APHRODITE OF THE TERROR
[1] In the Terror, a red silk thread worn around the neck intimated that friends or relatives had been lost to the guillotine. Aphrodite [ or Venus ] being a goddess, the same adornment signifies the loss of Olympian relatives and refers not to the Revolution’s ‘Sublime’ Terror but rather to the subsequent, secular Terror directed against The Ideal. Ian Hamilton Finlay
JE VOUS SALUE MARAT
[4] A window in the architect Corbusier’s Ronchamps Chapel bears the words ‘Je vous salue Marie’ rendered more or less in the manner of this neon. According to the Revolutionary Catechism good Jacobins should ‘have no other god than Marat’. How could a Revolution which based itself on the writings of Rousseau be other than religious?
Ian Hamilton Finlay
DAS WORT AUS STEIN: WILDFLOWER
[10] This fluted and inscribed columnular vase contains wildflowers to create an elegant pastoral. The composition of form, words and flowers suggests an association between historical and contemporary eras. The inscription couples the title of the 1939 German film, which translates as The Word Through Stone , with the word ‘Wildflower’. This short film is a paean to Nazi architecture, and the title adopts the phrase used by Adolf Hitler to describe his building programme. The film begins in Munich with the Ehrentempels. These were the twin Temples of Honour that were erected in 1935 to commemorate the dead of the 1923 putsch. Destroyed in 1947, their podia burgeon with wildflowers as oases of countryside in the city. The square column of this stoneware vase is based on those of the Ehrentempels, whose ruinous stones nurture the wildflower. This vase offers an eloquent reflection on these hardy, transformative and beautiful flowers. Patrick Eyres
WHITE ROSE
[16 ] In my version, there is a simple play on the fact that rose is both a colour and a plant [ bush ]; ROSE is rendered in white, and WHITE [ in French, German and English ] is rendered in rose. As it happens there is a nice rose colour available in neon. In the neon version the text is rendered in a free, handwritten manner, with the words centred one above the other, and because the French has the noun first it allows an alternation between top and bottom for the placing of the rose colour. Ian Hamilton Finlay [ letter to Tom Bee ]
GUILLOTINE TEAPOT
[ 22 ] This work represents the two aspects of the French Revolution, the epical [ the Guillotine] and the domestic [ the teapot ] .
FOR THE BEST OF THE JACOBINS1 THE REVOLUTION WAS INTENDED AS A PASTORAL WHOSE VIRGIL 2 WAS ROUSSEAU3
1Jacobins – a group of parliamentaries coming from England who were very well organised and always voted the same way. Their behaviour was the first expression of a modern political party.
2 Virgil – Poet who accompanied Dante on his trip into hell.
3 Rousseau – Philosopher, Inspirer of the Revolution as well as a believer of an idealised and romantic relationship between people.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
A,E,I,O,BLUE
[ 29 ] A,E,I,O,BLUE is a text written in light, suffusing and filling its space. Four vowels – and by implication a fifth, included in the final word and rhyming with it. Loosely speaking a vowel is just voiced breath, sound made with an unconstricted vocal tract, coloured by its shaping; with no friction, any more than there is in the movement of light. Finlay’s text re-configures half the opening line of an 1871 sonnet, ‘Voyelles’, by Arthur Rimbaud, a work absolutely modern despite being written in classical alexandrines:
“A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes...”
[ A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, Some day I shall speak of your hidden origins... ]
Finlay evades the complex and still contested questions of the rationales for Rimbaud’s colour-associations, for their plausibility: leaving us in a space saturated with colour, its BLUE vowel re-echoing and re-echoing.
Harry Gilonis
12 / 1794
[45] No group painting exists of the doomed members of the Committee of Public Safety. The French author, Pierre Michon, has recently devised the fiction of such a secular ‘Last Supper’ being completed, more famous than David’s Marat, and an inspiration for the historian of the Revolution, Jules Michelet. In 1969, the Greek artist, Jannis Kounellis, installed a lighted candle before a blackboard with the slogan, ‘Liberty or Death’, and the names Marat and Robespierre chalked upon it. Finlay’s night scene evokes the committee with twelve named candlesticks.
Stephen Bann
VIALA
[48 ] “I have also just finished the statue of the young Republican drummer boy who, mortally wounded, was forced by the men from Vendée to cry out ‘Long live the King!’ His only response was to press the tricolour cockade to his heart.”
– David d’Angers in a letter to the German artist Carus. This drummer boy is usually identified as Joseph Bara, but Robert Rosenblum [ Transformations ] quotes the view that he was really Joseph-Agricola Viala, who is preferred in the stone because the ‘ V ’ in his name coincidentally suggests the rope-pattern on the side of a drum.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
FLATTOP / TOMBSTONE / ALTAR
A PLACE / FOR LIGHT / TO LAND
[65] The term ‘flat-top’ has a specific meaning here, since it is being used to evoke the particular mark of aircraft-carrier which has been equipped with a ‘flat-top’ flight-deck. Such flat decks were employed both to launch and to recover the aircraft. One of Finlay’s early garden features was his ‘Aircraft-carrier birdtable’, which harboured a small pool of refreshing water. He also composed an emblem which invested the nuclear aircraft-carrier with an exemplary role, as it was a ‘celebration of earth, air, fire and water’. In this case, the flat polished surface is exposed to the sky. The simple message carved at its edges attests that this is where ‘light’ will land. Light will illuminate the square surface of the cubic structure which faces up to the sky [ altar ] , but also turns downwards to the earth [ tomb ] . Stephen Bann
WINDS / WOODS / STREAMS / SEAS
[68 ] The four urns, inscribed with the elements of an idealised natural landscape, owe something to minimalism but are derived from a passage in the Victorian pietist poetess and essayist Christina Rossetti. Ian Hamilton Finlay
