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.
About Robert Smithson
Robert Smithsonwas an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections.
More quotes from Robert Smithson
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
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.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Art’s development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Nature is never finished.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
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.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
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.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody’s own vacancy.
American sculptor and conceptual artist
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.
American sculptor and conceptual artist