7 Quotes & Sayings By Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson was an American artist, writer, and inventor. He is known for his monumental earthworks and sculptures in the United States and abroad and his pioneering work in the fields of ecology and environmental art. He is best known for his innovative use of found objects in the construction of large-scale public works, such as Spiral Jetty (1970), a sculpture in the Great Salt Lake Desert on the Utah–Idaho border. Hill died at age 55 of a heart attack while swimming at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California.

1
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
2
Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Robert Smithson
3
Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. Robert Smithson
4
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
5
Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Robert Smithson
6
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