Artworks2010The Beach

Rubbing of a pavement section on paper

A reference to the Situationist slogan: “Beneath the streets, a beach!” which was both a poetic call to anarchy but also a literal reference to the sand beneath the pavements where the French activists rioted, The Beach sees the street transformed into a site of revolution and utopia, protest and pleasure, while the graininess of the rubbing also indicates the texture and appearance of actual sand. But if The Beach is a punk politization of the pavement on the one hand, on the other, it reduces this potent symbol of change to the tourist activity of frottage – brass rubbings of saints’ graves found in cathedrals made with crayon – in which The Beach also appears as a crude and ultimately impotent reproduction of a dusty relic.