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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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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
Jersey
York
City
Bordered
Cities
Skyline
Artist
Skylines
Quarry
Suburbs
Cliffs

More quotes by 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.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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 are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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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 museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Nature is never finished.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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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