Every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time.
Robert Smithson, 1968[1]
“On Margate Sands”, T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem The Waste Land, “I can connect nothing with nothing”. He had come to the town in 1921 to recuperate from what his wife called “rather a serious breakdown” and stayed at the Albermarle Hotel in Cliftonville. He was not the first to arrive here seeking a cure, of course: Margate was early in promoting seawater, applied either internally or externally, as the remedy for a wide variety of ills; when the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital opened in 1796 it was said to be the first centre for orthopaedic treatment in Britain, perhaps the world. “There is no disease without antidote”, wrote John Anderson, an early director of the Hospital. “Sea-bathing comprehends in it the powers and qualities of fluidity, gravity, pressure, attraction, repulsion, stimulation, friction, attrition and velocity”.[2] And there was nowhere better to practice it than Margate: it was the town’s beach, “a fine, level, sandy shore, defended from the furious blasts of Boreas and the foaming waves of Neptune, by the pier, promontories and rocks” as a writer in 1801 described it,[3] that attracted visitors, travelling first by stagecoach and then by paddle-steamer from London, in an early manifestation of mass tourism.
Sand, it seems, releases something in human beings. Any five-year-old deposited on a beach and given a bucket and spade becomes an artist. Otherwise respectable citizens have only to remove their shoes and feel it between their toes before they tear off the rest of their clothes and run screaming into the frigid waves. In this liminal space – revealed and then covered again by the seas that lap at our tidal islands – different rules apply: temporarily released from the task of keeping watch on our screens we are free to appreciate the temperature, texture, odours and wind-speed of the present. But what does sand mean to artist Katie Paterson as a medium? In direct contrast to Eliot’s depiction of the alienation and fragmentation of modernity, her work seeks to connect everything to everything: more specifically, to build a bridge between the brief flicker of a human life and the immeasurably vast and slow chronologies of geology and space. Whether she is planting a forest outside Oslo to provide paper for a library – the contents of which will only be revealed a century from now; giving gallery goers a phone number to ring so they can listen to the sound of a glacier dripping as it retreats in the face of global warming; or broadcasting a minute of ancient darkness that dates from 13 billion years ago on cable TV[4], her raw material is time, and nothing embodies the effects of time like sand.
The earth’s crust is subject to continual erosion by rain, wind, heat, cold, rivers and streams as well as the effect of tectonic processes like earthquakes and volcanoes. Over many thousands of years, mountains and hills are broken into fragments and washed down watercourses to the sea. There, quartz, mica and silica mix with the skeletons of crustaceans, chalk battered from cliffs by the waves, sea shells and other organic sediments which, when bound by the right proportion of seawater, become the perfect building material beneath your feet, while also signifying the disintegration of all things. The artist Robert Smithson used sand to illustrate what he called the irreversibility of eternity. “Picture in your mind’s eye (a) sandbox divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other” he wrote. “We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey – after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be the restoration of the original division, but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy”.[5] It should be no surprise that one of Paterson’s so-far unrealised Ideas series is for “A beach made with sand from hourglasses”.[6]
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair”, reads the inscription on the statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem of the same name; but the sculpture itself, the poet tells us, is “half-sunk” in the sand, and of the empire of the King of Kings “nothing beside remains”. On the beach, we are all Ozymandias; life itself is a brief interlude between two tides. Lift a handful of sand, let it slip between your fingers and contemplate the eons that have passed, the civilisations that have risen and crumbled away before time milled it to this fineness. It drifts and obscures, burying crops, grazing land, cities and entire civilisations; yet sometimes it shifts to reveal what has been lost. On Margate beach, at low tide, one evening in late September, I notice a solitary man following the course of a stream of seawater down to the waves, sweeping it with a metal-detector. He has, it turns out, been studying the behaviour of sand at Margate for decades, relying as much on his ability to read its movements as on his electronic device: over the years he has found Georgian silver, numerous rings, Roman coins and a fat gold chain worth hundreds of pounds.
These treasures reveal something of the history and character of the site of their discovery. In neighbouring Walpole Bay, for instance, the gold dropped on the beach is 18 carat; while in in Margate itself it is only 9 carat, demonstrating the social stratification among seaside resorts that began centuries before Dreamland opened, or Mods and Rockers jousted on the beach. “Belgrave Square retires to Brighton” a writer in Punch explained in 1842, “while the Shambles of Whitechapel seek the shingles of Margate”. By the early 20th century, Eliot merely had to use the phrase “Margate Sands” to evoke a mental image of holidaymaking his readers may have considered a trifle vulgar. Yet the town was not short of aristocratic recommendations: after recovering from an operation at the resort in 1906, the Marquess of Salisbury was moved to give “another testimonial to Doctor Margate. The air of Margate is the finest in England”.
As well as air, the town had sand, and sand, at least in part, is mountains ground in the jaws of time. Katie Paterson asks us to turn back the geological clock and resurrect giants from the end product of their erosion. The summits we fashion will include some of the greatest engines of tectonic change on the planet: the volcanoes Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta, Mount Fuji and still-active Stromboli, as well as the mysterious inland island of Uluru, in central Australia, formed of the sand run-off from long-vanished escarpments. Venerated as well as feared, worshipped since mankind’s beginnings, these monuments too will be worn down and scattered, dispersed in the desert or on the shore – if, that is, they do not awaken first in large-scale eruptions, shattering themselves in the process.
On Margate Sands, Paterson casts us as magicians, able to set eternity running in reverse: yet even here our efforts are at the mercy of forces larger than ourselves. We know that in a matter of hours our work will vanish – the moon’s gravity will draw in the ocean and our creations will meet the fluidity, gravity, pressure, attraction, repulsion, stimulation, friction, attrition and velocity John Anderson has told us seawater possesses.
Perhaps connecting to the immutable and vast processes to which we are all subject is a way of reconciling ourselves to them. In the collaborative creative act, as we construct mountain ranges the like of which the world has never seen, for a few moments at least we step outside time.
