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

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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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 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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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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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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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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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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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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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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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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