Avant gardener... Ian Hamilton Finlay at home
in Little Sparta. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
In some respects, the recently late and enduringly great Ian Hamilton Finlay's decision to name his most famous exercise in concrete poetry Little Sparta was a little odd. The intended irony was clear, of course, in that Finlay was clearly in for a dig at pompous Edinburgh, the so-called "Athens of the North" not far to the southwest of which the artist's poem-cum-garden lies.
But the ancient city-state's fame encompasses more than its military rivalry with and moral superiority to Athens (a contemporary account has it that "All Greeks know what is right, but only Spartans do it"). For Sparta was, culturally speaking, a desert. Whereas in Athens the idea of the virtuous life embraced the arts as an appropriate adornment to civilian existence, in Spartan society even spicing up your cooking a little was considered a dereliction of republican duty. Spartans, too, were famously law-abiding.
Those who have visited Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills are unlikely to describe it as a cultural desert (just as Finlay's concern with letters didn't extend particularly to those of the law). Whatever notion of beauty you have - your interests lying in typography, topiary or in modernist, as it were spartan, design - you're likely to find it reflected in Finlay's undulating masterpiece, one of the few artworks that both blooms and decays at the same time.
Finlay's creative life began with poetry, but as his endeavours extended to encompass the visual arts, both in their more obscure and obvious varieties, he was notable in declining to associate himself with conceptual art - a movement with which his work bears demonstrable and nontrivial relations despite his lambasting of "meaningless art" during the 70s and 80s - and in his continuing insistence on being referred to as a poet.
Many artists, in the past, referred to themselves as poets, the practice deriving from a time when poetry was the most revered of the fine arts. Finlay's reverence for the term relates to the way in which the term - the Greek term "poeisis" refers to the idea of construction - suggests the building of reality, the bringing into the world of something real and positive, rather than the (negative) imitation or representation of something simply already there.
Up for the Turner Prize in 1985, with Little Sparta voted "the nation's greatest work of art" by 50 leading Scottish artists in 2004, and with a permanent installation at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Finlay's reputation is now solidly established. But unlike his younger colleagues, for some of whom self-publicity seems to have become an art, Finlay did little to smooth his relations with either the artistic or the legislative establishment.
In particular, his exploration of Nazi symbolism frightened many artist and critics from identifying themselves too strongly with his cause. Even in death, his reputation is problematic, as the increasing interest being taken in Little Sparta constitutes one of the main threats to its continuing survival.
