Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

cultural confinement
robert smithson
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition,
rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Some artists imagine they’ve got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them.
As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out oftheir control. Artists themselves
are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and
cells—in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries.” A work ofart when placed in a gallery
loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works ofart seen in such
spaces seem to be going through a kind ofaesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so
many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function
ofthe warden-curator is to separate art from the rest ofsociety. Next comes integration.
Once the work ofart is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized
it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable
merchandise. Innovations are allowed only ifthey support this kind ofconfinement.
Occult notions of“concept” are in retreat from the physical world. Heaps ofprivate
information reduce art to hermeticism and fatuous metaphysics. Language should find itself