Spare Room 33 Essay #2

In the smallest room of their unassuming Western Creek home, local collectors Susan Taylor and Peter Jones present a regular program of exhibitions under the banner of Spare Room 33. Rigorously researched and curated, diligently compiled and considered, the program connects visitors directly to a network of international art historical discourses. Over the coming weeks the Drill Hall Gallery will publish a selection of Peter and Susan’s accessible and informed essays that accompany each of their exhibitions.

Published here is the room sheet from their exhibition of Scottish poet/artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. It was through Finlay’s work that the couple was first introduced to concrete poetry. This opened exciting pathways that shaped the future of their collection.

SPARE ROOM 33 SHEET #2
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Poet/Artist

Introduction

Our first conscious encounter with the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was seeing his series of 12 screen prints, the Blue and Brown Poems, in the capsule exhibition of works from the Kerry Stokes collection, titled Peep, at Tarrawarra, Christmas 2007. The combination of text, colour, font (principally Helvetica) with the simplicity, discipline and cleanliness of each print was instantly attractive. We did not know at that time that these prints were published as a calendar in 1968 and represented a kind of ‘greatest hits’ collection, featuring major works by Finlay previously published in the 1960’s, including his first Poster Poem (Le Circus), Acrobats, Wave/Rock, Ajar, Ring of Waves and Green Waters. We were also not fully aware that we were therefore seeing some of the supreme expressions of the international concrete poetry movement.

While Finlay published work as a playwright and poet during the 1950’s, it was his discovery of the form of concrete poetry in the early 1960’s that energised his art. However, the range of Finlay’s interests and imagination could not be contained by any single form, and he relentlessly explored new ways to express his poetic imagination, often in collaboration with fellow poets, illustrators, typographers and stonemasons. Initially, these new forms of expression – including the poster poem, the kinetic artist’s book, ‘one-word’ poems, and the transfer of poems from the page into the physical environment in sand-blasted glass and carved stone – could still be categorised as part of the wider concrete poetry movement. As the 1960’s progressed, however, Finlay became increasingly uncomfortable with this label, its constraints on his highly individual poetic expression, and its implied association with other practitioners with whom he saw no fundamental commonality. As well as maintaining a prolific and varied output of poems, prints and cards into the 1970’s, Finlay had also established his garden at Stonypath (later ‘Little Sparta’) in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh as a physical canvas for his work. By 1971, he declined to be represented in the anthology of British concrete poetry called Mindplay and accepted no definition of his practice beyond that of artist, poet or gardener.

Given that Finlay was prolific for over 40 years, this exhibition is necessarily a small sample of his output, but contains some of his key early works as a concrete poet and examples of some of the directions in which he took his art from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. Some of these are, frankly, opaque. His engagement with neo-classicism and the French revolution throughout the 1980’s was both deeply informed and deeply personal, meaning that the entry level for understanding it is set uncomfortably high. His text works also demonstrated a high degree of reduction, as he continued his quest (already evident in his early concrete poetry) to seek the maximum complexity available from the maximum simplicity, in such later forms as his ‘detached sentences’, combinations of two or three words, often executed in neon. 

Throughout Finlay’s life, an abiding preoccupation was the sea and everything associated with it – sailing, sailors, boats, barges, fish, fishermen, nets, waves etc – and the relationship of the sea to the land and the sky, a consciousness sharpened by his years employed as a shepherd on the bare and windswept Orkneys in the early 1950’s. The exhibition contains many variations on this theme, across the duration of his artistic output.

Concrete poetry

What is concrete poetry? Why ‘concrete’? Have we got the time and space in these notes to fully answer those questions? Well, no, but a brief explanation is desirable for any appreciation of Finlay’s art as a whole and for particular works in the exhibition. To take the second question first, we must keep in mind that one of the founders of the concrete poetry movement in the early 1950s, along with the Brazilian Noigandres group, was the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer (b.1925). Indeed, perhaps the best examplar of a concrete poem remains Gomringer’s Silencio (1954). Concrete poetry has antecedents both in poetic form (Mallarmé, Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Pound’s ideograms, dada) and artistic form. In terms of the latter, the Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), after a decade-long debate over the terminology best applicable to abstract painting, published his manifesto ‘The Basis of Concrete Painting’ in 1930, in which he stated: ‘We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a colour, a surface.’ Concrete art subsequently became the preferred terminology of many European abstract painters, including the Swiss painter Max Bill (1908-1994). As it turned out, Gomringer was Bill’s secretary in the early 1950’s, and saw an aesthetic connection between Bill’s concrete paintings and the new form of poetry that Gomringer was experimenting with.

