Robert Smithson

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

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

“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.”

“Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.”

“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.”

“Nature is never finished.”

“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.”

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

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

“Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.”

“Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.”

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

“Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.”

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