IAN HAMILTON FINLAY

ARTIST’S BOOKS

APPLES. 1995

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
5.4 x 4.3cm, 8pp, plus card covers and printed cream dust jacket. Internally there is a text:

"Apples are points in the fields of Eragny".

The painting "Fields of Eragny" is by the pointilliste Camille Pissarro - an art style that was made up by coloured dots on the canvas that "mixed in the retina" (although in actuality more like the visual cortex). Hence an apple in the painting would be nothing more than a dot due to both the style and the distance the painter was from the tree. VG+.

BROUNT.

Eindhoven: Peninsula, 1995
30 x 21cm, 22pp. Original printed card covers. Artist's book with 6 b/w images by Robin Gillanders of a dog bowl with the name Brount on it. Robespierre wasn't all bad - he greatly loved his dog Brount and took it everywhere. This book, one of my favourites, has the tale of how Robespierre bought his dog and the walks he went on together. VG+

Robin Gillanders

1762 – 1794. 1995.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995 11 x 10.7cm, 12pp plus card covers. Artist's book with a b/w photograph of the grave of Andre de Chenier from the Picpus cemetary (by Robin Gillanders) and a concrete poem by Finlay in the shape of a guillotine blade (the text reads Andre Chenier Des Illes Grecques HORIZON d'acier quie separa noting the fact that the poet was killed by the revolution by the blade.) VG+.

Robin Gillanders

SEASONS. 1995.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1995)
8 x 7.7cm, 8pp plus card covers and printed typographic dustjacket. Artist's book with two poems by Finlay.
The texts read:

TWO BOATS
two half-moons

and

TWO BOATS
two snowdrifts

Two visual poems. VG+.

PICPUS. 7 – 9 MESSIDOR AN II DE LA REPUBLIQUE. 1995

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
13.5 x 9cm, 60pp plus black unprinted boards with red ribbon. A list of all the people murdered during the Terror and buried in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. The cemetery was only five minutes from the Place de la Nation where the guillotine was set up so was used for the creation of mass graves where where the decapitated bodies were thrown in together without regard for social class.
Finlay has listed here the names of all those killed during 7 - 9 Messidor (the tenth month in the French Republican calendar) in the second year of the Terror (a period which is known as The Grand Terror as the numbers of those condemned rose very greatly before the downfall of Robespierre). These dates in the common calendar are Thursday 25 June 1795 to Saturday 27 June 1795.
By our count this consisted of 116 people of differing station and most noticeable is the number of young lives under 30. Of course the popular view of the Terror is that it was the nobility that were guillotined but that is not true - the majority were working and middle class people accused of anti-revolutionary views and actions.
The red ribbon is a nod to the line of red blood on a guillotined body (obviously it was not a line) and the use of such ribbons tied around a wrist as a memorial to those killed. The black unprinted board an obvious allusion to death.

THREE WILD FLOWERS. 1995.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
10.3 x 10.3cm, 12pp plus typographic card covers. A b/w photograph by Robin Gillanders of wild flowers in the Picpus Cemetary where many of the guillotined dead during the last months of the Terror were buried in mass graves and a text by Finlay:

THREE WILD FLOWERS
Julie Boissard
Adelaide Lienard
Agathe Greaude

These are names of three of the women who were murdered during the Terror and buried in the cemetery. Finlay's suggestion that they be seen as wild flowers re-emerging from the ground is a beautiful memorial. VG+.

Robin Gillanders

FOUND POEM: THE MASTLESS BARGES. 1995.

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.

UNSIGNED. CHRISTMAS 1995. ONE OF 250 COPIES.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1995
12.5 x 13cm, 48pp plus printed boards Artist's photo-book with twenty-two b/w duotone photographs by David Paterson of sculptures and their sites in Little Sparta.
Finlay has had as a constant theme in his work a trick pof adding "signatures" (usually in a form of a plaque or a ground sculpture) to natural objects - eg "Poussin" at a viewpoint for a hilly landscape. These photographs are all of works that fall into that grouping.
The final photograph is of a boat on Lochen Ech which has as its name "UNSIGNED". One of only 250 such books printed as Christmas gifts by Finlay. VG+>

David Paterson.

DISTRIBUTIVE ENTITIES. 1996.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1996
10.6 x 8cm, 20pp plus card covers. Artist's book dedicated to Colin Sackett which can be read in both directions - in one direction every right hand page has the word "runnel" and if turned around and read in the opposite direction the the word repeated is "funnel". Hence in one direct the words run off the page like a stream (a runnel) but in the other move away like the expelled steam from a funnel. Interestingly the name "sackett" is regarded as having the meaning of an opponent - someone who goes opposite to you. VG apart from the staples are a bit rusted.

Colin Sackett

TWO EXAMPLES.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1996?) 11 x 8cm, 8pp plus card covers. Artist's book with two poems by Finlay that share a similar structure - that of a one-word poem:

On the left:

An Example of Closure

X

and

On the right:

An Example of Opening

X. "X" can stand for a kiss and is often appended at the end of messages, it can also be used in place of a name and therefore found at the beginning of letters. VG+.

REDOUBT.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d.
11.7 x 9.2cm, 8pp plus card covers and printed dust jacket with a line drawing by Mark Stewart of the golden temple to Apollo found on the edge of Lock Eck. Internally Finlay has four couplets one per page:

the flock of stones
the text from Virgil

the stray shot
the frozen gulley

the blue bow-rope
the bust in plaster

the black Bren
the golden temple

The lines describe the temple and with the title REDOUBT compares the small building with a military base (appropriate for Apollo). VG+.

10 SENTENCES. 1996.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1996
6.5 x 9cm, printed custom folder content of 10 6.5 x 9cm, 1pp black on deep blue cards. Each card has a epigram by Finlay on it:
"5. The sail and the keel practice dialectic."<BR< This sentence brings Hegelian dialectics into the consideration of a boat - the keel is at the bottom of the boat, the sail at the top, one keeps the baot upright, the other pushes it along. One without the other would have no effect - the synthesis of the two creates a journey.
All fine in like folder.