"An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words"
About this Quote
Smithson’s line treats language like a demolition crew: it doesn’t just express feeling, it builds it up and then knocks it down before you can get comfortable. The punch is in “one glance.” He isn’t talking about slow reading or poetic lingering; he’s describing the speed of modern perception, where a word, a caption, a label on a wall can trigger sentiment and then instantly expose it as constructed. Emotion becomes less a private truth than a reflex engineered by context.
As an artist associated with Land Art and a mind steeped in entropy, Smithson was suspicious of stable meanings. “Suggested and demolished” echoes his larger fascination with how systems decay: landscapes erode, structures collapse, and so do the narratives we attach to them. Certain words can romanticize a place (“ruin,” “wilderness,” “monument”) while simultaneously revealing the con behind the romance, the way those terms frame what we’re allowed to feel. The “glance” is the museum-goer’s glance, the tourist’s glance, the consumer’s glance: quick, hungry, and easily hijacked.
The subtext is almost combative. If emotion can be sparked and canceled by mere diction, then authenticity is a shaky alibi. Smithson isn’t mourning that; he’s pointing to it as a condition of contemporary culture. Words are not neutral companions to art and experience. They’re unstable machines that manufacture affect, then sabotage it, leaving you alert to the scaffolding underneath.
As an artist associated with Land Art and a mind steeped in entropy, Smithson was suspicious of stable meanings. “Suggested and demolished” echoes his larger fascination with how systems decay: landscapes erode, structures collapse, and so do the narratives we attach to them. Certain words can romanticize a place (“ruin,” “wilderness,” “monument”) while simultaneously revealing the con behind the romance, the way those terms frame what we’re allowed to feel. The “glance” is the museum-goer’s glance, the tourist’s glance, the consumer’s glance: quick, hungry, and easily hijacked.
The subtext is almost combative. If emotion can be sparked and canceled by mere diction, then authenticity is a shaky alibi. Smithson isn’t mourning that; he’s pointing to it as a condition of contemporary culture. Words are not neutral companions to art and experience. They’re unstable machines that manufacture affect, then sabotage it, leaving you alert to the scaffolding underneath.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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