A biography for Robert Smithsonhasn’t been written yet.
“History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.”
“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.”
“An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.”
“Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.”
“Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.”
“Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.”
“Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.”
“A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”
“The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.”
“Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.”
“Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.”
“The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.”
“Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.”
“Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.”
“Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.”