Robert Smithson Quotes

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Robert Smithson

Profession : Artist

Birth : January 2, 1938

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

Robert Smithson

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

Robert Smithson

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

Robert Smithson

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

Robert Smithson

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Robert Smithson

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Robert Smithson

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Robert Smithson

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.

Robert Smithson

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

Robert Smithson

Nature is never finished.

Robert Smithson

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.

Robert Smithson

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Robert Smithson

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

Robert Smithson

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

Robert Smithson

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.

Robert Smithson

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.

Robert Smithson

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.

Robert Smithson

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Robert Smithson