About

The beach State is an inter-mission, holds out intermediate between two different modes of totality, namely, uninterrupted flow (the ocean) and perpetual stasis (the continent). The interaction that takes place between them, water and rock, fluidity and stability, fails to fix in motion a perfectly ordered and clear outcome.

Instead, the coming together of these opposites arouses something more accidental, which priorities neither one nor the other, neither pure action nor complete paralysis. The erosion of the continental shelf by the activity of the waves produces a state (State) of things – a beach covered and recovered by sand – that never quite settles because it is always unsettled by itself: by the repetition of its own violent genesis.

A beach State is the aperture formed by the difference of flow and fixity constantly overcoming each other. That is, stasis, to "mean" anything at all, implies movement, but to have had "a meaning" such as movement, there must first come about some interruption, somewhere. Both are defined imperfectly by their opposite.

In this paradoxical interregnum of the intermediate beach, a proper stasis is failed because it has to come between desires and pure motion likewise because it has to turn, occasionally, to look at itself. Need and knowledge, flow and stasis, the ocean and the continent, never quite meet, are always disrupted, made impossible, by a pre-synthetic deferral.

A beach State is a conditionality, a fault line, an intermediary zone of un-certainty going both ways, where everything built, Stated is done so on the sand of a finite region of an infinitely possible recovery. Uncertainty (no stability at all) does not describe the situation as it is. There are many certainties, almost always too many, as they are washed out again – their very excess being the water that does this, replacing them with newer ones yet, descended from the latest irreconcilable confrontation between what is always unattached and what is always still.

The beach State is the resultant in-between of an irresolvable, unclosable difference.