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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

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
Idea
Language
Artist
Ends
Ideas
Locked
Find
Physical
World
Somebody
Head

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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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
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson
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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
Robert Smithson
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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
Robert Smithson
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
Robert Smithson
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
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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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Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
Robert Smithson
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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.
Robert Smithson
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Robert Smithson
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Nature is never finished.
Robert Smithson