A heap of Language

Robert Smithson
1966
Graphite on graph paper
6 1/2 × 22 in. (16.5 × 55.9 cm)
Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Something between a drawing and a text—or, as Smithson referred to it, “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read”—​A heap of Language ​offers a series of linguistic terms confined by the mathematical parameters of a numbered graph. Its shape is something of a pyramid (a symbol of rigorous structural precision), yet it is constructed from the top down, defying the laws of gravity. This work could be considered a concrete poem. Cleverly evading definitive classification at every turn, ​A heap of Language embodies Smithson’s love of paradox.

Note: Smithon's use of lowercase "heap" is followed in the title of this work

Writing

Scholarly Text

A heap of Language

Craig Dworkin
Cataloguing language about language, Robert Smithson's 1966 drawing A heap of Language inscribes itself at the intersection of minimalist sculpture, land art, architecture, conceptual art, and concrete poetry. Hand-lettered in pencil over a relatively narrow (6-1/2 x 22 inch [16.5 x 55.9 cm]) strip of blue-lined graph paper, the text records the entries following the lemma language in Roget's Thesaurus.
Writing by the Artist

A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art

Robert Smithson
In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures … at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations. The following is a mirror structure built of macro and micro orders, reflections, critical Laputans, and dangerous stairways of words, a shaky edifice of fictions that hangs over inverse syntactical arrangements … coherences that vanish into quasiexactitudes and sublunary and translunary principles.

See Also