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

σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος

[the most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion]

—Heraclitus of Ephesus 

Writing by the Artist

A Museum of Langauge 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