Dissociation: On the poetics of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Tree/Columns

Abstract

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Sacred Grove at the Kroller-MUller Museum at Otterloo, Holland, is striking both for its rhetorical audacity and its obvious philosophical seriousness. In this paper, I shall give a description of the tree/column bases it contains in terms of the modernist rhetoric of collage before proceeding to an account of the Grove's intertextual status and concluding by an investigation of its philosophical import. I hope thus to probe some of the issues implied by the term “visual poetics”, and also to contribute modestly to the revaluation of the concept of mimesis currently occupying deconstructionist philosophers in France. Mimesis has played a central role in our aesthetics ever since Aristotle, and it should take no more than a glance at Finlay's tree/column bases to see that they include a mimetic dimension, which can however in no way be reduced to the traditional notion of representation.