Robert Smithson Quotes

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

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Nature is never finished.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

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

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

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

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.

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

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.