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

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
Nought
Abstraction
Zero
Nobody
Everybody
Artist

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.
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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.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Nature is never finished.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson
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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
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
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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
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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
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson