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

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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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 does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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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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A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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 are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Nature is never finished.
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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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