Robert Smithson Quotes - Page 2

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us

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

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

As long as cameras are around no artist will be free of bewilderment.

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

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

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.

An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.

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

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

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.