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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Robert Smithson

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Robert Smithson
Age: 35 †
Born: 1938
Born: January 2
Died: 1973
Died: July 20
Art Theorist
Artist
Conceptual Artist
Draftsperson
Drawer
Geologist
Land Artist
Painter
Photographer
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Passaic
New Jersey
Robert I. Smithson
Confined
Architecture
Artists
Artist
Art
Output

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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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
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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.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Nature is never finished.
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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