Quotes from Robert Smithson

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

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 .

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

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

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.

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

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

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

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

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

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

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.

Establish enigmas, not explanations.

The word 'color' means at its origin to 'cover' or 'hide.' Matter eats up light and 'covers' it with a confusion of color.

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

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox.

It's like the end of the day where you feel nothing has been achieved and you're in a hurry to get the day over with so you can start the next one. You tell yourself you're going to do lots of positive things. But the next day is just like the one before. Sometimes it goes on for weeks.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

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

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

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.