binder. Forms recall the concision of Tadao Ando or the aggregates of Le Corbusier not to quote them but to test architecture’s grammar under radically temporary conditions. Voids are tuned like wind instruments; stairs become rhythms rather than circulation; towers are propositions, not shelters. The beach is a sandbox for urbanism’s dreams, allowed to fail safely and beautifully before the sea.

This also clarifies why the abstract is so potent here. Figuration promises narrative; abstraction promises systems,modular units, ratios, tessellations,which can be recombined or dissolved. The tide edits the system, offering a critique more honest than any jury.

Time, documentation, and the problem of collection

As with performance and land art, documentation is not an afterthought. Photographs, time-lapse films, drone topographies, and process scores operate as “afterlives,” sometimes as co-equal works. The precedent ranges from Smithson’s essay-films to Tino Sehgal’s paradox of non-documentation; Abstract Sandcastle artists sit between these poles, often issuing scores (“construct stepped volumes to the height of the breaker line; bevel until shadow merges with texture”) that invite re-performance elsewhere. Collections acquire the score, the right to execute, and a corpus of images, while institutions negotiate conservation through reiteration rather than preservation,closer to music than to masonry.

Public, playful, critical

Because the beach is a commons, the movement is necessarily porous. Children’s castles and expert works share the same horizon; beachgoers drift through the studio; critique arrives as an incoming swell. This porosity is not a dilution of art-world seriousness but a recalibration of publics in Jacques Rancière’s sense of the “distribution of the sensible.” The passerby becomes witness and sometimes collaborator; the demarcation between artwork and leisure narrows, echoing Fluxus and Kaprow’s Happenings while avoiding their interiority.

The best works exploit this condition by using legibility and illegibility in tandem: a fortress-plan that reads from the promenade dissolves up close into subtle chamfers; a pure abstract stack becomes, at child’s-eye level, a city of thresholds. The work must carry at three scales: from the pier (image), at the perimeter (architecture), in the hand (craft).

Toward a vocabulary

A succinct lexicon has emerged:

• Bevel: the elemental gesture; makes shadow a material.

• Stack: unitized massing that tests the angle of repose.

• Void: aperture cut to align with wind or horizon; architecture without interior.

• Score: procedural text enabling re-performance.

• Ebb-proofing: designing for dignified collapse; chamfers that soften failure.

Such terms matter because they allow criticism to speak materially, not metaphorically, about works that are both fragile and exacting.

Why now?

Abstract Sandcastles synthesize several urgencies:

• Ecological: they model low-carbon monumentality and honour nonhuman agency.

• Economic: they resist the saturation of object-commodities without renouncing craft or form.

• Technological: drones, phones, and social media give ephemeral works durable publics without requiring durable objects.

• Pedagogical: they teach composition, structure, and time,architecture and sculpture at one-to-one scale with nearly zero waste.

If Impressionism made the beach modern by turning it into a theatre of seeing, Abstract Sandcastling makes it contemporary by turning it into a theatre of making and unmaking.

Conclusion: the museum of the littoral

To encounter an Abstract Sandcastle at low tide is to stand before a proposal: that art might be rigorous without being permanent, architectural without building, public without enclosure. The next tide is the closing date; the horizon is the frame. When the water lifts away the last bevel, the work’s claim is not diminished but sealed. The beach, once merely pictured, now pictures itself,through the hands of artists who let form breathe with the sea.

Selected references

• Eugène Boudin’s beach scenes at Trouville; Claude Monet, La plage à Trouville (1870).

• J.M.W. Turner’s seascapes; James McNeill Whistler’s coastal nocturnes; Gustave Courbet’s La Vague.

• Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979).

• Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object… (1973).

• Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966); Spiral Jetty (1970).

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958).

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945).

• Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002).

• Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013).

• Wabi-sabi and Tibetan sand mandala practices as precedents in intentional ephemerality.

• Contemporary beach practitioners and influences: Calvin Seibert (architectonic sand forms), Jim Denevan and Andres Amador (large-scale sand drawings).