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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

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
Amnesia
Memory
Memories
May
Better

More quotes by 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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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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
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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