editor-in-chief: rima nasser
printing: chamas for printing & publishing s.a.l.
editor: kasia maciejowska
graphic design: genia kodash
contributing writers: Ari Amaya-Akkermans India Stoughton John Ovans Jennifer Hattam Rajesh Punj Frank Hornby Nour Harb
photo editor: rowina bou harb
www.citynewspublishing.com
Jon Rafman, I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too, 2014. Image courtesy the artist
04
# 04
interview: fiona banner
words: rajesh punj
Fiona Banner, All the worlds fighter planes, 1999-2009, found newspaper clippings labels vitrine, Copyright and courtesy the artist
selections art paper
riginally from the North of England, Fiona Banner was born in 1966. She attended Kingston University in the late 1980s before going on to Goldsmiths, London’s hotspot for conceptual art education, in 1990. There she was introduced to the YBA (Young British Artists) generation, including Damien Hirst, Fiona Rae, Simon Patterson and Ian Davenport, with whom she exhibited. Banner had her first solo show City Racing in 1994, at an artist run space in South London, and in 1995 was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the XLVI Venice Biennale. Following solo shows at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland in 2002, Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize that same year. Renowned for her visual
obsession with military aircraft and her rendering of macho American war films as text based installations, she intentionally engages with a milieu of cultural contradictions. As publisher and artist, Banner explains her central theme thus: ‘My interest is in the voice of language and the mistakes of language. Yes the high points of it but also the hopelessness of it, and how we always come back to it.’ Banner has exhibited extensively internationally and has a solo show WP WP WP at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, this Autumn. Rajesh Punj: Your works appear wonderfully complex; is that your intention? Fiona Banner: The film (Mirror, 2007) of a traditional life-drawing scene turned on its head pushes some things
that you might have already thought about into a slightly more absurd space. It kind of pushes a point, and therefore motivates a reaction that may create a further reaction. For me there is a complex narrative there around the work. Is it leading to any conclusion? No. Is it asking some questions and then looking at those questions in another way? It peels down the layers of expectations, so maybe you end up at a point where you are down to the bone. So something is raw and laid oddly vulnerable or bare. But certainly it’s not like I am formulating a position. I think like a practitioner so intellectually nothing is conclusive. An idea develops and it can take a very long time to make something out of it. I come back to things that I thought maybe had gone and themes circulate.
RP: What is it about Chinook helicopters you like and are they still operational? FB: Yes they are, they came out in the 1960s and are the longest serving helicopter. When you talk to people in the military they speak about this helicopter as if it has some kind of mythological status. For me it’s the way the blades always look like they are going to crash into each other because they actually go in opposite directions and cross over. Also the aircraft doesn’t specifically have a front or back and it is so animal-like, it is so inelegant – that all interests me. RP: How does that relate to the installation you have planned for Yorkshire
RP: Is that comfortable for an audience, entering into the space for the first time? FB: ‘Comfortable’ is an interesting term. I don’t think it will be comfortable but by the same token I don’t think it will be totally intimidating either. I think it will be quite strange in that it will have a strong performative element. For me I am used to relating to these aircrafts from a great distance and often through some mediated form. Movies, newspapers, images - relating to them one way or another – so just to be there up against the functionality of the aircraft
and the blades will be quite strange in terms of how we all relate to these objects.
RP: That brings us back to the intended contradiction in your work. Here you are scrutinising a film that you say yourself is trite. Why do you labour over works of ‘low’ culture in such a way? FB: I think there is something immersive about making these works. For example I made a spoken word version of the Nam because somebody said to me the work was unreadable. It is an eighteen hour talking book and there is something incredibly focused about it, because the act of writing or the act of reading requires that focus. As a practitioner that engagement was a really positive thing because what you really have to try and do as an artist is engage with a medium, whatever that is - however ephemeral, or however traditional.
RP: The Chinook recalls the other modern aircraft you have used as artworks, including the Harrier and the Jaguar. Why have you selected those particular combat aircraft? FB: With the Harrier and the Jaguar (Tate Britain, 2010), I really wanted to work with aircraft that were still in service, so both those models were still functioning when I displayed them and were of a type that still had a currency in their field of conflict. It was important for me that they were implicated and displayed in a contemporary way, so we can relate to them. An old aircraft, a retro Imperial War Museum type thing is of no interest to me as somehow that would seem like a romantic transgression into the past and I am not really interested in being romantic, although I am interested in the seductive qualities of these airplanes. RP: How did you determine the compositional layout for works of such magnitude? FB: Those pieces were quite specific to that neo-classical end of empire space of display at Tate Britain. Of course the museum was never designed to accommodate major industrial scale military hardware; it was designed for sculpture and painting. Specifically for sculpture I think for those outer spaces, but of a very different scale to. With the Harrier the space really captured the sense of
Fiona Banner, WP WP WP opens 20th September at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK Fiona Banner, The Nam, 1997, 1000 page all text flick book, published by Frith Street Books and The Vanity Press with assistance from the Arts Council of England
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Sculpture Park this year? FB: The installation at YSP is something I have wanted to make for a long time. It is like a sculpture without a centre because there is no body of the aircraft on display, it is just the helicopter blades. They rotate in the space at about twenty-five miles an hour; so quite fast, and they will be choreographed, so there will be a structure to the pace at which they move. Chinook helicopters are not available as there are not very many of them in the world and they don’t get decommissioned. Rather they are cannibalised and it is only because they are such high performing things that we take what we can from them. The use of the blades comes out of that and also for me it is the part of the helicopter that does speak of contradiction. The way they work seems so peculiar; the way the blades go against each other in opposite directions – I think of this arrangement as ‘push me, pull you’.
it being like a trophy - like how a hunter might hang a dead bird. Also sculpturally I was interested in how utterly filled out the space was and in pushing our voyeuristic tendency with regard to those aircraft. RP: How did your large scale text pieces come about, referencing films like Top Gun, and Apocalypse Now?
FB: Well Top Gun (1994), and Nam (1997), (which is a book encompassing six well-known Nam movies, written in my own language) were early verbal pieces that came out of a particular engagement with movies. So to take Top Gun, I got really into that film and I was intrigued by it being such a basic piece. It comes across as a trite piece of entertainment. It is mainstream Hollywood
Fiona Banner, Harrier, 2010. BAe Sea Harrier aircraft, paint 760 x 1420 x 371 cm, Copyright Tate, Photography Andrew Dunkley & Sam Drake
Killer Beasts
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British sculptor Fiona Banner has exhibited throughout Europe but is best known for her vast aeroplane installations at Tate Britain. Here she talks about her obsession with military craft as she launches a new exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK
Fiona Banner, Apocalypse Now, 1997, pencil on paper, 274 x 650 cm, Copyright and courtesy the artist
“I am not really interested in being romantic, although I am interested in the seductive qualities of these airplanes” Fiona Banner
and an unreflective bit of entertainment. But what interested me was the really euphoric, almost splendid display of flying and how this came out right at the end of the Cold War. I was making paintings of the film and of the aircraft in it. They weren’t terribly good paintings because I was very messed up about what to keep in and where the frame was. So I ended up making these paintings where the aircraft left the frame. And at that point I thought I have just edited everything out of this painting. At the same time I recall I was reading a lot about photography and stories about how photography is manipulated. I was into Susan Sontag at that time and questioning the validity of the visual as we known it.