Art reviews: A Model of Order: Concrete Poetry/David Austen

A MODEL OF ORDER: CONCRETE POETRY ****

DEAN GALLERY, EDINBURGH

DAVID AUSTEN: MY LOVE, I HAVE BEEN DIGGING UP MY OWN BONES IN THE GARDEN AGAIN ***

INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH

CONCRETE poetry: it sounds like an oxymoron. Grey and inert, concrete is the least poetic of substances. A concrete poet sounds even more absurd – a lumpy figure on a plinth. The word's common meaning in English, a too familiar and unlovely building material, has overshadowed its original meaning which is simply to be manifest in solid form. This shift hasn't happened in other languages. The concrete poetry movement in the Fifties and Sixties was international and multilingual and so, defiantly, "concrete" came back into English by this polyglot, poetic route, its original meaning restored.

The objective of this movement was to give poetry an absolute presence; for words to become things. As one of its pioneers, Eugen Gomringer, defined it, a concrete poem was "a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other". Extending this, Edwin Morgan wrote that the concrete poem should not be encountered in books. "It would rather be an object that you passed every day… It would be in life, in space, concretely there."

Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay worked closely together in the early Sixties when both were exploring the potential of this new kind of poetry. Finlay went on to become the master of the "wayside object-poem" as Morgan describes it. Completing the circle and with characteristic double take, Finlay even realised some of his object poems in actual concrete. In a letter written in 1976 he remarks: "I have been trying to achieve a three-dimensional, large-scale version of Wave-Rock for years… I am promised a cast concrete version for this spring."

Wave-Rock is a poem he had composed in the early Sixties. A diagonal column of single words crosses the page. The word "wave" is repeated for the first three lines. Then, as if the wave breaks on the rock, for the next three, in a confusion of letters, "wave" is superimposed on "rock". Then for the last five lines, "rock" stands alone. The wave has withdrawn. This poem is currently on display at the Scottish Poetry Library – a glass version, not a concrete one – in conjunction with A Model of Order: Concrete Poetry, a small but densely packed exhibition in the library at the Dean Gallery.

The exhibition is drawn entirely from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's own holdings, marrying its comprehensive collection of Finlay's published work to the rich collection of early Modernist publications and ephemera in the Penrose and Keiller libraries, but also augmenting it with one or two additional purchases and bequests. Thus the exhibition traces the history of a typographic revolution that began with the wild lettering and nonsense words under the heading "parole libere" – free words – of Marinetti's First Futurist Manifesto in 1908. This was followed five years later by Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes, poems that applied the formal revolution of Cubism to the composition of a poem and its presentation on the page. The Dadaists took to this idea with enthusiasm. Here, a copy of the eponymous publication Dada, for December 1918, includes, alongside several declamatory poems, a touching tribute to Apollinaire.

Finlay himself is the central character here, however. It often seems that he was an isolated figure, but the exhibition does a valuable job of setting his early work in a wider context. His publications from the early Sixties form the largest group of works. These include Poor Old Tired Horse, the poetry magazine he published and which included work by an international group of poets, including Edwin Morgan, Augusto de Campos and Edgar Braga. All are represented here in this and other publications. There are also individual works by them and other artist-poets and several early works by Finlay himself including Star-Steer and Acrobats.

In Star-Steer, against a silvery ground the word "star" descends in a wavering column like starlight flickering on water, but the last word at the foot of this column where we might be standing looking out across the water if we were on a boat is "steer". We steer by the stars. Considering the history of religion, they can be a moral as well as a geographical compass and this points the way that Finlay's work was to evolve, not only with its themes of ships and sailing, but also with his often fierce and uncompromising sense of morality.

Acrobats reminds us of the playful side of Finlay's work, but in this context it also points to the formal origins of his art. The word "acrobats" is written on crossing diagonals. In each diagonal line it is written first left to right and then in mirror image. You can read the word in four directions, but where they meet, the words share the final "s". It hooks them together like acrobats on a flying trapeze.

This repeated "s" also forms the horizon at the centre of a square of letters apparently cut out from a series of these diagonal words repeated indefinitely. Thus it becomes a kind of word-sculpture.

This square format also appears in Finlay's Homage to Malevich. Self-descriptively, the words "black" and "block" form a dense black block. It is not just a homage to Malevich in general, but specifically to his most characteristic and most abstract work, Black Square.

Edwin Morgan, in two versions of the Computer's First Christmas Card, uses a similar formal discipline, though to more comical effect. Nearby, Finlay's First Suprematist Standing Poem, a white standing card with ten words in five lines printed on it, endorses the point. The absolute austerity of Malevich's abstraction is, as Finlay put it, speaking of concrete poetry in general, "a model of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt".

Beside these works, while they are certainly important antecedents, nevertheless the early examples here do seem very different. The Futurist and Dadaist texts, even the poems of Apollinaire, seem more declamatory, more to do with the disruption of expectation and delight in the consequent disorder than with the search for some self-sufficient order beyond the pedestrian march of the printed word.

David Austen, showing at the Ingleby Gallery, is also linked to this branch of the Modernist abstract tradition. Hitherto his delicate watercolours have shown his affinity with Paul Klee's poetic abstraction. There are one or two works in this show which still have this quality. As with Klee, it is the exquisite delicacy of Austen's touch that gives these little pictures their magic. The same is true of his delightful and slightly comic little figure paintings. He uses watercolour so elegantly that what might otherwise seem merely whimsical has both integrity and charm. In this show he has moved into words, however, as his very long title suggests. It is My Love, I Have Been Digging up My Own Bones in the Garden Again. Some of his word-pictures are large, and in Paris Hotel, for instance, a painting in beautifully textured black and grey, he too shows his admiration for Malevich.

There, however, any comparison with Finlay and the concrete poets must end. In smaller format, his word-pictures seem bald and inward-turning, more a model of some private darkness than of order, even "in a space full of doubt". His short black-and-white film, Man Smoking – an unbroken close-up of the craggy face of Italian artist Enzo Cucchi – suggests that isolated phrases presented as word-images, like End of Love, Smoking Girls, Desire, Lust and Sin, or indeed Paris Hotel, far from being the lapidary, free-standing and self-sufficient art works of the concrete poets, are just a nostalgic dream of art-house B-movies.

&149 A Model of Order: Concrete Poetry runs until 3 January; David Austen until 21 November