Robert Smithson Quotes

45 quotes in 463 categories

• Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
• One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas…
• Nature is never finished.
• Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
• Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
• Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
• The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
• A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
• Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
• Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
• From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
• 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.
• Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
• Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
• The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
• Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
• Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
• When a finished work of 20thcentury sculpture is placed in an 18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing…

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