It's what he writes about language and art that I like the most. The following piece was written under a pseudonym as a press release for his own work. Funny, Robert Smithson has his fictional writer "Eton" quote him (R.S) at the end. Here’s the "press release," with artificial divisions that I'm putting in there:

Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates.

A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or "cubist" visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system.

Literal usage becomes incantory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. Yet, discursive literalness is apt to be a container for a radical metaphor.

Literal statements often conceal violent analogies. The mind resists the false identity of such circumambient suggestions, only to accept an equally false logical surface. Banal words function as feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words. Other words constantly shift or invert themselves without ending, these could be called "suspended words." Simple statements are often based on language fears, and sometimes result in dogma or non-sense.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things. References are often reversed so that the "object" takes the place of the "word." A is A is never A is A, but rather X is A. The misunderstood notion of a metaphor has it that A is X—that is wrong.

The scale of a letter in a word changes one's visual meaning of the word. Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

A word outside of the mind is a set of "dead letters." The mania for literalness relates to the breakdown in the rational belief in reality. Books entomb words in a synthetic rigor mortis, perhaps that is why "print" is thought to have entered obsolescence. The mind of this death, however, is unrelentingly awake.

-Eton Corrasable

[My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas--i.e., "printed matter." (R.S. June 2, 1972)]

Here is the work this went along with:



If I were to translate what he's saying, an ominous and nefarious process, I'd say he's drawing a distinction between the material form of language, and the perhaps more ephemeral existence of a word as "meaning," a division that is in part justified by French linguist Saussure's distinction between sign, signifier, signified, (and the object being encoded).

From what I understand of Saussure's theory, which is not a lot, a "sign" is composed of the "signifier"—a word, for instance—and "signified"—which is the concept(s) that arise in the mind of the reader, writer, speaker, etc. And whenever you have a signifier, it will give rise to different signifieds in the minds of different people. On some base level, we might see a similar object in our minds, but we will probably interpret the signifier differently on a metaphoric, personal, and/or compositional level. That is, although we may roughly agree what the word "tree" indicates in the material world, "tree" nonetheless means something different to you than it does to me, as I have different experiences with trees than you do.

This theory also points out that there's no material connection between a word and the object being encoded; thus the word "tree" has nothing to do with trees in a physical sense—the word is not made out of wood, has no leaves, is not growing, and so forth.

Anyhow, back to Smithson's deal, within which I think he's drawing a distinction between the material presence of a signifier (a word on a page, for instance)—which he calls "literal," and the immaterial presence of signifieds—which he calls "metaphorical." This isn't totally accurate either, as he points out that the literal form of the word can in itself create a radical metaphorical meaning.

I often feel that various writers, artists, and speakers place different importance on the literal or metaphoric capacities of words. A designer, for instance, is often more interested in the literal composition of words on a website, in a brochure, on an ad placed on a billboard—in order to spring a particular literal signified out of viewers of their design, whereas writers are all too often myopically concerned with how syntax develops a metaphoric meaning not having to do with literal form.

I noticed this in the letterpress class I took, where all of the other students in the class were in the Visual Communications department (a fancy term for graphic design artists), and I was the only writer. Most of the other students were far more interested in the design and placement, the development of context for language, than I was initially; and vice-versa, I was far more aware of the metaphoric, narrative, etc meanings of the language we were using. This turned out pretty nicely because we were able to help each other look at the possibilities differently—as sometimes I might have an idea for what word might be more appropriate/open for the context that they had already decided upon. Yah, that is, we tended to work in a upside-down fashion from each other, in that they first had a general idea, a design idea, and then worked on putting together the text, whereas I had an idea, wrote it down, and then worked on finding the appropriate form for the text I had already written (or had in mind). Of course, this wasn't absolute, and I modified my text as I went to better fit the form, but coming from the text created a certain rigidity towards formal considerations—something that I hope becomes more flexible as I keep learning.

I think that Smithson is, in the above statement, creating a half-manifesto, a half-explanation of the possibilities he finds in language, in particular the literal form of language. In the fourth section I pared off, he points out what might happen when a word is stripped of its metaphoric meaning, and simply has the literal form (signifier without a pinnable signified)—nonsense words would be a strong example, and they are "incantory" because they are sounds, or they are images, that create visual or audio response but no language meaning (I think of the evangelists or the prayers that were spoken by Russian Orthodox over and over again until a certain kind of sense was stripped away and it became a mystical chant).

In the third part, he points out how you could create a rupture if you were to, say, visually rope a word into a form that jars with its metaphoric meaning... a cheesy example would be to take the word "tree" and design it into a form that looks like water. What? Is it tree or is it water, and what is the relationship? But he says there are more radical possibilities for doing this sort of work, for playing around with the divide the opens up between a literal and a metaphorical meaning. And of course, this radicalism has to do with re-arranging our perceptions of reality, and how we think things relate.

He notes, in the second section, how this is a matter of context, of how the words are placed, and how the contexts, both physical and personal, are sites to play with the radicalism of language... and its power, a power formed by the inherently different reads of language.

Anyhow, in the fifth section he elaborates on what happens when these possibilities and differences are ignored, and language becomes rote or stupefied because we just use it in this way or that way without giving thought to the way in which we use/create language. Towards the end, he mentions advertising, which I think would be a good example of form dictation – and how scale of language (a big font, a big shout from our despicable President) is manipulated without sufficient thought to what the content means to our constructions of life.

Actually, and I do think this is related, one of the geniuses of the current government is its near-stranglehold over the form that information takes, to the point that it doesn't matter what the fuck they are saying—war, lie, cheat, kill, commit treason, change our Constitutional rights—and all that matters is that they say it over and over and over again, naming it whatever they want, each time become more bombastic, hugely-scaled, designed by their own parameters, and thus manipulative of our understanding of their words' meaning (dogma or non-sense, as Smithson puts it).

I think Smithson's little X=A=X-ity deal is again a re-iteration of the signifier, signified, represented thing. As I read it, he disagrees with our forgetful notion that Sign = Object/Thing-Encoded-In-Language/Actuality (A = X) and is pointing out that a Sign (word) is only a Sign (word) and not the thing itself (A = A). An example might be Bush's constant naming the current war "The War on Terror" until we actually think his title really is what we're doing (!why, by jove, we are waging war on a horrible abstract concept like terror!), when the actuality of what we are doing lies in an area separate from the language anybody encodes it in.

In the last section of this passage, Smithson kind of points to the drawbacks or reasons for why we might perceive language the way we do – for instance, our love of visual design and literalness stripped of meaning might have to do with our postmodern lack of belief in a one reality that can be touched by all of us; so we just reject our responsibility to be attentive to the literal and metaphoric levels because we don't believe any more that we can ever find it. How disheartening.

And on the other hand, books books books, a potentially live creation but only if a mind brings the text's meaning to life, back from the tomb. I'm not sure if that's what he's saying, but that's how I read it. I do remember thinking in class yesterday that if this is true, it's like a cerebral big bang and the history of a universe eternally expanding and eternally shrinking takes effect every time we pick something up and read.

All of this gives the most compelling justification ever for hybrid art—in these new spaces, form is meaning, both literal and metaphoric, and context is being "built" and not simply assumed.

Labels: form, hybridity, Robert Smithson