From: Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer by Yves Abrioux, Reaktion Books, 12 Dublin Street, Edinburgh EH1 3PP, Scotland, 1985
1925
Born in Nassau, Bahamas. Returned to Scotland as a child; boarding school; father lost his fortune made from bootlegging with a schooner; poverty in Glasgow; education ended at the age of thirteen with the outbreak of war and evacuation to the Orkneys.
Read many books on cubism when he was about fourteen. Briefly attended Glasgow School of Art before being called up; almost never went; read books on cubism and surrealism. Hitch-hiked to London, which he first entered astride a torpedo or a bomb in the back of a truck.
1942
At seventeen, army service for three and a half years. Finlay was a sergeant in the RASC and saw service in Germany. He became friendly with the artists Colquhoun, MacBryde, Hohn Minton, often staying with them while he was in the army.
End of World War II: Worked as a shepherd in the Orkneys. Had a dream of 'Sweet Philosophy' in which he found visionary happiness in discoursing with classically-clad philosophers in a kind of bright green-grassed grove; wanted to study philosophy, but this was not possible.
Agricultural laboring and writing, first short stories and then short plays. Most of the short stories were published in the Glasgow Herald in the mid-1950s, before appearing in book form. Finlay's short plays date from the late 1950s; some were broadcast by the BBC.
The protagonists of Finlay's stories are mostly children and country or fishing folk. For all their surface simplicity and economy of means, the stories have the symbolic power associated with Russian exponents of the genre (Sologub, Andreyev), or with the Joycean epiphany. At the same time, their prose rhythms place them within an unjustly neglected strain of Scottish writing (John Macnair Reid, Ian Macpherson). Such fruits of the 'non-classical tradition of the north' have not received the attention they deserved. However, one may wonder whether the community and culture implied by their form still exist. Finlay recognized the problem and subsequently reformulated the themes of some of his earlier stories and poems in a more obviously modernistic idiom.
Late 1950s: Move to Edinburgh, followed by a sojourn in the Orkneys as a laborer; rhyming poems period.
Like the short stories, FInlay's rhyming poems embody both the accents of native Scottish speech and a strict formal concern. Described by Mike Weaver as a collection of 'sophisticated folk poems', The Dancers Inherit the Party was admired in America by such poets as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Lorine Niedecker. However, the book was not at all well received in Scotland.
1961
The Wild Hawthorn Press founded by Finlay and Jessie McGuffie. The Press, which at the outset published works by a number of contemporary artists, came over the years to concentrate exclusively on Finlay's own production. From the start, it was notable both for the uncompromising quality of its publications and for the possibilities it offered for formal innovation. The first book to be published at the Wild Hawthorn Press was Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, poems by Finlay written in Glaswegian dialect.
1962
Founded the periodical Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., offset at the Wild Hawthorn Press. It ran to twenty five issues, the last of which appeared in 1968. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. was a forum for the verbal and the visual, the traditional and the modernistic, the creative and the theoretical. It introduced new kinds of poetry into Scotland and enabled Finlay to establish contacts with the outside world.
A biographical portrait in Typographica 8 (1963) observed that the media had made Finlay's activities sound dadaistic, and that according to a report in Radio Newsreel 'his airship, the Wild Hawthorn Zeppelin, was going to bombard the 1962 Festival Writers' Conference (in Edinburgh); his Wild Hawthorn March was banned by the Edinburgh magistrates; and a radio broadcast put out the rumor that 50,000 supporters of the Glasgow Rangers (Football Club) were going to demonstrate in favor of Shimpei Kusano, the Frog Poet & the Wild Hawthorn'. The entire episode was, of course, fictional.
1963
Exhibition of toys at the home of the publisher John Calder, Ledlanet House, Fife. In the early 1960s, Finlay had felt 'an absolute need to turn from the rhythmic to the static,...and turned towards making little toys - things of no account in themselves, yet true to (his) inspiration, which was away from Syntax toward "the Pure"'. The static nature of the toys marked Finlay's transition towards concrete poetry, which he did not know at the time.
Founded the broadside Fishsheet for concrete poetry (one issue only).
