Robert Smithson Quotes

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Robert Smithson

Profession : Artist

Birth : January 2, 1938

Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.

Robert Smithson

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.

Robert Smithson

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

Robert Smithson

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.

Robert Smithson

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

Robert Smithson

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

Robert Smithson

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

Robert Smithson

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

Robert Smithson

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Robert Smithson

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

Robert Smithson

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.

Robert Smithson

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

Robert Smithson