ARTS
Follies
Neo-Classical rearmament
Alan Powers applauds the revival by Ian Hamilton Finlay of the noble tradition of the pamphlet war in defence of follies, old and new The first letter I received from Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish poet, in February this year came quickly to the point: 'I enclose some material on the dreadful National Trust Follies Guide. As there is at least the remnant of an educated class in England, I cannot understand how this book is tolerated.' The 'material' included cards bearing pictures and slo- gans, notably two drawings after J-L. David, with daggers hanging menacingly over a dead body inscribed `I was a member of the National Trust' or 'I was published by Jonathan Cape'. Another card, beautifully printed in letterpress with a fleuron border, entitled Menu a la Carte, lists Danton, Hebert, Clootz, Meulenkamp and Headley. The first three met their fate long ago. The last two are the joint authors of Follies, a National Trust Guide, pub- lished by Jonathan Cape in 1986.
The Follies War of Ian Hamilton Finlay, allied with other artists and academics, is unresolved but far from finished. Follies contains a slighting reference to the garden at Stonypath, alias Little Sparta, which Ian and Sue Finlay have created over the past 20 years. This modern successor to the poetic gardens of the 18th century is illustrated and analysed in Ian Hamilton Finlay, a Visual Primer by Yves Abrioux (Reaktion Books, £24), but the war is being fought on a much broader front, and Finlay insists that it is not merely the result of personal grievance.
Finlay's poetry has seldom been pre- sented in conventional forms. In the 1960s he was a leading Concrete poet, using words pared down to a minimum. His readiness to do battle, evidently unknown to Headley and Meulenkamp, has express- ed itself in cards, pamphlets and, at times, sculptures and medals. While most people threatened by bureaucracy or adverse crit- icism turn away to 'get on with their lives', Finlay fights back, making such campaigns part of his artistic activity, and abetted by the 'Saint-Just Vigilantes'. This mysterious group of Neo-Classical supporters is not wholly mythical.
The beginnings of 'Neo-Classical rearmament' at Little Sparta date back to 1970. It proved prophetic, since in 1983 the garden was twice invaded by bailiffs from Strathclyde Regional Council, who even- tually succeeded in removing works of art from the garden temple on which rates had suddenly been levied. Finlay refused to pay until his case for its status as a religious building had been heard. The First and Second Battles of Little Sparta resulted in a stream of pamphlets, cards and parodistic stickers. `To be a hero, it is not enough to write to bureaucracy twice,' declares one handbill, rubricated 'Death to Strathclyde Region'. At the side of the farm track leading to the Finlays' property a bronze relief mounted on a plinth records the battle, with the emblem of a machine-gun, and the Virgilian motto: 'Begin with me, my flute, begin my song'. The case remains unresolved.
Because of their failure to declare on this issue Finlay also began his long-running dispute with the Scottish Arts Council, involving, at one stage, the fly-posting of cultural monuments in Edinburgh with finely lettered linocut posters inscribed `Concilium Artium delendum est' .
In thus transgressing the normal res- traints of artistic behaviour, Finlay has performed a vital service. The tradition of pamphlet war seems to have died out with Wyndham Lewis in the 1920s, but has a noble history. The Follies War is not merely part of an eccentric personal ven- detta. If the National Trust allows its name to be used on a book which exploits a heritage as 'a commodity, to be sold for a giggle', then it concerns anyone who really cares about history, landscape, archi- tecture or poetry, whether they know it or not. The idea that architecture is, or ought to be, funny, is the main theme of Follies. An appropriate wit was applied to the subject by the painter Barbara Jones in her book Follies and Grottoes (1953 and 1974), but the newer book subordinates schol- arship, accuracy and intelligence to the attitude that all folly builders are lunatics, to be laughed at behind the bars of some bedlam of architectural history.
The casus belli is, in fact, whether the past is dead or alive. If the past is dead, then the attitude of Follies does not matter. It is of little concern whether there is a difference between follies and garden tem- ples, and whether gardens like Studley Royal and Stourhead are any more than the sum of their architectural parts. It does not matter if the garden at Little Sparta, a equally uncompromising cultural tenden- cy, refusing any Post-Modernist distortions of Classical architecture. In fact, Leon Krier, the chief theorist of contemporary Classical architecture in England, has much in common with Finlay in his wit, austere doctrine and determination to inte- grate the Classical tradition with a vision of reformed modern life.
These qualities are certainly alien to English methods. Krier is a cosmopolitan figure, born in Luxembourg, while Finlay perpetuates the Scottish tradition of look- ing to France for intellectual rigour, bor- rowing extensively from the history of the Revolution. His work is much more appreciated in Europe than in Scotland or England, and he has major commissions in progress at Versailles and Munster. The quick-firing polemics of Krier and Finlay demand total commitment to a cause which most English critics and patrons are only prepared to back two ways, yet both have shown how modern Classicism could be- come the mainstream of culture, not only visual but literary and intellectual. The
THE NATIONAL TRUST Follifies Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty
FIGHT FOLLY WITH THE SAINT-JUST VIGILANTES Little Sparta
visual and intellectual masterpiece of inter- national renown, is dismissed as a heap of inscriptions too small to detain the folly hunter in his Range Rover. But, if the past is dead, then the present must be so, too, so far as it concerns the thought and feeling required for creative art. The fallacy of Modernism, detected by Ian Hamilton Finlay in the Concrete poetry of the late Sixties, was the attempt to build in a vacuum over the grave of history. Post- Modernism has filled the vacuum by man- ipulating the embalmed corpse of history like a ventriloquist's dummy, distorting it into grotesque attitudes. In this, the Follies guide stands for much of the culture of our time.
I first became aware of the Follies War when inviting Ian Hamilton Finlay to be represented in the exhibition Real Architecture at the Building Centre (after a provincial tour this returns to London where it can be seen at the Ibstock Brick- work Design Centre from 16 September). The exhibition is a manifestation of an garden at Little Sparta contains the germ of such a possible culture, and the Follies War, on a miniature scale, is a model for the change in attitudes required to bring it about.
If the National Trust is so concerned not to lose face that it feels compelled to defend the Follies guide, it is silencing the past to which it is so greatly committed. Stourhead and Studley Royal will not as a result become wildernesses overnight, although to anybody exposed without scholarly defences to the Follies guide they are dimmed and diminished. But, in Fin- lay's words, 'the issue raised by the NT is the central issue of our time: Is there a place for reverence any longer?' Once it is brought to their attention, there is no doubt that 'the remnant of an educated class in England' will be concerned about it. So many second-rate books are pub- lished on important subjects, but it takes someone with Finlay's ingenuity, tenacity and belligerence to seize upon this small facet of a much larger problem. His own achievement in reviving the poetic garden gives him ample authority to speak, and, although the pretext for the Follies War may seem trivial, the implications are not.
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