Robert Smithson
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.Collection: Architecture
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.Collection: History
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.Collection: Gardening
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.Collection: History
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.Collection: Nature
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.Collection: Art
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
Nature is never finished.
Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.
A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the futureCollection: Artist
One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.Collection: Erosion
Establish enigmas, not explanations.Collection: Enigma
One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.Collection: Important
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's headCollection: Artist
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancyCollection: Museums
Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.Collection: Loss
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with usCollection: Artist
The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.Collection: Memories
As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.Collection: Artist
Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their controlCollection: Artist
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problemCollection: Mistake
Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.Collection: Eye
The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.Collection: Numbers
Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye.Collection: Eye