About Robert Smithson: Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his use of photography in relation to sculpture and land art.
An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.
Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.
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.
Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.
Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.
History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.
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.
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.
Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
