TEMPLE. 1984.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1984
10 x 10.5cm, 1pp artist’s card with a drawing of a marble temple in a landscape by Mark Stewart below which Finlay has added a definition work:
TEMPLE, n, a marble edifice, a veined edifice; the sear or summit of reason.
and two quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphses and Finlay’s own Despatches from the Little Spartan War. In the former quote Philemon and Baucis have their hut turned into a Temple – which Finlay clearly regards as a similar process to his own renaming of a building on the estate as the Garden Temple. The second quote notes how Strathclyde raided the Garden Temple to take away artworks in lieu of what they claimed was unpaid rates. Clearly Finlay saw the second events as sacrilegious. VG+.