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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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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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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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Nature is never finished.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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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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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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 are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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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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