This new form of concrete poetry rejected the syntax, grammar and sentence form of traditional poetry in favour of a reduced language made up of the basic textual elements – the letter, the syllable, the single word – which become the material from which the poem is constructed. The meaning of a concrete poem is delivered by the visual arrangement, interaction and juxtaposition of this material and its interaction with the blank page. The blank page is a frame for the poem, but the blank space of the page can also be an active participant in the poem’s meaning (e.g. Gomringer’s Silencio; also Finlay’s print Seams in this exhibition). A concrete poem has accordingly been defined as ‘the dynamic relationship between the words or fragments of words and the space around them’ (Terry Sturm, 1971) or, in a more extended definition, as ‘an art of signs, in which the element of metaphor arises not from the discursive framework, but from the range of variations and types of assemblage which can be exercised upon the printed word’ (Stephen Bann, 1966). The connection that Gomringer saw with concrete painting was the poem as a functional object, which displays its composition in its visible structure. 

Finlay’s concrete poetry

In his now famous letter to fellow concrete poet Pierre Garnier on 17 September 1963, Finlay wrote: ‘’Concrete’ began for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a physical level was no longer there –  so it had to be replaced with something else, with a syntax and movement that would be true to the new feeling …’. 

Finlay’s first collection of concrete poems, Rapel, published in 1963, shows him already personalising the form in his definition of the poems as either ‘fauve’ or ‘suprematist’, references to key art movements of the early 20^th century. The distinction between the two types is not particularly clear: Finlay compared his fauve poems to Apollinaire’s calligrammes and wrote that they had a kind of feeling that relates to reality and space, whereas the poems classified as suprematist were more formal. The elasticity of these distinctions, however, is illustrated by the Formal poem from Rapel (exhibition item A3) which, by its title and structure is seemingly suprematist, but by its content (a deer and a tree) could also satisfy the fauve definition. 

Finlay’s first Homage to Malevich from Rapel (item A2) is undoubtedly suprematist, not least given that the term is Malevich’s own. The poem references both Malevich’s famous painting of a black square in its form, and also the ultimate futility of the aspiration to perfection accepted in Malevich’s suprematist philosophy, in the way that the displacement of the letter ‘b’ disrupts the perfection of the black block. That disruption also introduces additional dimensions of uncertainty, tension and suspension to the poem, in the continuous see-sawing between the words ‘lack’ and ‘lock’ and their oppositional meanings.

Finlay classified the untitled poem from Rapel we have called The little burn (item A4) as fauve. In this poem, Finlay has commented that the path of the burn/stream is denoted by a series of ‘m’s, representing its sound, and ‘x’s, representing mills along its course and also the ‘kiss’ of sunlight on the water. The different sizes and styles of font suggest the altering nature of the water as it flows. The overall sound of the running water Finlay compares to tunes on a mouth organ.

Finlay’s preoccupation with fishing boats is illustrated in the Lullaby (item A15), from his second collection of concrete poetry, Telegrams from my Windmill (1964), where the poem asks the child to count boats, with their different coloured hulls and sails, instead of the traditional sheep. In the same year, Finlay’s first Poster Poem screen print takes the form of an old-fashioned carnival poster, using an imagined fishing boat, Le Circus, and its accoutrements as the performers. The attendant spiel finishes in a circular rainbow’s ‘hoop’, created by the reflection of the rainbow on the sea’s surface. The reflection of objects on the surface of bodies of water was used many times by Finlay, including in the folding card Schiff in the exhibition (item B20).

The Poster Poem also contains a fishing boat identification number, K47. Finlay quickly recognised the potential of such numbers for concrete poetry, as both readymade assemblages of textual units (letters and numbers) and coded signs (as per Bann above) of the boat’s home port. In 1966, he created a folding card called 4 Sails, where the interior physical structure of the card divides into four triangular ‘sails’, printed on which are various vernacular descriptions of sails, incorporating capitalised port letter codes, the key to which is presented on the rear of the card. He followed this the same year with the Sea Poppy 1 poem print (later published as a card – item B15) where the boat numbers are arranged in concentric circles, like a floating flower viewed from above. Sea Poppy 2 (item B14) uses the same idea but with actual fishing boat names that include the word ‘star’. The importance of the stars to navigation at sea is directly referenced in the Star/Steer poem print, also from 1966 but later reproduced (item A13), where the repeated word ‘star’ meanders down the page, like the tacking course of a yacht, ending in a transposition to the word ‘steer’, which is presented in bold or distinctive type, as is a single guiding star in the progression above it. 

The poem print Seams is a classic expression of concrete poetry in terms of the definitions presented earlier in these notes. A single word ‘seams’ is repeated vertically down one half of the page, but its component letter groups ‘sea’ and ‘ms’ are separated so that the blank space of the page between them creates a visual seam. As usual in Finlay, there is another dimension to this poem – ‘ms’ is an abbreviation for manuscript, so the ‘seam’ can also be viewed as the wake of a boat being ‘written’ on the dark green surface of the sea.

Artist’s books

Finlay produced a number of artist’s books between 1964 and 1967. His major innovation in this art form was to make the book an active (or kinetic) participant in the poem it contained, not just its carrier. For example, Canal Stripe Series 3 (1964) progresses the reader/viewer along a canal. The passing landscape contains a haystack, a cathedral, a houseboat and a windmill. As each page is turned, the object coming into view in the foreground is in large type on the recto page, while the object receding from sight is in small type on the verso page. Moreover, the syllables of the haystack, houseboat and windmill are separated and recombined, representing their constant movement and overlapping through the agency of the viewer’s own motion and changing perspective. Only the cathedral, as a dominant, solid form in the distance, is not altered in this way. The same theme of movement along a canal was also used by Finlay in his Canalscape from Futura 7 (item A14), which represents a tug towing three barges (‘offspring’) along a canal, the last of which is flying a flag.

The themes in Finlay’s artist’s books reached their peak of sophistication (and obliqueness!) in metaphor and abstraction in his last book in the series, Ocean Stripe 5 (1967), which juxtaposes apparently mundane photographs of fishing boats found in the trade magazine Fishing News with quotes from three major exponents of sound poetry: Ernst Jandl, Paul de Vree and Kurt Schwitters. The sequence ends with a boat churning its way into a stormy seascape, attended by a quote from Schwitters: ‘It is impossible to explain the meaning of art; it is infinite.’ After this, there was nothing more for Finlay to say in this form. In a reference to this book, Finlay described the letters and numbers that fishing boats carry as ‘little sound poems’. The postscript to the book is a transcription of one of Schwitters’ sound poems, a sequence of consonants not dissimilar to the fishing boat identification codes Finlay had been using in his visual poetry.

As can be seen, Finlay was highly educated on the history of art and forms of poetry he found relevant to his own preoccupations, and his printed output and his garden at Stonypath are littered with homages and references to particular artists and poets (items A5, A8, A10-12, B6).

Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.

Commencing in 1961, Finlay published an irregular poetry journal, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. (POTH), as a means of bringing to wider attention the work of British and international poets he admired. The title was taken from a Robert Creeley poem. The journal ran to 25 issues before concluding in 1967. Concrete poetry (by the Brazilian Noigandresgroup poet Augusto de Campos) first appeared in POTH 6 and by POTH 10, took up the whole issue. A number of later issues were given over in full to single artists or collaborations, including Robert Lax (17), Bridget Riley in collaboration with Ad Reinhardt (18), Ronald Johnson in collaboration with John Furnival (19), Finlay himself in collaboration with Richard Lyle (20) and Charles Biederman (22). The exhibition includes all issues of POTH from No. 7 through to No. 25.

Conclusion

The above notes, in focusing in particular on concrete poetry, are intended to serve as an entry point to Finlay’s art. The particular works in the exhibition discussed illustrate the multiple dimensions of meaning Finlay achieved in his best work, a complexity usually hidden within an apparently simple poem or object. While he eventually rejected concrete poetry as a descriptor of his art, he continued to use the tools of juxtaposition and metaphor throughout his career. In his 1963 letter to Pierre Garnier, Finlay wrote: ‘If I was asked, ‘Why do you like concrete poetry?’ I could truthfully answer ‘Because it is beautiful’.

Peter Jones and Susan Taylor

Spare Room 33

November 2013

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For events and programs related to Eye to Eye: The Susan Taylor and Peter Jones Collection please see our website dhg.anu.edu.au

Contact Anne-Marie Jean or Tony Oates for images and to arrange interviews: 02 6125 5832, anne-marie.jean@anu.edu.au, anthony.oates@anu.edu.au