Robert Smithson Quotes

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

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.

For many artists the universe is expanding;
for some it is contracting.

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

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

There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

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.

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.

Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye.

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

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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

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

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.

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 decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.

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

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

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now ... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.

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

Establish enigmas, not explanations.