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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.

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
Facts
Nature
Parks
Ideal
Condition
Ideals
Conditions
Fact
Artist

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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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As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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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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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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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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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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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
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Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Nature is never finished.
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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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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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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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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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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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