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Ian Hamilton Finlay 28 October 1925 - 27
March 2006
The art of Ian Hamilton Finlay is unusual
for encompassing a variety of different media and discourses. Poetry,
philosophy, history, gardening and landscape design are among the genres
of expression through which his work moves, and his activities have assumed
concrete form in cards, books, prints, inscribed stone or wood sculptures,
room installations and fully realised garden environments.
Common to
all of Finlay's diverse production is the inscription of language -
words, invented or borrowed phrases and other semiotic devices - onto
real objects and thus into the world. That language inhabits, for Finlay,
a material or real dimension gives rise to the two seemingly opposed
but signal characteristics of his work.
On the one hand, Finlay, beginning with with his early experiments with
concrete poetry, has always been acutely sensitive to the formalist
concerns (colour, shape, scale, texture, composition) of literary and
artistic modernism. On the other hand, Finlay, a committed poet and student
of classical philosophy, has also always recognised the power of language
and art to shape our perceptions of the world and even to incite us to
action. Fused in his work is thus a certain formalist purity and an insistent
polemical edge, "the terse economy of concrete poetry and the elegant
[and speaking] simplicity of the classical inscription." Formalist
devices are themselves shown to be never without meaning, and they are
ingeniously deployed by Finlay to arm his works with an ever more evocative
content.
The movement of words and language into the world has been most
fully realised by Finlay in his now famous garden, Little Sparta, set
in the
windswept Pentland Hills of southern Scotland. Begun in 1966 when Finlay
relocated with his family to the site, an abandoned farm, Little Sparta
is a deliberate correction of the modern
sculpture garden through its maker's revisiting the Neoclassical tradition
of the garden as a place provocative of poetic, philosophic and even
political thought.
At every turn along Little Sparta's paths or in its glades, language -
here plaintively, there aggressively - ambushes the visitor. Plaques, benches,
headstones, obelisks, planters, bridges and tree-column bases all carry
words or other signage; and this language, in relation to the objects upon
which it is inscribed and the landscape within which it is sited, functions
metaphorically to conjure up an ideal and radical space, a space of the
mind beyond sight or touch. The garden historian John Dixon Hunt has written
that "the ideal gardener is a poet." Finlay, in an astonishingly
explicit way, is this ideal gardener, having made of his Little Sparta
a sustained as well as highly sensuous poem.
The garden of Little Sparta has been described as "the epicentre
of [Finlay's] cultural production," from which his other works in
a sense emanate. With its far-ranging allusions to pre-Socratic philosophy
and Ovidian metamorphoses, to the art of Poussin and poetry of Vaughan,
to the imagery adopted by the shapers of Revolutionary France, to WWII
sea battles and contemporary Scottish fishing craft, Little Sparta itself
stands as a single grand metaphor for no less than Western Culture.
It, like Finlay's other works, both chronicles and re-enacts the complex,
contradictory relation between Culture and Nature, between the cultivated
and the wild (for Nature only becomes intelligible to us when ordered
through cultural constructs that necessarily belie Nature's essential,
untamed "naturalness"). To re-invoke Nature and its real raw
power - and to re-establish poetry's and art's relevance in the world
- Little Sparta has been made rife with images not only of invincible
Antique gods but also of deadly modern warships, our nearest symbols
of sublimity and terror.
At the heart of all the varied materials and forms
through which Finlay's invention flows are his prints, cards, booklets
and "proposals." These
works -- as works on paper -- bear an especially intimate connection
to Finlay's activity as a poet. Meaning, in the purely non-literal or
figurative sense, is more obvious as such in Finlay's paper works than
in his three-dimensional pieces which often have an irresistible physical
presence. This meaning, which can be suggestively open-ended, is arrived
at through metaphor -- i.e., through the coupling, on a single page,
of unlike terms which are brought to behave as "multivalent" pointers,
or as shifting invocatory signs.
To allow his own and others' experimentation with elements of language
as signs - as both graphic and connotative/poetic devices - Finlay founded
in 1964, along with Jessie McGuffie Sheeler, the Wild Hawthorn Press.
Finlay's production through the press has been unceasing and prolific.
The press has served as a nursery of ideas for Finlay's sculptural and
garden works. It is also Little Sparta's publishing, or disseminating,
arm. The themes engaged, so often with incisive wit, at Little Sparta
are ones usually first examined and then re-examined in Wild Hawthorn
imprints.
Among these themes are the relation between Nature and Culture as symbolised
in gardens and the activity of gardening; the Sea as an instance of Nature's
sheer power and problematic beauty; (Neo)Classicism, with its attendant
aesthetics, philosophy and politics, as the defining type of Western
culture; and the French Revolution as an especially rich instance of
Neoclassical thought and forms married to pastoral (gardening) imagery.
A fellow poet has written of Finlay's works on paper the following: "The
model of order is ... [the] pages of a folding card or a flimsy booklet,
produced with care and diligent collaboration to give the reader a shock
not of recognition but of cognition, which is much harder and much more
valuable." Each of Finlay's works, whether on paper or in some other,
very different medium, offers that "shock ... of cognition".
Prudence Carlson
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