Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
9.2 x 8cm, 4pp, Artist's card with a photograph of a airplane smoke trail in the sky which vaguely resembles a bow with an arrow prepared to fire. Internally there is a quotation from Genesis 9:13: " I do set my bow in the cloud" - which Finlay responds as "contrail". VG+.

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Dusseldorf: Galerie M & R. Fricke, 1995
22 x 17cm, 100pp. Boards and printed dustjacket. Exhibition catalogue of city wide public art curated by Marion and Roswitha Fricke with works from Bogomir Ecker, Ingo Gunter, Shirazeh Houshiary, Kazui Karase, Raimund Kummer, Inge Mahn, Hermann Pitz and Kiki Smith as well as Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Finlay's contribution was a wall plaque "Equality does not consist in everyone being arrogant but in everyone being modest": quotation from Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. There is a short text in German by Marion Frick one the work and a full page colour image of the installation in situ. VG+.

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Stuttgart: Oktagon Verlag, 1995
17 x 13.5cm, 32pp which include 23 full colour 8.7 x 12.5cm "Kodak" photographs loosely tipped onto blank pages plus title page and colophon. Padded orange boards with foil stamped title. First edition of this artist's book which was designed to look like a family photographic album.
The photographs purport to be souvenirs of a family holiday at Berck-Plage in August 1975 and have the over bright colours found in the colour stock of the time - and an over saturated colour pallet that Boltanski has used in some of his mid-career photographic studies.
As with all of Boltanski's work one is left unsure if the images are genuinely from the artist's family records or found from some other vintage source?
This is one of 500 signed and numbered copies in pencil on the colophon by the artist. The series of Oktagon artist's books was edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist who has since worked several times with Boltanski including the series of "Take Me I'm yours" exhibitions from the late 90s. VG+ condition.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d.(1995)
9.4 x 9.4cm, 8pp plus card covers and printed dust jacket with a line drawing by Gary Hincks of boats on an estuary. Internally there is a "found" text which Finlay has designated as a poem by adding line breaks:

As they slip up the Torridge to Bideford
on the calm of a summer's evening, their
two or three men seem to walk
on the half mile wide stretch of water and
there are only the little islands of hatchways
and the tall thin stove-pipe exhaust shooting
out pulses of blue smoke


to show where there is a barge.

The quotation is from Basil Greenhill's Sailing for a Living from 1962....

Wien: Kunsthalle Wien, 1995
26.5 x 21cm, 120pp). Original card covers. Artist's book displaying 110 b/w full page images sourced from items stolen by the Nazis from Jews and now in the archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the objects claimed to be from a woman in Baden-Baden, clothing from Francois C and objects supposedly found i the sewers of Zurich (the latter three images can be found in earlier publications by Boltanski). None are labelled individually although the groupings are mentioned at the end of the book. Released during the exhibition "Menschlich" in the Kunsthalle Wien. VG+

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995 10 X 10cm, 4pp card with a drawing of the ”Cabane” by Andrew Whittle on the front and internally a drwing of the proposed motto to be above the door:

LA CABANE A SES RAISONS QUE LA MAISON NE CONNAIT POINT

The proposal for the restoration of the stone hut in Provence was to be built using the original stones except for the lintel with a variation on Pacal's famous dictum which translates into "THE HUT HAS ITS REASONS THAT THE HOUSE DOESN"T KNOW". Pascal's original was The heart has it's reasons that reason doesn't know. VG+. ...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
8.3 x 19.2cm, 1pp, Artist's card with an elevation drawing of a modern warship with the various towers and gun placements being labelled as if they are the four types of classical columns found in Greek architecture. An amusing correspondence but the quotation "For the Temples of the Greeks our homesickness last forever" comes from Odysseus and his longing for the familiar sights of his home. That gives this war machine a poignancy that the forms of sheet metal itself are unlikely to encourage. The beauty of Michael Harvey's line drawing also makes the boat a thing of classical form.
This image was also a much larger print and one of Finlay's most popular late works. VG+.

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