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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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+.
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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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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+. ...
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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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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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.2 x 6.3cm, 4pp card printed black on grey. Two poems both inspired by Bishop Andrewes from his "Devotions" collection of prayers. The firs shows the word as the sea (as often found in Christian iconography) and the second the land as the sea. Both list objects and animals found in (firstly) Christian preaching and secondly during a walk. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9 x 7.4cm, 19pp, plus turquoise card covers. Content of three drawings of flowers by Jo Hincks along with quotations about warships - all from the Flower Class of corvettes - found in a book by Preston & Raven from 1942. Each quotation gives the drawing its subject - for instance:
Anemone, Bluebell
Ships with
original
sheer and flare.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.2 x 7.5cm, 12pp, plus turquoise card covers. Content of three codes for different types of flower used in a seed suppliers catalogue (all have only the initial of the word to identify them) below which Finlay has added three names of warships - all from the Flower Class of corvettes - where the names also start with the same letter.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, Christmas 1998
4 x 10 x 3.5cm, custom made printed cardboard box content of two cotton reels - one with light blue thread, the other grey. The outside of the box has the text: "TWO HORIZONS". The object multiple references a number of other Finlay works that notes that a horizon at sea is blue and that on land is grey. A physical embodiment of that visual poem. The box is slightly damaged but overall VG.
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N.p. (Germany): n.p., n.d. (c. 1998)
Six original xerox handouts from an unknown gallery show - here a 30 x 42cm, 1pp of 18 portraits from Lew Suisse Morts, 1991 (folded as issued), and four 30 x 21cm, 1pp handouts - an image from the journal New Eter 1972 (which they erroneously date as 1991) and an image from Diese Kinder Suchen Ihre Eltern, 1994, another from Sachlich, 1995, Lost (1994) and Menschlich also 1994.. All VG.
It is not clear where exactly these came from but on the back of the large sheet there is a handwritten note "Institut de Francais, 1998".
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