|
|
Article: Smithson & the American Landscape.
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
It's this idea of destruction, this conception of near and inevitable change which gives in our opinion so original a character and so touching a beauty to the solitudes of America.
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The abysmal problem of gardens somehow involves a fall from somewhere or something.
--Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects
The world of our fathers resides within us.
--Cormac McCarthy
It was not until I saw, on the cover of John Updike's In The Beauty of the Lilies, a reproduction of The Great Falls of the Passaic River by an unknown 19th-century American artist that I ...