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

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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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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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 is never finished.
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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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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 themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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