An “artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat the artist out of his ‘art of looking’ by only valuing ‘art objects’. The existence of the artist in time is worth as much as the finished product. Any critic who devalues the time of the artist is the enemy of art and the artist. The stronger and clearer the artist’s view of time the more he will resent any slander on his domain. … Artists with a weak view of time are easily deceived by this victimizing kind of criticism, and are seduced into some trivial history. An artist is enslaved by time only if the time is controlled by someone or somebody else other than himself. The deeper an artist sinks into the time stream the more it becomes oblivion; because of this, he must remain close to the temporal surfaces. many would like to forget time altogether, because it conceals the ‘death principle’ (every authentic artist knows this). Floating in this temporal river…the present…must go into the places where remote futures meet remote pasts.”
Robert Smithson: ‘The Value of Time’ 1968
Taskscape 