Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his use of photography in relation to sculpture and land art. Read full biography of Robert Smithson →
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
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.
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his use of photography in relation to sculpture and land art.