Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
8.8 x 12cm, 1pp, black on blue artist's card. The one word poem is:
East Coast Gaff Sloop
scratchbuilt
and a description of the painter Graham Rich who "often applies his paint with a matchstick. Or he scrapes away with a sharp point, a paintt already present on the found object." from Thomas A. Clark and then:
"Scratchbuilt: a model completed from other than a commercial kit". VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
10.5 x 18.9cm, 4pp card printed black on white with a drawing of Gary Hincks of broken and rotting boat. A text inside of the card reads:
Decommisioned Fishing Boats
new Baedeker Blitz
Finlay notes that under EU regulations a fisherman can receive financial compensaiton for decommissioning - destroying - his boat and compares this to the "Baedeker Blitz" where the Luftwaffe mounted revenge raids on English Cathedral towns. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
14.8 x 6cm, 1pp, black on blue artist's card. There are two translations from the Greek:
planks which.
were once
pines of Ida
from Aeneid Book X
and
(jacinta, Antusa)
hunters
of deep sea prey
From Homer's Epigrams XVII
Fishing boats and fishermen. VG+.
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Edinburgh/Glasgow: Morning Star Publications/Wax366, 1998
15.5 x 11.5cm, 2pp black on red card issued during the 1998 football world cup - Bellingham creates a team from important Russian avant garde artists. VG+.
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Kõln: Salon Verlag, 1999
17 x 12cm, 32pp. plus slightly oversize wrappers. There are 30 b/w portraits of young men and women in their teens placed on a graph-lined back ground and their dates of birth with a space for their later death dates. All the people were born in the mid 70s. One of 1,000 numbered copies. VG+.
INSERTED AS ISSUED:
17 x 12cm, 1pp single lined sheet with an original photograph of a young man tipped on - the image that was used in the book. The back of the sheet is signed in pen by Boltanski. The sheet is in a glassine envelope.
This is one of the first 50 numbered copies of the book and the image used corresponds to the page of the same number - here 15 - hence each deluxe copy (up to number 30) has the original photograph used for the publication.
So Schnell translates to "So Fast" perhaps a reference to how quickly time passes, All in original printed slipcase.VG+. ...
Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.6 x 14cm, 1pp, black on white artist's card.
The gods went home, and everything beautiful,/everything lofty they took with them, all colours, all life's tones.
A quotation from Schiller written on 13 July 1998. Published in Autumn this card shows regret for the lack of colour as the fall approaches (if we ignore the colours of leaves). VG+.
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Paris: Le Monde, 28 Mai 1999
46 x 32cm, 38pp. A single number of the important Parisian tabloid daily newspaper which has given a full page to Boltanski as part of a "carte blanche" art project. Boltanski has supplied a fiull page image on Page 33 of an appropriated vintage photograph of a young Jewish girl with a party hat and costume. The fete de Pourim is a commemoration of the saving of the Jewish people from Haman who had plotted a pogrom according to the Book of Esther in the Old Testiment. Often children would wear fancy dress which seems to be the story here. Apart from those visual clues - there is no other information about the image - a typical Boltanski strategy to disrupt narrative. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1999?)
8 x 20.5cm, 4pp outer folded with a black on deep blue drawing of the famous heavy cruiser. Internally there is a 8 x 20.5cm, 4p printed sheet with a poem:
PRINZ EUGEN*
Her nouns were round, her verbs were straight and swift
The poem sees the battleship as a sentence - the actions of this war machine are immediate and once presumes deadly, it's shape and form more aesthetic.
One of Finlay's poems in a folder although the format could be seen as a card.
VG+.
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Glasgow: WAX336, 1999
7.3 x 15cm, 2pp. Artist's postcard with AHEAD on one side, and BEHIND on the other printed with white text on gray. Early concrete poem. VG+.
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Den Haag: Stroom, n.d. (1999)
27x 19cm, 62pp plus typographic wrappers. A book issued on the installation of Finlay's long planned public sculpture at the Hofvijver where an equally long neglected underground stream re-emerged after being polluted by passing through a municipal dump.
The campaign to improve the water and local environment was eventually successful and Finlay's plaque above the water "ET IN ARCADIA EGO" - usually translated into "I too was in Arcady: is a note that shamed the poverty of the water supply prior to its improvement. Tipped on colour photographs and b/w image throughout as well as texts in Dutch and English by Erik de Jong and Lily van Ginneken.
After some thought we have decided to place this book in the monograph section of this catalogue but it arguably could be an artist's book.
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Glasgow: Wax366, 1999
15 x 21cm, 2pp artist postcard with a colour image of Pavel Buchler reading a book on Marx and Engels upside down - a parallel to the idea that Marx (although we would argue Engels more) turned Hegel upside down. VG+
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
10.5 x 7cm, 4pp, black on brown artist's card with a poem from Finlay which is based on a Simon Cutts variation on an original by Samuel Palmer the landscape painter and poet:
loosing
the sheets
open-
ing the
hold
fold-
ing the
last
sail
As discussed elsewhere in these cataloguings, the folding of the sail is related both to maintenance of the boats but also the burial of sailors. VG+.
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