Saturday 17 November 2012

the avant-gardener. "The Present Order Is the Disorder of the Future.


"When I hear the words Arts Council", Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, "I reach for my water pistol." The body in the line of fire was the Scottish Arts Council. The choice of weapons was not just a joke: in retreat from a world in which the art object is apt to be overshadowed by its publicity, Finlay created his sculptural garden at Stonypath, Lanarkshire, in the Pentland Hills some 30 miles south-west of Edinburgh. Already a practitioner of concrete poetry, Finlay began "planting" poems, if not in concrete, then in marble, granite, slate, across streams, on gardening tools, even in the trees: "WOOD / WIND / SONG, WIND / WOOD, WOOD- / WIND / SONG". Firing his pistol at the arts-governing bodies he regarded as being in opposition to his purity of purpose, he could water his garden at the same time.
One of the many commanding monumental sculptures at Stonypath is a set of 11 irregularly cut stones (made by Nicholas Sloan), with a single word incised on each: "The Present Order Is the Disorder of the Future.  


"Why doesn't anyone write about the CLARITY in my work, and its LYRICISM", he complained in 1991, "and its (frequent) love of the ORDINARY?"

It is a pity that the limitations of the Tate's holdings mean that the exhibition's themes are more or less restricted to war and peace, disorder and order. Until the end of his life, Finlay delighted in the playfulness of the "wee boy" he had been when he first discovered he was not quite of this world. He continued to celebrate and remake the playthings that helped him make sense of it, principally toy boats. The Tate exhibition is worth visiting, however, even if only as the first step on the road to Little Sparta. Finlay was such an advanced experimentalist that he rejected that term, considering "experiment in all fields old-fashioned". Take that as you wish; there is no arguing with his description of himself: he was the avant-gardener.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/16/ian-hamilton-finlay-concrete-poetry

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