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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.

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
Machines
Gradual
Loss
Solar
Results
Recording
Energy
Photographs
Light
Machine
Camera
Cameras
Photograph
Diminution

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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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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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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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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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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
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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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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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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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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 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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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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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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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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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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Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future
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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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Nature is never finished.
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