Robert Smithson Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.

Robert Smithson
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Robert Smithson
Writing should generate ideas into matter, and not the other way around.

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

Robert Smithson
As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.

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

Robert Smithson
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.

Robert Smithson
There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

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

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

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

Robert Smithson
Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Robert Smithson
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Robert Smithson
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.

Robert Smithson
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.

Robert Smithson
The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

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

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

Robert Smithson
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called 'pictures' and 'statues. Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows (frames) that open up into a variety of blanks. Stale images cancel one's perception and deviate one's motivation. Blind and senseless, one continues wandering around the remains of Europe, only to end in that massive deception 'the art history of the recent past'

Robert Smithson
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

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

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

Robert Smithson