15 JUNE 06
I've been reading Robert Smithson.
"Cezanne and his contemporaries were forced out of their studios by the photograph. They were in actual competition with photography, so they went to sites..."
Interviewer: "You were born in New Jersey?"
Smithson: "Yes, in Passaic, New Jersey.... I was born in Passaic, and lived there for a short time, then we moved to Rutherford, New Jersey. William Carlos Williams was actually my baby doctor in Rutherford. We lived there until I was about nine and then we moved to Clifton, New Jersey. I guess around that time I had an inclination toward being an artist."
"What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave."
"I'm not really discontented. I'm just interested in exploring the apparatus I'm being threaded through, you know, and to me that's a legitimate interest. I've always been interested in different sites and different kinds of relationships...like the relationship in a white room as opposed to a quarry. I mean, there's obviously a difference of intention there, and the whiteness of the room looks like a little neutral cell in heaven and the painting hanging on the wall--you're supposed to not even think of the wall.... You're supposed to just respond metaphysically to the painting in terms of color, line, structure, you know, and talk about the framing support, but forget about where you're standing...the ambience of the entire space."
"...what I'm doing here--I'm going to use a room and a salt mine.... (It's out here on Lake Cayuga, Cayuga Salt Mines)--and tomorrow I'll go down there and put on an exhibition in the salt mines and arrange these mirrors in various configurations, photograph them, and bring them back to the interior along with rock salt of various grades.... Most sculptors think about the object, but for me there is no focus on one object, so it's the back-and-forth thing."
"I'm not interested in 'happenings,' or process for process sake.... I'm more interested in the way things are."
(Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings)
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