Robert Smithson

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

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

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

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

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

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

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

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

Nature is never finished.

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

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

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.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head.

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.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.