Robert Smithson

“Cultural Confinement”

His establishment of Land Art is the confines of the gallery towards a more directly critical relation to the modern world. Cultural confinement happens when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, not asking artists to set his limits. Artists are not confined, but their output is.

Their outputs are placed in neutral rooms, called “galleries.”

Language should find itself in the physical world, and not be stacked in an idea in somebody’s head. Language is a developing process, and generates ideas into matter.

He is not talking about art work that shows “process” within the metaphysical limits of the neutral room.

He mentions parks are idealization of nature, but nature is not ideal, not proceed in a straight line, it is a sprawling development. There is no end. Parks and gardens are a pictorial of paradise, Eden, nostalgia..

And the modern counterparts are urban parks, because of their tendency toward idealism, abstraction, pure society is confused, so is art world.

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

Art | Art Robert Smithson

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