Publication of Rapel, Finlay's first collection of concrete poems, and of Standing Poem I, his first poem/card.
1964
Canal Stripe Series 3, Finlay's first published booklet-poem. The kinetic booklets in the Ocean and Canal Stripe Series were an innovation of Finlay's at the Wild Hawthorn Press, and an important contribution to the concrete poetry mode. Works from these series were also transformed into kinetic constructions. This two-pronged attack on conventional book form demonstrates the overall coherence of Finlay's formal innovations, however varied these may be. The structure of both the booklets and the constructions is semantic. They constitute significant forms.
Poster/Poem (le Circus), the first in a long string of poem/prints (an innovation also introduced by Finlay), belongs to a series also featuring works by Franz Mon, Ferdinand Kriwet, John Furnival and Pierre Albert-Birot.
Move to Easter Ross, north of Inverness, where Finlay created his first poems designed to be set in an environment.
First poem in sandblasted glass shown at the Cambridge International Exhibition of Concrete Poetry in November of the same year.
1965-7
'Under the general rubric of a "new classicism", Finlay began to investigate the inscription of the poem in the world and the transcendence of the sign through metaphor.'
Summer 1966
Spent in Fife, with Sue Finlay, at Coaltown of Callange, 'a place as pastoral as its address'. The 'idyllic pastoral' inspired such works as the Coaltown of Callange Tri-kai, Autumn Poem and 6 Small Songs in 3's.
Autumn 1966
Ian and Sue Finlay settled at Stonypath. They had met two years earlier; they have two children. Stonypath was an abandoned hillside croft in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, where the Finlays immediately set about creating their world-famous garden. It consists of a stone house, agricultural buildings and about four acres of land. One of the buildings was turned into a gallery showing the work of Finlay and his collaborators. This subsequently became a Garden Temple. In 1968, Stonypath was a desolate spot, with none of the vegetation that is now so well established. The ponds did not exist. There was just one old tree in the front of the cottage. This is still standing, in a corner of the garden.
At Stonypath, Finlay began building model planes and boats.
1967
Sunken garden begun at Stonypath; pond dug behind the cottage. International concrete poetry exhibition at the 1967 Brighton Festival. Participants from Britain, Europe and America. Finlay contributed Star/Steer to a collection of concrete poems published for the festival. Other works, done in collaboration with Henry Clyne, were featured in the exhibition. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. 24 is a photographic record of works by various artists exhibited at different sites in the streets and gardens of Brighton - and even out at sea.
Finlay had corresponded with Eugen Gomringer, in Switzerland, and with the Brazilian concrete poets, from about 1962. He was the Scottish representative on the comite international of the concrete poetry movement. This 'deliberate connection with (the) literary avant-garde ceased when concrete poetry degenerated into a trite, decorative mode. Finlay's own contributions to concrete poetry demonstrate his enduring concern for cultural values. The booklet Ocean Stripe Series 5, produced in 1967, shows Finlay taking stock of the tradition of the avant-garde.
1967-68
Boat names and boat registration numbers in painted wood, some covered in nylon fishing net. One of these works, Starlit Waters, was acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1976 and was the object of a minor press campaign in the wake of the Carl Andre bricks controversy. Works from the same series are to be found in other public collections. A further set of similar works was undertaken for Finlay's Serpentine Gallery Exhibition in 1977.
1968
First one-man exhibition at the Axiom Gallery, London. Published in 1968, the last issue of Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. is entirely devoted to one-word poems. The mode was devised by Finlay in the mid-1960s. Other poets were invited to contribute one-word poems to Finlay's magazine. Contributors included George Mackay Brown, Edwin Morgan, Edward Lucie-Smith, Jerome Rothenberg, Guy Davenport, Ernst Jandl, Pedro Xisto. Finlay's instructions to his fellow poets stipulated that the poem ' was to consist of one word, with a title of any length, these two elements forming, as it were, a corner which would then contain the meaning'.
