Robert Smithson Quotes
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Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.
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There is something abominable about cameras, because they possess the power to invent many worlds. As an artist who has been lost in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction for many years, I do not know which world to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven to the point of frenzy by photography.
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Establish enigmas, not explanations.
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For many artists the universe is expanding; for some it is contracting.
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The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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Nature is never finished.
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Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
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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.
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A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.
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Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification
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Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising
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One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.
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One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.
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A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
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Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
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Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.
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The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.
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Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of stills through my Instamatic into my eye.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
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History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.
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The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
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