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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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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
Ground
Memories
Reality
Congealed
Past
Graveyards
Graveyard
Pretext
Museums
Parks
More quotes by Robert Smithson
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
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
The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
Robert Smithson
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
Robert Smithson
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
Robert Smithson
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.
Robert Smithson
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
Robert Smithson
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
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Robert Smithson
As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
Robert Smithson
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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
Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
Robert Smithson
