There? Where?
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
The most delightful exhibition this summer by a native artist is the present display of con- crete poetry by Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Axiom Gallery. I have seldom, if ever, enjoyed a more sensible and cheerful collection of work than this show, which so exactly pins down, at one and the same time, the precise sense of a word and its physical appearance in terms of letters—and then sends out echoes and resonances of further meaning into space. I have no idea if Mr Finlay is a major or a minor artist: he is most certainly a fine one; his feel- ing for the emotional undercurrents, as well as the physical space and density of colour— and the most delicate inflections of abstract form—is quite scintillating.
Set on the floor and extending laterally like the Uccello Hunt in the Forest at Night are two words, STARLIT WATERS, with the letters three-dimensionally cut and separated: these two words are in a warm, deep blue and they march along, like a procession, on a solid red base. Enveloping the whole thing is a tightly drawn, orange fishing-net of open diamond- shaped repeat design. The net slightly muffles the physical impact of the words, qualifies their meaning, and triggers off an extraordinary sensation, both concrete and mysterious, of waters spangled by starlight. I have spent my life clambering out of the nearest window at the slightest hint of folksiness or feyness and suffer from restricted powers of visual imagina- tion when confronted with anything that is supposed to be more than it seems—architects' drawings, for instance—so there is little chance of self-delusion here. The imaginative extension and suggestiveness are there in the concrettio reality which confronts—and confounds-0 you.
Elsewhere two words, 'wave' and 'rock,' are repeated in abstract groups, side by side, en- graved and painted orange on a milky-white glass rectangle set on a table: the 'rock' words pile up asymmetrically until a craggy pile of rocks is suggested to the right, whilst on the left the 'wave' words swish and meander along with a more laterally insistent asymmetry until a 'wave' word merges with a 'rock' word and other `wave' words touch and glance off 'rock' words —and here we are with the waves dashing on the rocks.
Whimsical? Absolutely not: this and other concrete poems are too scrupulously dead- pan, almost prosaic in their visual and tele- pathic poetry. The word 'steer' engraved on a dark grey slate, in another work, acts as the base for a slow moving, rising stack of re- peated 'star' words, eddying to and fro like a column of smoke: two-thirds of the way up, one particular 'star' is slightly spaced out and it is this, though differently spaced to `steer,' which communicates directly with it. The mood of night is established, as well as the slow tacking to and fro of a boat over the rise and fall of the sea.
Finlay engraves his words on glass, stone, wood or slate, colours them, recesses them, spaces them with eloquent authority, and makes abstract art come to life with great dignity and weight. There are many delectable silk- screen prints at very cheap prices and I cannot think of a more pleasurable or reasonable way of spending a pound or two and thereby add-
"another, dimension, sometimes a huge sta, to four walls. This is Finlay's first one- show and will prove historically impor- tant. Small children are asked to take one and Sixpence and their sandwiches for school out ings: all you need at Axiom is a free mind any dbout fifteen bob for an outing that will outlis., the occasion.
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