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

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
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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Nature is never finished.
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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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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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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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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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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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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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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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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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