All we can do is keep on working, seeking not the acclaim of an invisible posterity, but the qualities of the materials under our own hands.

Carl André, 'On Sculpture and Consecutive Matters' in 12 Dialogues 1962-1963 (The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980) p. 18

The city gives the illusion that earth does not exist.

Robert Smithson, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 82

The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other – one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call "abstract geology". One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way. This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries. This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into the cerebral sediment, where particles and fragments make themselves known as solid consciousness. A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched.

Robert Smithson, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 82

Förnyelse? Man bör då minnas, att enligt konsumismens lagar innebär förnyelse enbart en förnyad anpassning till gällande samhällsstruktur. Konsumism och populärkultur var ursprungligen inte nödvändigtvis samma sak. Men har blivit det, helt postmodernt. Därför att konsumismen, lössläppt och nu sanktionerad som svensk överideologi – och ständigt ekande i kulturministerns ord – förgiftar allt den tränger in i. Alltså också populär- och genrekulturen. Det är skillnad mellan att befinna sig på en marknadsplats, och att ses, och att se sig som enbart uttryck för marknadskrafter. Marknadsplatsen erbjuder trots allt många möjligheter, och levande, gnistrande, rykande gränsöverskridanden mellan fin- och populärkultur, skuggor att tillfälligt dra sig tillbaka till, tidsbegränsade allianser, provisoriska möjligheter; marknadskrafterna däremot jämnar ut allt detta till en trist homogen hegemoni. Den vi nu är på väg in i.

Carl Erland Andersson, 'Dags att återvinna det autentiska' in GP, Nr 15, Årgång 153 (Göteborgs-Posten, 2010) pp. 50-51

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.

Robert Smithson, 'A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 56

The mirror promises so much and gives so little, it is a pool of swarming ideas or neoplatonic archetypes and repulsive to the realist. It is a vain trap, an abyss, nevertheless the cold distant people of the Ultramoderne installed themselves in many versions of the Hall of Mirrors. They lived in interiors of gloss and glass, in luminous skyscrapers, in rooms of rarefied atmospheres and airless delights. The overuse of the mirror turned buildings, no matter how solid and immobile, into emblems of nothingness. building exteriors were massive and windows were often surrounded by tomb-like mouldings and casements, but the interior mirrors multiplied and divided 'reality' into perplexing, impenetrable, uninhabitable regions. The walls outdoors were ultra physical, while the walls indoors were ingraspable and vain. The purist is vain enough to imagine he is pure, but this ultimate viewpoint frightens the naturalist. The 'window' and the 'mirror' are secret sharers of the same elements. The window contains nothing, while the mirror contains everything. Consider them both, and you will find it impossible to escape their double identity.

Robert Smithson, 'Ultramoderne' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 50

As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance. On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is the massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word "temporality" hardly fits: All-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space, this temporality reminds one of Kronos in Hesiod's mythology, the incestuous son whose massive presence covered all of Gea in order to separate her form Ouranos, the father.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 16-17

It could indeed be demonstrated that World War II, though fought in the name of national values, brought an end to the nation as reality: it was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved only for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed. [...] Let us say that the chimera of economic homogeneity gave way to interdependence (when not submission to the economic superpowers), while historical tradition and linguistic unity were recast as a broader and deeper determinant: what might be called a symbolic denominator, defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography. [...] A new social ensemble superior to the nation has thus been constituted, within which the nation, far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange temporality, in a kind of "future perfect", where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive character to a logical and sociological distribution of the most modern type. For this memory or symbolic common denominator concerns the response that human groupings, united in space and time, have given not to the problems of the production of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, to those of reproduction, survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex, and symbol. If it is true, for example, that Europe is representative of such a sociocultural ensemble, it seems to me that its existence is based more on this "symbolic denominator", which its art, philosophy, and religions manifest, than on its specific economic profile, which is certainly interwoven with collective memory but whose traits change rather rapidly under pressure from its partners.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 13-14

At the turn of the century a group of colorful French artists banded together in order to get the jump on the bourgeois notion of progress. This bohemian brand of progress gradually developed into what is sometimes called the avant-garde. Both these notions of duration are no longer absolute modes of "time" for artists. The avant-garde, like progress, is based on an ideological consciousness of time. Time as ideology has produced many uncertain "art histories" with the help of mass-media. Art histories may be measured in time by books (years), by magazines (months), by newspapers (weeks and days), by radio and TV (days and hours). And at the gallery proper – instants! Time is brought to a condition that breaks down into "abstract-objects". The isolated time of the avant-garde has produced its own unavailable history or entropy.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 35

Most notions of time (Progress, Evolution, Avantgarde) are put in terms of biology. Analogies are drawn between organic biology and technology; the nervous system is extended into electronics, and the muscular system is extended into mechanics. The workings of biology and technology belong not in the domain of art, but to the "useful" time of organic (active) duration, which is unconscious and mortal. Art mirrors the "actuality" [...]. What is actual is apart from the continuous "actions" between birth and death. [...] Whenever "action" does persist, it is unavailable or useless. In art, action is always becoming inertia, but this inertia has no ground to settle on except the mind, which is as empty as actual time.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 32