Ian Hamilton Finlay-George IV Bridge
Graham Fagen, 2010
If you stand on Jamaica Bridge, Glasgow and look west, you will see two granite pillars with the words All Greatness Stands Firm in the Storm carved into them. The text is first in English and then in Greek on the north pillar, in Greek and then English on the south pillar.
The granite pillars are planted in the River Clyde and are approximately 45 feet high at low tide. They are joined by a steel arch and were built in 1879 to support a rail bridge that was removed in the late 1960s.
Brenda Berman and Annette Stirling arranged the typography and the carving completed in 1991.
Ian Hamilton Finlay proposed this work to the committee of TSWA (Television South-West Arts) Four Cities Project, Glasgow. It was their aim to commission a series of temporary offsite (not for museum or gallery) art works to be simultaneously shown in the cities of Derry, Glasgow, Newcastle and Plymouth.
Finlay wasn’t invited to take part in this project. His unsolicited proposal came through the post and took the form of a note and a drawing. It was received after the committee had already decided on their artists for Glasgow, from open submission and an invited selection process. IHF wasn’t invited because the organizers thought that he wouldn’t be interested. The proposal came out the blue and was though too good to turn down.
The text is derived from Plato’s Republic and was considered by Finlay to ‘dramatise’ the removed bridge. Like many of his works, it consciously plays on its Piranesian scale and its Roman origins such as the use of grand lettering on the Ponte Fabricio in Rome.
This placement of Greek and English text onto specific pillars in a specific part of Glasgow is what makes the artwork. It enables the viewer on the bridge to consider where they are and how they relate to their immediate surroundings and surroundings beyond. It reflects our own culture and proposes how ours relates to others.
Looking west from Jamaica Bridge you are facing the direction of the flowing river as it heads toward the sea. Glasgow connected with the world from this direction and from this river. Places within the city were given the names of the places the people had travelled to and come back from, hence Jamaica as a name for the bridge.
This route helped to establish Glasgow. It also helped to find the riches of the British Empire. In 1786 Robert Burns himself had booked two passages from Greenock (where the Clyde meets the sea) to Jamaica, in order to work on a sugar plantation managed by Scots and manned by African slaves.
Finlay’s work remains the only physical remnant of the TSWA Four Cities Project within Glasgow. The ‘fast and easy’ decision to commission Finlay’s permanent work broke the curatorial premise of the project. The organizers themselves were persuaded by opportunity; Finlay’s work being an example of ‘good artwork superseding guidelines’.
The work has no plaque and is unattributed. It is understood now as part of the civic fabric of the city, exactly as Ian Hamilton Finlay had wanted.
With thanks to Euan McArthur and Nicola Celia Wright
Graham Fagen is an artist who lives in Glasgow. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1988 and the interdisciplinary MA in Art & Architecture from the Kent Institute of Art and Design in 1990.
Exhibitions including the Busan Biennale, South Korea and the Art and Industry Bienial, New Zealand, as well as being part of Zenomap, Scotland and Venice, at the 50th Biennale. In Britain he has exhibited at the V & A Museum, Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London and in 1999 was invited by the Imperial War Museum, London to work as the Official War Artist for Kosovo.