FInlay observes that 'It seemed obvious to me that one could not have a literally one-word poem on the page, since any work must contain relationship; equally, one could (conceivably) have a one-word poem in a garden, if the surroundings were conceived as part of the poem. I thought of the one-word poem as a kind of native alternative to haiku (a form which was then in Fashion). What I didn't know then, was, that the one-line poem was virtually and established European form, of which examples can be found in Apollinaire. (...) Obviously, one-word and one-line poem, have a certain relation to concrete poetry. (I once described the sonnet as a "sewing machine for the monostitch.) This opens on to two areas of questioning: first, what is the especial status of the fragment? and, why does one desire the word in itself? These questions probably have to wait until literature very belatedly recognizes the concrete poem. Or perhaps they will never be answered, or asked by literature, since they are first and foremost metaphysical questions.'
The one-word poem was never a fixed form for Finlay. Stonechats, the booklet containing the largest number of his one-word poems, is a collection of texts conceived as inscriptions for the garden at Stonypath. It demonstrates the importance of the one-word poem to the semiotic aesthetic which characterized Stonypath in the first years of its development. Finlay also adapted one-word poems for poem/cards by adding an image, or by replacing one of the verbal components with an image. The concentration implied by the one-word poem had brought to the forefront the importance of the relationship between constituent elements in any work, which is central to Finlay's aesthetic.
1969
Small loch at Stonypath formed by damming a tiny stream.
1970
Retrospective exhibition on Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Wild Hawthorn Press at the Ceolfrith Bookshop Gallery, Sunderland. In the early 1970s, Finlay's garden at Stonypath began to assume a more coherent shape. At the same time, the image of the modern warship began to replace that of the fishing-boat as Finlay's main theme, and his 'neoclassical rearmament project' began to emerge more clearly.
1971
The Weed Boat Masters Ticket booklet published at the Wild Hawthorn Press. This was the first of a series of question booklets, later expanded to So You Want To Be A Panzer Leader and The Wild Hawthorn Art Test. In these booklets, Finlay's intention to challenge - wittily - the literary and artistic competence of his readers is openly declared by the form.
1972
Retrospective exhibition, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Embarked on a series of large color poem/prints with Jim Nicholson.
c. 1974
Started a series of works for the Max Planck Institute Garden, Stuttgart. The project took several years to complete.
1975-6
Ceramic works in collaboration with David Ballantyne; impresa-type medallions in collaboration with Ron Costley, and other works based on the Renaissance emblem; collaboration with the American artist Jud Fine.
1976-7
Large neon works and Battle of Midway Tableau (in collaboration with James Stoddart and James Boyd) for Finlay's Serpentine exhibition in 1977. Much of Finlay's work is done in collaboration with a range of artists and craftsmen. Other works make use of modern industrial techniques. The garden at Stonypath owes much to the collaboration of Sue Finlay. In many cases, a single work or design is recast in radically different idioms or media. These collaborations and variations form an integral part of the evaluation of cultural forces on which Finlay is engaged.
1977
Series of embroideries with Pamela Campion (earlier embroideries date from 1973).
April-May 1977
Collaborations exhibition, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
June-September 1977
Lyre on show at the Silver Jubilee Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture, Battersea Park, London. Consists of an actual Oerlikon gun standing on concrete slabs and accompanied by a quotation referring to Heraclitus from Edmund Hussey's book The Pre-socratics.
September-October 1977
Exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London. This was divided into five rooms plus an information area. The catalogue described the first of these rooms in the following terms: 'We are to imagine a neo-classical interior, perhaps a small temple opening upon a garden at Stourhead or Stowe'. This marks the first public claim by Finlay to a religious environment as the proper setting for his work. The publication in 1977 of Finlay's Heroic Emblems, with extensive commentary and documentation form an essential part of his work. Indeed, it is a major aspect of Finlay's aesthetic that his works should induce a process of exploration and meditation on their references.
1978
Withdrawal of Serpentine traveling exhibition from the Scottish Arts Council's Charlotte Square Gallery, Edinburgh, just before the planned opening, in protest against actions of SAC officials. Finlay comments: 'Beyond the prosaic (almost pedantic, moral) level already alluded to, what I was aware of (as a "reason") was, that the absence of the works was a clearer statement of their content, than the works themselves could have been, in that circumstance. In short, the absence of the exhibition, was the exhibition, and the (Scottish) Arts Council clearly found this unacceptable though it had recently mounted (and publicly defended) and exhibition which consisted entirely of blank canvases, carefully framed. (Perhaps this was the ideal "state art" social occasion - so very near in form to my own, yet in effect its opposite.)"
