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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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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
Forget
Future
Monuments
Artist
Causing
Past
Monument
Seems
Cause
Remember
Seem
Like
Instead
Causes

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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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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 museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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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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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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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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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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