Art review: Ian Hamilton Finlay

Published on Monday 22 June 2009 21:32

IAN HAMILTON FINLAY **** INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH

THERE are artists who are little more than ventriloquists' dummies, a vacant space into which to project a voice – and too often it is the voice of an aesthetically challenged label-writer that fills the emptiness. Then there are artists who take the language of others, develop it and adapt it to their purposes. There is nothing unworthy in that. Indeed, it is what the vast majority of artists do.

Nevertheless, we know the difference when very occasionally an artist appears who speaks to us with the authority that comes from true originality and in a voice that is authentically their own. What they say has not been worn to bland smoothness by familiarity and repetition, and so the results can often be difficult, unsettling, uncomfortable even.

Ian Hamilton Finlay was one of the few great originals of this kind that we have seen in recent times. True to form, people have often found his work difficult and at times uncomfortable. Certainly, it is not always easy. Take for instance Two Scythes, currently on view at the Ingleby Gallery and made in collaboration with Keith Brockwell.

Two enormous scythes hang side by side against a white wall. The light-coloured wood of their long handles contrasts with the gleaming steel of their curving blades. They are shaped like ordinary scythes, except that half way along the blade its curve is reversed at an acute angle.

This makes the shape of the whole scythe echo the zig-zag of a lightning flash, and so two scythes hanging side by side echo the double flash of the SS. This is IHF at his most difficult and uncompromising. His use of this symbol caused a tremendous row in France, and indeed in 1989 it deprived him of the commission to create a monument to the Declaration of the Rights of Man at Versailles. This work was made defiantly in 1991 when that row was at its most vicious.

The easy inference, and the one that was deployed against him in France, was that he used the SS symbol from some kind of Nazi sympathy, but that would be quite wrong. It would not only totally misrepresent the artist's political sympathies, it also misses the complexity of his art and the uncomfortable moral challenges that it often contains.

The easiest way to deal with the history of the Nazis is simply to demonise them, and so put them beyond the norm of ordinary human nature. The Second World War was incontrovertibly a war between good and evil and so, as we were on the right side, we can complacently leave our confidence in human nature undisturbed. It has not been so easy in Germany and what happened so recently in the Balkans, for instance, has shown that, sadly, this is not an adequate account either of history or of human nature; it does not take much for the lid to come off our comfortable vision of the norms of human behaviour to reveal the seething violence that lurks beneath.

Finlay, though he was fearless in controversy, was very hurt by the way he was misrepresented over this issue, and he said to me at the time that this symbol was a reminder of the presence of untamed nature within all of us; a warning that we should not be complacent about ourselves.

There is more to it than that, of course. His art is rarely simple. Cultivated for its own sake, the art of war can lead to great evil. Nevertheless, as the Second World War demonstrated, it can also be necessary to take up arms to defend civilisation, and so the lightning flash morphs into a scythe. Because of the reverse curve in its blade, it is two-edged; it cuts both ways. The scythe is an agricultural tool; in a place on the edge of the wilderness like Finlay's famous garden at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, it is even a gardener's tool; it is both the instrument of harvest and a weapon of defence against the ever-encroaching weeds and grass, the vegetable armies of nature against which the gardener must constantly struggle. Little Sparta itself is a metaphor for the processes of civilisation and the morality that must underpin it: the constant struggle to maintain a balance between order and disorder, while allowing life itself to flourish.

Order imposed by tyranny is not civilisation in this sense. To return to the gardening metaphor, it is the equivalent of covering your garden in tarmac or concrete. Like the sickle, the scythe can also become a weapon in the hands of a rebellious peasantry, and so a symbol of revolution, of the need to overthrow tyrants to allow life to flourish, but also of the need to cut away the dead wood and the choking weeds of redundant or ossified institutions – all very topical in the days of the second Rump Parliament.

This thinking is therefore entirely of a piece with Finlay's French Revolutionary imagery. In the Ingleby Gallery, a painted Apollo is chasing Daphne along the wall. The figures are adapted from Bernini's wonderful sculpture of the metamorphosis of Daphne, turned into a laurel bush at the moment that, in close pursuit, Apollo was about to catch her. God of mathematics, clarity and order, Apollo was also a gardener, and so this image represents the gardener's constant pursuit of order that is correspondingly always on the point of escaping. (Apollo is the presiding deity of Little Sparta.)

Here Apollo is red and Daphne is green, and in this version of the work a text is added that identifies the god as the Revolutionary in pursuit of the ever-elusive outcome of the Revolution. The scythe, however, is also a symbol of time as it frames the cycle of life and death. Three glass screens standing against the light bear the words Liberty, Equality, Eternity.

There is much else in this show. Especially notable are a number of very beautiful examples of the artist's concrete poetry. There is a selection of printed poems and there are also two very early sculptures. One in particular shows the wonderful economy that Finlay could achieve. A three-sided white marble block, a schematic sail, is inscribed with the three words of a poem, "Blue water's bark".

Finlay also features concurrently in a show dedicated to concrete poetry at the ICA in London, but more significantly this exhibition in Edinburgh marks the opening of the last part of the garden at Little Sparta. Developed posthumously, but following the artist's plans (and as a trustee of the Little Sparta Trust I must declare an interest here, though I had no part in this project), this is called the Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden. The stone walls of a roofless barn enclose a small garden laid out in rectangular beds, all framed with paths of square granite setts and box hedges. The beds are planted with medicinal and culinary herbs, roses and other flowers. The south wall has been lowered to let in the sunlight and fruit trees have been planted along the south- facing wall. The choice of plants is deliberately medieval, just as the image of the hortus conclusus is familiar from medieval art, where it is a symbol of virginity.

One of the best-known and most beautiful examples is, for instance, the tapestry called La Dame la Licorne, the Lady with the Unicorn.

Newly planted in this new garden, the little plants look tender and vulnerable, but full of hope. In an adjacent space is a circular pond. A mirror to the sky, its slate surround is inscribed with the names of clouds. The whole thing is a wonderful posthumous testament to the poetic, life-affirming side to Finlay's art. He was always a poet, but his poetry transcends the written word and the printed page to find rich metaphors in the world around us.

&#149 The Ingleby Gallery exhibition continues until 25 July. For more information on Little Sparta, visit www.littlesparta.co.uk.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Alexander Stoddart: Drawings And Models

Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow, until 12 September

Sandy Stoddart has been adorning the streets of our cities with real, old-fashioned statues for some years now. In a quiet way he has been making a more significant mark on Scotland than most contemporary artists. An exhibition at the Hunterian Gallery of Glasgow University gives some insight into the work of this remarkable sculptor.

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