The canceled exhibition can be taken to mark the opening of what, after a number of preliminary skirmishes, was to become the Little Spartan War. Within months, the SAC made it known that, while it accepted that Finlay's action in withdrawing the exhibition was entirely legal, communications between themselves and the artist would henceforth be conducted through solicitors. They then instructed their solicitors not to correspond with Finlay. Subsequently, the SAC refused to allow the artist the right to add documentary material to works of his in their collection. The Crown Office intervened to prevent the Consumer Protection Department (a department of local government) from taking legal action against the SAC. Strathclyde Regional Council entered the fray by withdrawing the rates relief it had formerly granted to the gallery in Finlay's garden at Stonypath. One of the 'reasons' put forward by the Region was that the gallery did not receive an SAC grant... In 1980 - in a move that had been in the making at least since his Serpentine exhibition - Finlay transformed his gallery into a Garden Temple. Strathclyde Region refused him the rates exemption granted by law to religious buildings. It failed even to give the Finlays the chance to put their case for mandatory relief and had recourse to legal pressures to enforce its arbitrary decision. In this, it had the passive, and at times active, support of a number of judicial, administrative and elected officials, as well as public bodies, who refused to act on the matter. In September, 1984, the SAC published a statement asking Strathclyde Region to avoid further action pending reassessment of the Garden Temple. The Region failed to respond. The Regional Assessor, acting at the behest of the SAC, subsequently agreed that the description 'garden temple' was not a valid one, but the Region still remained unmoved - and in February 1985, the SAC refused to advise the Region as to the meaning of the term. Although Finlay protested that in so doing the SAC had violated the terms of its charter, the arts establishment once again refused to take notice, and Strathclyde Region announced that it was going to go ahead with the sale of the works seized form the Temple in 1983.
If the events of 1984-85 suggest considerable confusion on the part of various British authorities, it should be recalled that Finlay's demand throughout the whole affair has always been simply for a fair chance to put his case, so that the legality of the Region's rates claim might be properly established. The conflict is not over payment as such. It is the result of Strathclyde Region's refusal to examine the grounds on which a building can appropriately, in the 1980s, be regarded as a Garden Temple. Finlay refuses to allow a bureaucracy to settle unilaterally a cultural question which it has publicly stated not even to understand. It should also be underlined that no brief account of the affair can give any indication of the hardship and suffering which the Finlays have put up with, in their refusal to yield on what they consider to be a matter of principle.
1978
Finlay embarked on a 'Five Year Hellenisation Plan' for his garden at Stonypath. Stonypath was subsequently renamed Little Sparta.
1978
Corresponded with Albert Speer; idea for the Third Reich Revisited series ( first exhibited in 1982; complete showing, 1984-85). 1978 also marked the beginning of FInlay's 'Free Arts' project, an answer to the problem of the dominance of state-aided art within a pluralist democracy. The Project was designed to allow everyone to have a role as a patron in a genuinely pluralist cultural economy, instead of reducing the general public to the role of consumer in an arts market dominated by the state. The scheme worked in a modest way, even if Finlay encountered reluctance on the part of artists and potential patrons to participate in a project which did not have official approval.
March 1979
'Crates Event' at the Charlotte Square offices of the SAC. Projected by Finlay as a pastiche of the avant-garde 'event' (a type of activity the SAC likes to subsidize), it was built around the return by Finlay of two neoclassical stone reliefs which the SAC had accidentally delivered to Stonypath after acquiring them for its collection. Finlay played upon the ambiguities of bureaucratic prose, in an effort to focus upon the problem of communication between the artist and the arts administration. The SAC was not appreciative and the reliefs in question were subsequently modified to mark the occasion. The SAC's stone reliefs were to figure once more in the Little Spartan War when, early in 1984, they were removed from the SAC headquarters and installed in the Temple at Little Sparta as war spoils. The raid was carried out by the Saint-Just Vigilantes, a group of Finlay supporters who had previously conducted a number of guerrilla activities in defense of the garden and Temple. Named after a prominent French Revolutionary leader, the Vigilantes made their first appearance in the fictional context of Finlay's Third Reich Revisited. Reference to the French Revolution became a prominent feature both of Finlay's garde and Temple and of the conduct of the Little Spartan War.
