Gardening may be divided into three species: kitchen gardening—parterre-gardening—and landskip, or picturesque-gardening… It consists in pleasing the imagination by scenes of grandeur, beauty, or variety. Convenience merely has no share here; any farther than as it pleases the imagination.
—“Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening,” William Shenstone, 1764.
Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one head, composing. … Where the viewer is solitary, imagination is the scale.
—“Detached Sentences on Gardening,” Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1985.
These two quotations provide an intellectual background for Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “landskip,” Little Sparta (1966), and a general idea of Finlay’s concept of art, which is inseparable from his concept of gardening. Finlay takes the land as a canvas onto which he can project his imagination. The same is true of language: Finlay’s work as a concrete poet shows him using language simultaneously as a signifying mechanism and as raw material: the shaped poem is both language and visual object. Landscape under the control of Finlay’s imagination is also both language and visual object. Shenstone points out in a footnote that, “Garden-scenes may perhaps be divided into the sublime, the beautiful, and the melancholy or pensive,” clearly expressing the idea that while seeing the garden is a visual experience, that same experience may involve both emotion and intellect.
For Finlay, imagination is not the random flow of images from the subconscious. Echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, Finlay’s imagination represents a conscious effort of selection, placement, and shaping that permeates every facet of his artistic production. His focus on transforming reality into art reflects his fascination as well with the second half of the eighteenth century, which takes the Western world from the Age of Reason into a fraught Romanticism that inverts or questions every precept, artistic or political, of the previous age. That the French Revolution of 1789 should begin as the application of rationality or reason to society and end in the Reign of Terror of 1793, with thousands senselessly sacrificed to the Goddess of Reason, is a paradox Finlay found irresistible.
In celebration of his centennial, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) is currently the subject of an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and eight other venues, including David Nolan Gallery. David Hartt, who designed the exhibition, has managed to deploy some eighteen items in the gallery, including wall and floor pieces, works both large and small, in such a way that viewers unfamiliar with Finlay can understand what his work is about. No mean feat, because the Nolan space divides into two rectangular viewing rooms connected by a corridor, itself a third viewing area.
The first subject would be Finlay’s version of the pastoral—an armed pastoral in Finlay’s case. This mode harkens back to the transition in landscape gardening that took place during the second half of the eighteenth century, which saw a move away from the French geometrical control of land into British picturesque irregularity and then into Romantic sublimity. So, Finlay’s plaster cast, Man with Panzerschreck (1993), holds a German bazooka-style weapon from World War II. The pastoral world in art—starting with one of Finlay’s favorite works, Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego (1637–38), with its embedded idea of death, too, having a place in Arcadia—is closer to the violent world of history than we might think. Aphrodite of the Pastoral (1993) is another evocation of Finlay’s violent pastoral: the plaster-cast Venus wears a US Army Desert Camouflage jacket. Even goddesses need protection when the bullets start flying.
And they must fly in Finlay’s world because no change can take place without a clash of opposing forces. This Finlay illustrates in a 1987 stone wall piece, a frieze that shows an arrow on the left metamorphosing into an automatic rifle on the right, the piece inscribed with its title: Every Goal Negates (L. Feuerbach). You can’t move forward without cancelling some element of the present. This idea shows why the French Revolution is central to Finlay’s thinking. Two pieces, a screenprint titled Néoclassicisme Révolutionnaire (1988) and a carved stone Urn 1794 (1993), remind us that the Reign of Terror, which ended in 1794, would see many guillotined heads falling, if not into urns, then into baskets. Finlay’s lithograph Saint-Just Composing the Republican Institutions (1992) is a revolutionary pin-up. Louis de Saint-Just, the most radical of leaders during the revolution, appears as a naked hero as he composes a document whose tenets would never be put into practice. Saint-Just himself would ultimately be guillotined.
Finlay probably identified himself with Saint-Just in the sense that as an artist, he constantly tried to bring the ideal world of aesthetics into proximity with the world we live in. His garden in Scotland, Little Sparta, is the total expression of this idea, but shows like this one at David Nolan invite us to delight in Finlay’s fragments, the remains of a brilliant career.
