Karla Black

IAN HAMILTON FINLAY, LITTLE SPARTA, 1966–2006 

One of the best artworks in the world is this garden, or poem, or sculpture—no one knows quite what to call it—in Scotland’s Pentland Hills. Finlay made it in collaboration with his wife, Sue Finlay. The artist died in 2006, but the work continues to evolve in concert with nature.

Little Sparta requires pilgrimage, especially in these times; it stands there hostile to war, a monument in equal contemplation of both terror and the divine. It is an homage to and critique of Western “civilization,” culture, intellect, artistry, brutality, and bloodshed, realized through the aesthetics of ancient Greece, the French Revolution, and World War II. It is built from stone, concrete poetry, and cultivated land.

Finlay ran Little Sparta as a separate city-state. The land, inherited from his wife’s family, was originally named Stoneypath, after the militaristic Greek municipality. It was the site of a dispute in the 1980s when a local council refused to recognize the site’s temple as a religious building and tried to impose exorbitant taxes upon Finlay. But he won out in the end, saving his work from falling prey to bureaucracy. I was lucky to walk the hills of Little Sparta with Finlay many times, a formative experience for me as a young artist. There is a lot of humor in what he did—I still believe that art can’t be intellectually sharp without that.

If you go there, you will enter beneath a gated archway to the gardens, on which is carved the words of the French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint Just: A COTTAGE. A FIELD. A PLOUGH / THERE IS HAPPINESS.

DIA BEACON, NEW YORK 

Dia Beacon organizes the most sensitive presentations of art in an institutional setting that I have ever witnessed. The way that a generous, significant slice of an individual’s oeuvre is exhibited, with multiple works given so much space to exist, is really a lesson in how to do it right. We see art here as it was meant to be seen and, as such, its power remains intact and unedited.

MIDTOWN FARMHOUSE, MY COTTAGE STUDIO IN THE ANGUS GLENS, SCOTLAND 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about building a studio/museum as a permanent site for my art on the half acre surrounding my cottage. I’d want a traditional drystone farm building, but carbon neutral and half underground—something inspired by both Little Sparta and Dia Beacon. I realize that as time goes on I’ll have to home my work myself. There are many institutions that have my sculptures in their collections, but I feel a need to store and display them correctly. If I do this, I can totally dissociate the art from language. I can leave out the raw materials I use in my work—such as plaster powder, Vaseline, and body moisturizers—while cleaning and conserving it in place, rather than removing a piece and remaking it each time it is shown. Pitting “formless” art like mine up against markets and museums is necessary and I fully engage in those manipulations. However, I dream of my own space where I no longer need to compromise or explain. The conditions around my art are also a part of it, and without a spotlight on that, I don’t know what the sculpture really is.

SUZANNE JACKSON, P. K. BLOSSOMS, 2021 (THE MODERN INSTITUTE, GLASGOW) 

There is so much to admire about Jackson and her expansive, legendary practice. I love this work for its courage of shape and form, the way it frees painting from the frame, and for its bright transparency. This piece is everything—practically nature itself.

BARRY LE VA, ROOM 2 OF A 3-ROOM, 3-PART INSTALLATION, UTILIZING VARIOUS QUANTITIES OF THE 3 MATERIALS, 1969 (WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS) 

Le Va used dangerous materials—iron oxide, mineral oil, and broken glass—for this seminal work. It was first installed at the old Walker Art Center only because the space was about to be demolished. This piece epitomizes my interest in sculptures that admit within themselves the fallacy of an object’s stability. I wish that I could see this sort of sculpture all the time in galleries and museums, and that it wasn’t only possible to make this type of art when the place it’s being displayed in is getting destroyed.

LYNDA BENGLIS, THE GRACES, 2003–2005 

Benglis is a giant of sculpture. I love these works—for their scale, for their pinkness, and for the artist’s deft handling of unwieldy materials (cast polyurethane, lead, and stainless steel) to create towers of strength and crystalline beauty. The Graces exemplify the longevity of the artist’s creativity. She is such an impressive shape-shifter and continues to dish out delightful surprises. Benglis is always innovating, never static.

DAVID HAMMONS, UNTITLED, 1992 

This piece, made out of hair sweepings from Black barbershops, is astounding, as is all of Hammons’s art. There is no hierarchy of materials or form here. His sculptures are the “almost” or “only just” type of works that I love the most. His direct connection to the materials he knows from everyday life allows them to breathe freely.

BOBBY BAKER, DRAWING ON A MOTHER’S EXPERIENCE, 1988 

Baker felt that the importance of motherhood—and, indeed, parenting as a whole—was shockingly undervalued. So she devised this performance, in which she creates an “action painting” by spilling common household foodstuffs—Guinness, beef, milk—onto a double bedsheet laid out on the floor while she interrogatively talks about domesticity, being a mother, and her life as an artist. Like jangled nerves, this work has resonated throughout my life, as I made every exhibition in the presence of my daughter until she was ten years old. The emotions of this piece bleed everywhere, harking back to Carolee Schneemann and the history of feminist performance art as well as the physical anarchy of the Viennese Actionists. Mess, like abstraction, is a political stance. Akin to Little Sparta, Baker’s performance is an act of protest and resistance. She does not shy away from the anger of the fight.

A 73,000-YEAR-OLD PIECE OF CROSS­HATCHED OCHER, FOUND IN THE BLOMBOS CAVE, SOUTH AFRICA 

There is much debate among anthropologists about whether this item is the earliest artwork ever made because of the deliberate mark-making on it, which ostensibly evidences the dawn of human consciousness. This little scratched stone blows my mind, as it opens the door to questions about artistic creation and how “conscious” it might be; to my mind, art is somehow both an intentional and an accidental form of activity. 

FINGER FLUTINGS IN THE “MOONMILK” FROM ROUFFIGNAC CAVE, FRANCE 

During the Upper Paleolithic era, peoples in the caves of Europe and Australia dragged their fingers along a wet carbonate substance known as moonmilk. These Ice Age men and women created handprints and other kinds of patterns. The marks will never dry, and remain as malleable as the day they were made. This, to me, like the scratched piece of ocher, is what art really is—an impetus toward physical response. I’m always trying to get back to that.