14 Sep

Posted at 11:25h in Artist's Books

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
11.5 x 8.6cm, 8pp, plus card covers and printed blue dust jacket. Three appropriated drawings of named boats by Gloria WIlson from as book published by Fishing News are printed below their names and a short paragraph describing the,. The names together read "PROSPERITY/LEAD US 11/AND GALILEE" which Finlay relates to both the life of Jesus and the Romantic poet Christina Rossetti who wrote many devotional texts.
The title "A WILD HAWTHORN RE-READER" alludes to the appropriation of another's work and a re-interpretation of it.

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01 Sep

Posted at 20:28h in Artist's Books

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999.
29.5 x 14cm, 12pp plus cards and printed dust jacket. Artist's book with a poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and it's English translation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which have linocut illustrations by Jo Hincks and then a variant on the poem by Finlay where the original poem's landscape is replaced by a scene of boats (which are blue lemons):

Do you know the land where the blue lemons ride
A silver fountain springs from the vessel's side?
There, in the stern, the orange net-floats glow,
The brown sail shifts, the salt winds gently blow.
DO you know it well, that land, beloved friend?
"Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend!"

The poem also is a thought of death and heaven. FInlay's version is also illustrated by Hincks - making the boat references more obvious (the fountain for example is the bilge water spraying out)>
VG+ example.

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26 Aug

Posted at 12:50h in Artist's Postcards

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn, n.d. (1999?)

6.5 x 5.2cm, 4pp very small artist's card with a text:

POEMS

Things can
go wrong -

The lines,
the colours

Finlay compares creating a poem with all its problems with that of painting.

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22 Jul

Posted at 20:32h in David Bellingham

Glasgow: WAX366, 1999
200 x 1cm, original measuring rule with rivets to allow the rule to open and close. Silkscreened on the first part of the measure is the text "ASSESSMENT OF EXTENT DEPRIVES US OF THE INFINITE". An object multiple released in a small but unknown number. VG+ although slight tear to the printed paper closing wrapper....

09 Jul

Posted at 20:33h in Letters + Documents

Little Sparta: s.p. Finlay, n.d. (c. 1990s)
21 x 30cm, 11 pages all original xerox printed one side only and stapled three times on left to create a document. The letter (annotated later with short remarks by Finlay) was sent originally in 1962/1963 to Cid Corman who edited Origin (one of the first publications to put Finlay in print) where he praises the magazine, talks about how he writes and feels isolated in doing that and unsure of what he is doing is good and discusses his own mental health (he complains about anxiety). Attached are a number of poems in traditional form from The Dancers Inherit The Party. AN insightful document indeed.
This was sent to Janet Boulton in July 1999.
JOINT:
KNOWING THE LAND WHERE NEON BLOOMS: IAN HAMILTON FINLAY'S INSTALLATION IN ERFURT. n.p.: s.p., 1999 30 x 21cm, 3pp (recto only) stapled. An essay by Harry Gilonis about Finlay's installation of neon works. JOINT:
XEROX COPY OF ARTICLE IN JOURNAL OF GARDEN HISTORY BY STEPHEN BANN. 1981. 30 x 21cm, 13pp (recto only) stapled. An essay by Bann about Little Sparta with lots of phtographs. JOINT:
31 x 21.5cm, original mailing envelope with handwritten notes of the contents by Finlay. Torn badly when opened at top.

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29 Jun

Posted at 21:52h in Artist's Postcards

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.3 x 12.1cm, 4pp, black on rippled blue/white artist's card. The one line poem inside reads:

Morning: the mountains lifting off the mist

A more common saying would be that the mist is lifting off the mountains but by this reversal Finlay is suggesting the early morning scene of misty mountains gives an illusion of the hills being pulled above the clouds. VG+.

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26 Jun

Posted at 15:34h in ARTIST’S BOOKS

Beelitz, Kehayoff, 1999
11,5 x 17 x 3cm, two-part cardboard box with mounted title-sticker on lid content of a a folded text sheet with a colour drawing of the exhibition site and a text in English. Additionally there are 39, 10.5 x 15cm, 2pp colour post-cards. This was the exhibition catalogue for the exhibition shared between Boltanski, Ilya Kabakov and Jean Kalman. Each card shows an installation view of the works which were sited in a former sanatorium near Berlin. The text by Kabakov explains the background to the project. VG+.
BR>...

26 Jun

Posted at 09:24h in DELUXE ARTIST’S BOOKS

München. Gina Kehayoff. 2000 31 x 29.2cm, printed folder with ribbon content of 29 cardboard pages with mounted (photo corners) colour photographs of the various installations by the three artists in a former sanatorium outside Berlin. Additionally there is a large colour poster showing the layout of the project and a text in English by Ilya Kabakov.,br. There is also a colophon sheet tipped onto the inside back of the folder signed and numbered by all three artists in pencil. One of of 69 deluxe copies. VG+.

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10 Jun

Posted at 09:36h in David Bellingham

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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07 Jun

Posted at 08:50h in DELUXE ARTIST’S BOOKS

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+. ...

28 May

Posted at 15:44h in NEWSPAPERS

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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26 Feb

Posted at 11:30h in Artist's Books

Barcelona: Joan Miro Foundation, 1999
16 x 11cm, 48pp, with black boards and tipped on title label. This book accompanied the exhibition "Variations on Several Themes' and is identified often as an exhibition catalogue but this is incorrect - it is an artist's book in itself.
The first pages of the publication have a new concrete poem which is based on Christina Rossetti's devotional works, and Eugen Gomringer's Constellation form of visual poetry. The words boat, net, wind, fire, vine, flock, sun, lamb are recombined in different placings to create five different imagined scenes.
At the back of the book there is an essay by Thomas A. Clark in English who points out that the structure of the poem is from Gromringer's 5 mal 1 konstellation' and the words used are from Rossetti's "Letter and SPirit". That essay is better than I can write here so we shall leave this here although we will point out that in the late 90s religion as a subject begins to be more apparent in Finlay's work.
We have re-classified this book as an artist's book and not just a catalogue

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