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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

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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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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A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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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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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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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