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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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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
Ends
Result
Hold
Control
Results
Apparatus
Imagine
Supporting
Fact
Cultural
Artist
Prison
Facts
Artists

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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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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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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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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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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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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Nature is never finished.
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