Robert Smithson Quotes
Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Smithson, Robert. "Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read." Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996, p. 61.
Justice Holmes was explaining the shortcoming of taking words, spoken or written, literally and not looking further to try and determine the actual intent. This becomes a major legal issue when trying to determine the original intent of legislators of the framers of the Constitution. We all have written things which when interpreted to by others end up with a meaning different from what we intended. In the legislative process with the negotiations over wording, committees, and tradeoffs, it is often very hard to determine what the originators had in mind for in many situations they disagreed about the issue but ended up compromising on some specific language which might represent a consensus or might not even represent anyone’s view.
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. He was one of the founders of the Land Art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty.
