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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
Better
Amnesia
Memory
Memories
May

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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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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.
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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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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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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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