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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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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
Surface
Outside
Objects
Disengaged
Becomes
Portable
Loses
Gallery
Art
Placed
Work
Charge
World
Object

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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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Nature is never finished.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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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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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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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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