Robert Smithson

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

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.

Nature is never finished.

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

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

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

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

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

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

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

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

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.

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.

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.

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

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

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

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.