Ian Hamilton Finlay: L’Idylle des Cerises
Until September 17; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

Ian Hamilton Finlay: Sentences
Until October 23; Inverleith House, Edinburgh

Ian Hamilton Finlay always has the same effect on me. Stepping through his magical garden at Little Sparta, or seeing this year’s festival shows at Ingleby gallery and Inverleith House, I feel a desperate craving to leaf through volumes of classical literature, history books and dictionaries. Only then will the artist’s battery of esoteric one-liners start to piece together like a silent 21-gun salute.

In an effort to decode Finlay’s work, I have spent the last 24 hours learning about the special calendar invented by French revolutionaries, and about the military discipline of the Spartan state. I have stared at photographs of battle-ships and side-drums, and reminded myself of the difference between Doric and Ionic columns. I have read a chunk of Virgil’s Aeneid, and found to my surprise that it’s by far the raciest book on my shelves.

For a man whose words invariably come in carefully parcelled nuggets, Finlay’s range of reference is encyclopaedic. His quotations might first appear unconnected, but once you trace them back to their sources, you are consistently returned to the classical virtues of purity, order and discipline.

These virtues are evident in Little Sparta, the garden which Finlay has gradually built up over the past 40 years, and which holds the key to all of his works. In its wild and cultivated areas, in its artefacts of stone and wood, it demonstrates the necessary friction between order and chaos.

Little Sparta has it all: the succinct texts, the concrete gunboats and the chaotic jumbles of foliage, wrapping themselves around immaculate chiselled stone. The tensions between wilful nature and obstinate order are all around, palpable without the need for intellectualising.

The artist’s son, Alex Finlay, has pointed out that Little Sparta “is not a crossword puzzle of cultural references to be worried away at and ticked off one by one”. Reading your classics is only half the battle; the other half is feeling the work, allowing its physical presence to make an impression on you. But, brought into a refined gallery space, one half of the equation is lost, and the dry crossword puzzle reasserts itself.

“The work is not an isolated object,” Ian Hamilton Finlay recently said about each artwork at Little Sparta, “but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on.” For the first time, works made for the garden are being shown elsewhere: Ingleby Gallery has three plaques orginally intended for one of Finlay’s temples, but, the lawnmower being in more pressing need of space, they never made it to their final resting place. The white limestone plaques sit neatly on Ingleby’s clean white walls like revolutionaries with no battle to fight. Though it’s a privilege to see them, they look trapped in the rarefied atmosphere of the New Town gallery, divorced from the rampant greenery which would counterbalance their uncompromising forms.

These works are in a room devoted to the French Revolution. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Finlay’s favourite revolutionary, makes frequent appearances in quotes and visual metaphors. Responsible for the Terror, in which thousands were guillotined for showing insufficient devotion to the new Republic, Saint-Just looked back to Sparta for a model of strong citizenship.

In the centre of the floor stands a work not seen before. Column To Drum features four sandstone cylinders, gradually morphing from a Greek column on the left, to a military side-drum on the right. Typically Finlayesque, this simple visual statement is bulging with cultural references and multiple meanings.

From column to drum, Classicism is transformed into the Neoclassicism of the French revolution, and culture is militarised along the way. The final form in the sequence, a drum, happens to be the most primitive form of human expression. Column To Drum is characteristically neutral on the question of whether this cultural transformation demonstrates historical progress, or decline.

The back room of Ingleby Gallery reconnects Finlay’s work with nature. In a refreshing move, the Inglebys have carried out the long overdue landscaping of their back garden to a design made by Finlay himself. The drawings hang next to the window, through which you can admire the garden, and a proposed outdoor sculpture sits just by the window too.

The rest of the room is filled with garden proposals in the form of pamphlets and prints, which might at first look too much like hard work. Don’t be fooled; they are a delight to peruse, full of Finlay’s typical humour and, in contrast with the obscurity of the French Revolution collection, they provide their own interpretation courtesy of the man himself. This is the best way to get inside Finlay’s head, and to understand his predilection for mixing and matching words with elastic meanings.

Inverleith House, in the Botanic Garden, boasts the biggest Finlay exhibition in Edinburgh since 1972. Again, it’s a missed opportunity not to situate works in the gardens themselves, but perhaps budget, conservation, and time have not allowed. Instead, Finlay has employed a signwriter to paint numerous of his detached sentences around the walls of the gallery.

“Gardens are not yet blamed for being civilised as our art museums are,” he opines, in large red letters. “The garden gnome is of the Gothic and not the Hellenic tradition,” in green capitals. “The Late Night Shipping Forecast is a kind of High Church Weather Service for radio listeners.” They are accessible sentences, full of humour, philosophy and wisdom.

These staccato one-liners do unfortunately bring to mind those e-mails which drop with cheerful frequency into your in-box. Listing a few dozen aphorisms from the Dalai Lama, they chirpily insist that your ears will drop off if you don’t forward them to 12 of your friends by midnight. By the time you reach Finlay’s pink bon-mots about friendship you can’t shake the association from your head.

Along with Edwin Morgan, Finlay introduced concrete poetry to Scotland, and while many of the detached sentences in Inverleith House lack the genre’s physical prowess, the two oddly shaped rooms around the lift shaft have provoked an imaginative response.

Upstairs, a band of textually-realised daisies is interrupted by the phrase “Mower is Less”. Here is Finlay’s innocent humour at its best. Downstairs, three vertical columns of text play with words, punctuation and layout. As your eyes find their way around the text, they move in union with the lark, rain and fountain which the words describe. Once you’ve seen that, you’ll be hungry for more: next stop Little Sparta.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.08.05