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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

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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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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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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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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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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
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