Robert Smithson

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own.…

— Robert Smithson

“It’s like the end of the day where you feel nothing has been achieved and you’re in a hurry to get the…

— Robert Smithson

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

— Robert Smithson

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the…

— Robert Smithson

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy

— Robert Smithson

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

— Robert Smithson

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

— Robert Smithson

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

— Robert Smithson

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

— Robert Smithson

“Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is…

— Robert Smithson

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

— Robert Smithson

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

— Robert Smithson

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

— Robert Smithson

The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

— Robert Smithson

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation…

— Robert Smithson

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head

— Robert Smithson

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

— Robert Smithson

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

— Robert Smithson

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem

— Robert Smithson

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set…

— Robert Smithson

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

— Robert Smithson

One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs…

— Robert Smithson

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

— Robert Smithson

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

— Robert Smithson

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

— Robert Smithson