Robert Smithson Quotes

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.

~ Robert Smithson

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

~ Robert Smithson

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

~ Robert Smithson

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.

~ Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

~ Robert Smithson

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

~ Robert Smithson