1978-9
Japanese Stacks, in various woods, with John R. Thorpe.
1980
Work started on the Sacred Grove at the Kršller-MŸller Museum in Holland. Project completed in Spring 1982.
1980-1
Nature Over Again After Poussin traveling exhibition.
4 February 1983
After a long period of verbal skirmishing, accompanied by various attempts by Strathclyde Region to put pressure on the Finlays, the First Battle of Little Sparta took place, when the sheriff officer unsuccessfully attempted to seize works from the Garden Temple. The Saint-Just Vigilantes were successfully mobilized, and Little Sparta won the day - as the pressmen and television cameras in attendance testified. The Vigilantes had earlier drawn attention to themselves by carrying out a neoclassical poster campaign (in Latin) involving several historic buildings in Edinburgh, and also by conveying 'to the protection of the trees' dryads from the Little Sparta Temple, which the sheriff officer had placed under summary arrest. A medal was struck to commemorate the First Battle of Little Sparta, and a monument was erected on the battlefield.
15 March 1983
Budget Day Raid. While the attention of the press was monopolized by events at Westminister, the Region struck again. The sheriff officer removed from the Finlays' Temple a number of works, which he placed in an undisclosed bank vault. Documentation forming an integral part of some of the pieces removed was left behind, depriving them of much of their value. Amongst the items seized (valued at twice the sum figuring on the sheriff officer's warrant) were a number of works belonging in whole or in part to various individuals and establishments. it proved impossible to ensure the cooperation of judicial or parliamentary authorities to obtain the return of these items to their rightful owners. Only the Wadsworth Atheneum of Connecticut was able to rec over its property, with the threat of assistance from the US State Department. Private collectors in Britain were unable to obtain satisfaction, even after offering proof of ownership. Following the sheriff officer's raid, Little Sparta was closed to visitors for a year.
August-September 1983
Monumental stone inscription - 'The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future' Saint-Just - exhibited at the Sculpture Show, Hayward Gallery, London.
1983-4
Collaborations with the architect Andrew Townsend. Goose Hut and Grotto completed at Stonypath, Little Sparta.
1984
The garden and Temple again open to visitors. The Temple, in what will probably be its definitive state, consists of a Main Room, conceived as an extension of the garden, and as homage to the classical and pastoral values of the French Revolution; an Intermediary Room, on the theme of Virtue, Terror and Revolution, with wall-hangings and flags repeating the motif of the lyre and the Oerlikon gun; and a Dark Room. In 1984, this housed the stone relief war trophies. There is also an Office where essays, publications and other documents are stored. While the garden spread into the main room of the Temple, an increasing number of columns and capitals found a place in the garden, bringing about a movement in the opposite direction. The interpenetration of garden and Temple is now one of the chief features of Little Sparta.
Summer-Autumn 1984
Exhibition of tree-plaques in the Merian-Park, Basel, and of Talismans and Signifiers, and Japanese Stacks at the Graeme Murray Gallery, Edinburgh and subsequently in the British Council's British Show in Australia; completed Third Reich Revisited, together with Heroic Ephemera from the Little Spartan War, in a touring exhibition organized by Southampton Art Gallery. Proposals for the Schweizergarten, Vienna, the Maritime Village, Swansea, and the Villa Celle, Italy - a measure of the recognition of the landscaping aesthetic developed by Finlay at Little Sparta. Indoor sculpture 9 Columns purchased by the Kunstmuseum, DŸsseldorf.
March-May 1985
Little Sparta & Kriegsschatz exhibitions with Sarkis at the Espace Rameau-Chapelle Sainte-Marie, Never, France and at the Eric Fabre Gallery, Paris. Finlay also took part in outdoor sculpture exhibitions at Geneva, and at Wageningen in Holland. Proposals for the bi-centennial celebrations of the French Revolution.
July 1985
Shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
