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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

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
Occurrence
Procedure
Procedures
Isolated
Developing
Language
Ever

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
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Nature is never finished.
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
Robert Smithson
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Robert Smithson
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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
Robert Smithson
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson