Star/Steer is a masterpiece from 1968 by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). What you see can be simply described. The word “star” appears a dozen times, screenprinted in silver on deep grey. They graduate down the page in a swaying column. Right at the bottom is a 13th word, “steer”, as if tethering – or guided by – all these descending stars.
Each star is like an instance of itself, glimmering out of a fog, and the winding pattern irresistibly evokes starlight on rippling water. You look up to the stars, and down to the invisible boat summoned by that noun-verb “steer”. Which star to follow, how to navigate at sea, what the night skies can hold: the work is a visualisation, a poem and a prayer.
Finlay achieves all these sublime effects purely through the subtle arrangement of two words against two colours. His is an art of distillation, juxtaposition, thrift and contemplation. A poet before he became a concrete poet, a sculptor who became an “avant gardener”, as he put it, of that fabled landscape known as Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills beyond Edinburgh, Finlay understood as few other artists the emotional power of letters cutting into form, shape and colour.
You sense it over and again in this wonderful centenary commemoration at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. It’s there in the blue and white screenprint Evening Sail, which consists of the words “Evening Will Come They Will Sew the Blue Sail” running in classical script down a long deep blue banner, as if to suggest both the sail and the mariners’ shrouds sewn in antiquity from such sails at the end of the day. It’s there in the scarlet invectives, so exquisitely lettered on his behalf by Nicholas Sloan, against the government quangos Finlay despised: Pereant Tyranni Nummari (Let Perish the Money Tyrants).
And it runs through this show, as through his Pentlands garden, incised in all kinds of stone. A tank is delicately inserted into the pastoral relief Et in Arcadia Ego, embodying Virgil’s ringing memento mori, carved in the marble below. A bird table for Finlay’s garden doubles as a miniature aircraft carrier (imagine the birds landing and taking off), the letter E incised into its deck, a reference to the USS Enterprise, the longest nuclear-powered carrier in the world.
One gallery is filled with haunting photographs of Finlay’s artists’ signatures at Little Sparta, including his tribute to Albrecht Dürer. Above a stand of tall grass resembling Dürer’s own Great Piece of Turf, hangs his famous AD monogram incised in stone – as if Dürer had himself signed nature.
Finlay selects the mot juste with a poet’s precision. Take a work such as Wave Rock from 1966. The word “wave” runs back and forth, horizontally, up against a vertical heap of the word “rock”. The waves meet, depart, always unpredictable in their encounter with the rocks. Look closer, and the words “wreak” and “wreck” become discernible in the collision of letters. And all these words are etched on a sheet of sandblasted glass propped up in a bit of driftwood, like a letter in a rack. Everything flows, and connects.
Finlay’s art is so refined, philosophical, antic in its wit and elegance, that it scarcely seems to comply with an embattled personality at constant war with institutions, galleries and publishers. But his long-running conflicts were notorious. A vivid gallery of films and photographs recounts his 1980s campaign against Strathclyde council for trying to force him to pay business rates on an old byre that he had converted into a classical temple. Local farmers joined in, blocking the marauding tax officials with their tractors. I especially like the poster Shock Tropes for Little Sparta (Sparta, of course, was at war with Athens).
“Mors Concilio Artium” (Death to the Arts Council) is inscribed on blazing prints. When the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) accidentally returned some of Finlay’s stone carvings, his revenge was classical. The names of council functionaries, along with other enemies – including well-known painters and poets such as Elizabeth Blackadder and Iain Crichton Smith – are now carved in perpetuity on the back, along with a rousing tribute to Robespierre. Not incidentally, the SAC eventually gave them to the nation.
The French Revolution, battles on land and sea, historical warfare – all have enduring significance in Finlay’s art. He joined up in the second world war and his own position is always ambiguous. Two curious stone boots, exquisitely carved by John Andrew, are in fact representations of the funnels of the Mikuma, a Japanese cruiser deployed during the war. Terrifying on a vast scale, they are reduced to what Finlay ironically called paperweights. But lest we forget, the Mikuma was sunk in 1942 by the US with most of its crew.
It feels apt that such a show should take place in the neoclassical grandeur of the former Dean Orphanage in Edinburgh. One of the most immaculate works here – poised between antiquity and conceptualism – is the tiny Marble Paper Boat, in which an origami vessel crests the fluted waves of a stone finial that would not look out of place in the Georgian architecture of the city’s New Town.
If only this exhibition stretched from the ground floor to the upper galleries too. But Finlay is widely spread in his centenary year, with several other shows, including one at Victoria Miro, London (30 April-24 May), and an illustrated book of essays by writers including the late, lamented Tom Lubbock.
What makes this particular exhibition so special, moreover, is its emphasis on the intimate: many small sculptures raised up to perfect viewing levels on plinths, the walls dense with exquisite screenprints. What you see is Finlay’s mind in closeup – words and ideas forming into two- and three-dimensional works of unique and visionary art.
• Ian Hamilton Finlay is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, until 26 May
