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.

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.