Kleve: Stadtbucherei Kleve, 1989 21 x 15cm, 4pp announcement and programme for a number of lectures and exhibitions in the artist's home town three years after his death. One portrait of the artist on the front, inside a listing of the events. There are a couple of ink annotations in red and black ink but else VG....
Florence: Germain, 1989 21 x 14.5cm, 4pp. Self-cover. Artist's book - with a poem by Herbert - the book is the first time Byars created a parody of (or homage to) the format and typographic style of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise Editions Gallimard. This was later to incur the wrath of the publishing house. One of 1,000 issued. Fine. Now scarce....
Torino: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 1989 49.5 x 49.5cm black card with a 35.5 x 35.5cm, square text with a text by Byars. Small edition but not known. Fine. ...
Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. 6 x 9.6cm, 1pp artist's card printed black on green card with a text discussing the difference between a poems subject ("about a thing") and the poem itself (which IS a thing). Semiology for beginners. VG+....
London: Coracle, 1989
12 x 17.5cm, 60pp plus pictorial boards. A festschrift for Jonathan Williams's 60th birthday. More than three dozen contributors include: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Glen Baxter, R.B. Kitaj, Thomas A. Clark, Richard Caddel, Roy Fisher, Charles Tomlinson, Basil Bunting, Eric Mottram, and Sandra Fisher.
Finlay's contribution is a single page:
Aram Saroyan pays Homage
to Jonathan Williams
on his 60th Birthday.
undoubtedly
avant-
garde
Aram Saroyan was known for his minimalist works and Finlay here parodies the style in honour of his friend Williams. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Committee of Public Safety/Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1989)
2.8 x 21.6cm, 4pp. Artist's card with a text:
1989: BICENTERNAIRE DE LA REVOLUTION FRANCAISE
1990: LA LIBERTE DE CELEBRER 1789.
The year after most people define the beginning after the French Revolution the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789) was passed by the National Constituent Assembly thus giving citizens the right of free speech. Finlay's card celebrates that occasion which is usually ignored - putting it on an equal status as a highlight of world history. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
11.4 x 8.9cm, 4pp. Artist's card with a drawing of an abstracted moorland/estuary (very similar to the colourful images used in From 35 One Line Poem postcards published earlier by Finlay - and the text "Birds fly, Waterfoul Ply" - one having the air above the water, the other the water and the moorland but the latter being compared to boats "plying" their trade. Strictly speaking ply means to move regularly over an area or to work steadily - something both boats and land birds tend to do. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
21 x 15cm, 30pp with card covers and printed dust jacket. Ten drawings by Laurie Clark based on the ten names of the first decade (week) in the revolutionary calendar. The English translation of the names of the days of the first decade of the month of Thermidor is beneath each French name and the associated drawing. Thermidor was the month when Robespierre and Saint-Just and their colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety were guillotined effectively ending the period of The Terror.
Finlay suggests in an explanatory note at the back fo the book that those ten days become a "kind of via crucis - a Stations of the Jacobin Cross". VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
40 x 52cm, blue, red and black offset lithograph.A French flag drawn by Hincks has the texts "LIBERTY FOR SOME/EQUALITY FOR SOME/LIBERTY FOR SOME" respectively on each coloured section. The colours of the tricolour (invented as a compromise early during the French Revolution) were the red and blue: the colours of Paris allied to the white of the king. Later after the king was deposed and killed the flag was retained as the nation's flag and never retired even after the rise of Napoleon. The three texts of the work remind one that the revolutionary ideals did not really ever succeed - in fact, one might argue during the Terror, they had already been broken. VG.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
21 x 14.8cm 8pp booklet designed and with drawings by Gary Hincks after Claude Lorrain. Finlay claims he saw a resemblance between a "coastal area in the south of England and Latium, the leafly coastal country of the later chapters of Virgil's Aneneid." The former presumably is owned by Thompson for whom the proposal was made. Each page has a water colour and a text by Finlay suggesting tree plaques, stone inscriptions and the installation of a "classical gate". Near fine condition.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
13.5 x 13cm, 16pp plus printed brown card covers. Four drawings of proposed texts" for a paved area adjacent to a barn." each drawn by Stephen Raw. Included are the works:
Swallows
Little Matelots
Brown barns
Slower than old beige barges
VG+.
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Basel. Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1989
23 x 16cm. 62pp plus card covers. Artist's book released on the occasion of an exhibition in Switzerland. Twenty-three enlargements of faces from a group photograph of children celebrating the Fete de Pourim in 1939 in a Parisian Jewish School - looking at the faces (which take on the characteristics of spectres because of the fuzziness from the enlargement) one cannot tell the fates of any particular child although one might suspect many to have died in the killing camps of the Nazis. There is an interview in German between Boltanski and Jorg Zutter at the back of the book. VG+.
Reference: Flay Catalogue Page 180.
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