Robert Smithson quotes

Robert Smithson was an American sculptor and land artist, best known for his groundbreaking work with earthworks. His most famous piece, the Spiral Jetty, redefined the relationship between art, nature, and landscape. He explored themes of entropy, the environment, and the passage of time in art. Here are 37 of his quotes:

Nature is never finished. (Robert Smithson)
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness. View quote
Robert Smithson
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. View quote
Robert Smithson
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline. View quote
Robert Smithson
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy. View quote
Robert Smithson
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. View quote
Robert Smithson
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. 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. View quote
Robert Smithson
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called 'pictures' and 'statues." Anachronisms hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows (frames) that open up into a variety of blanks. Stale images cancel one's perception and deviate one's motivation. Blind and senseless, one continues wandering around the remains of Europe, only to end in that massive deception 'the art history of the recent past' View quote
Robert Smithson
Writing should generate ideas into matter, and not the other way around. View quote
Robert Smithson
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. View quote
Robert Smithson
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. (Robert Smithson)
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum. View quote
Robert Smithson
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. View quote
Robert Smithson
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. View quote
Robert Smithson
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. View quote
Robert Smithson
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence. View quote
Robert Smithson
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. View quote
Robert Smithson
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. View quote
Robert Smithson
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. View quote
Robert Smithson
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality. View quote
Robert Smithson
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought. (Robert Smithson)
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. View quote
Robert Smithson
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. View quote
Robert Smithson
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information. View quote
Robert Smithson
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye. View quote
Robert Smithson