"Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things"
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Smithson’s line reads like a cold little etymological prank: the mind, supposedly our most refined territory, can’t even describe itself without borrowing props from the body and the built world. “Grasp” an idea, “wrestle” with a problem, “see” the point, “hold” a thought, “weigh” an argument. The vocabulary of interior life is smuggled in through hands, eyes, heft, friction. That’s not just a linguistics trivia fact; it’s a jab at the fantasy that consciousness floats above matter.
Coming from Smithson, an artist who made earthworks and treated landscape as both medium and concept, the intent feels pointed. His practice kept insisting that meaning is not a clean mental act but something produced by contact: dirt, scale, entropy, time. If language is already materially contaminated, then the traditional hierarchy (idea first, matter second) starts to wobble. The subtext is almost anti-idealism: we don’t have pristine access to “mind” because our metaphors are anchored to physical experience, and those metaphors quietly steer what we think is thinkable.
The context is also art-world polemic. Late modernism and conceptual art often promised pure idea, dematerialized artwork, clean systems. Smithson liked systems too, but he distrusted their antiseptic self-image. This sentence performs that distrust in miniature: even our most abstract terms are made of stuff. The mind talks like a body because it is one.
Coming from Smithson, an artist who made earthworks and treated landscape as both medium and concept, the intent feels pointed. His practice kept insisting that meaning is not a clean mental act but something produced by contact: dirt, scale, entropy, time. If language is already materially contaminated, then the traditional hierarchy (idea first, matter second) starts to wobble. The subtext is almost anti-idealism: we don’t have pristine access to “mind” because our metaphors are anchored to physical experience, and those metaphors quietly steer what we think is thinkable.
The context is also art-world polemic. Late modernism and conceptual art often promised pure idea, dematerialized artwork, clean systems. Smithson liked systems too, but he distrusted their antiseptic self-image. This sentence performs that distrust in miniature: even our most abstract terms are made of stuff. The mind talks like a body because it is one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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