Fiona Banner
From Arsewoman to Explosives: A chat with Fiona Banner
by Joanna Pocock
Who: I first noticed Fiona Banner’s work in 1994 when she showed a billboard sized blow-by-blow account of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia at City Racing. She then went on to make more of these ’still films’, as she calls them, of Top Gun, Pennebaker’s documentary of Bob Dylan Don’t Look Back and the porn filmAsswoman in Wonderland among others. She also produced a book called The Nam, a 1,000 page unedited account of six Vietnam films, Apocalypse Now!, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Her show “Your Plinth is my Lap”, including her ’still film’ Arsewoman (sic) in Wonderland, as well as sculptures of giant full-stops was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000. Her current work uses neon and explosives. She is represented by Frith Street gallery in London and Barbara Thumm in Berlin.
Where: Little Georgia, East London
When: December 20th 2004, 5:00 pm.
Joanna Pocock: What is it about the medium of film that makes you want to transcribe them for your word pieces, your ’still films’.
Fiona Banner: I was making a lot of paintings of military hardware. And I realised that — for me — the only access I had, the only visual references I had were through films, and I had already started working with Top Gun.
JP: You did a ’still film’ of Top Gun, didn’t you back in ‘94?
FB: Yeah. And I had been making lots and lots of paintings of the aeroplanes from Top Gun. There are some amazing, very, very picturesque night scenes in the film. And I was intrigued by the way that film seemed like a visual display of all this military hardware, which had in a sense become redundant because it was right at the end of the cold war. I was seduced by those things.
JP: Did Top Gun come before Lawrence of Arabia?
FB: I think actually I was working from Lawrence of Arabia around the same time. But I actually did the painting later [1] maybe a year after Top Gun. Anyway, it was natural because I was making these paintings and I was getting more and more frustrated. I don’t think it was actually the paintings I was getting frustrated with, I think it was pictures as a medium. And I was finding it hard to edit what was in the frame and what was out of the frame. That was the thing I found impossible: the control to know when to cut a moment.
JP: By transcribing your films though, you can fit the whole thing into the frame.
FB: That was really how it started happening. Then I wanted to make these all-inclusive frames where everything is prioritised and everything is included, where you have these total accounts. Even though that is a fallacy because you can only include what you notice. But at the time that was my earnest intention. Now I see there is no way you can do that.
JP: You went from war films to doing Arsewoman as a ’still film’. This is quite a leap, or is it?
FB: laughs…
I don’t really know. I do think people are often confused by that. It is very hard to know how people see the content. For me when I finished The Nam [2]. I had this astonishingly huge book. I thought ‘what is it?’ and I realised that it was a work of pornography. You know those films are deeply pornographic. I think I wanted to explore porn in a more literal way. And also I had worked from all this material that was deeply male, where there was no female presence except maybe as a rape victim. In many ways porn films are studies of the female nude. And OK some might say exploitative, and maybe they are, but maybe not. But they certainly push limits both from the inside and the outside.
JP: But you chose a porn film that was directed by a woman.
FB: Yes, and I chose one I thought was good actually.
All the films I choose I am slightly in love with. I am always very, very seduced by them. I mean with The Nam films, what I found very confusing was the allure and the seductive power of them, while at the same time I was completely repulsed by them. They are also propaganda. And somehow the more entertaining they are the more active and alive they seem to be in terms of the buttons they push. So I don’t completely understand the porn thing yet. Except that I wanted to switch from something that felt very male to something that felt very female. Even though porn is made for the male gaze, I am not sure to what extent that is actually true. And in a way I think with porn films, you are looking at how much can you stretch the body, how much can you stretch any given orifice, how inside can you go. Then I went on to do a series of nudes, like the one that you saw me do at Port Eliot [3]
JP: Yes I was really moved by the piece you made in Port Eliot. It was beautiful to watch you do it as much as anything else.
FB: These word paintings are in a way much more singular and much calmer. They came from the porn films though. It’s all about voyeurism.
JP: But it’s also a scale thing and a time thing with these pieces. With the nudes, there is a temporal element and a size element. But you do manage to get it all onto one piece of paper.
FB: I was amazed by that Port Eliot piece, just how trance-like it was for me. I just went straight, I didn’t miss a beat. I don’t know how long you can keep that up. It was a very different thing in that it was a performance. It was interesting bringing that element, that extra dimension of time, into it.
JP: But I think there is a bit of that sense of performance in your other work, with your ’still films’, as well. We become voyeurs, because we are watching you watching the films. There is that similarity of watching you perform except that you aren’t there doing it when we come face to face with them in a gallery. You do reveal a lot in them don’t you, through your translations of nudes or films?
FB: Yes, I think I do retrospectively. Again when I read back The Nam [4] I was amazed by how much it gives away. I mean I really did think, and at the time I claimed my book to be the only completely unedited book — obviously a hilariously lordly claim but in another sense I was interested in that aspect of it. It was a tracing rather than a re-presentation.
JP: I was surprised when I went back to have a look at The Nam, that there were so many poetic bits in it. You mention the tips of leaves fluttering in the breeze and tiny, astute observations almost at odds with the main action. These say a lot about you.
FB: Yes, but it wasn’t meant to be like that of course. In retrospect I realised that, ‘Oh my God, I am completely in love with Willard!’ I spend all this time describing the colour of his skin and the way the sweat sits on his face. In turn the film makes you fall in love with Willard. Apocalypse Now! is an incredibly expressionistic film, all the smoke, the chiaroscuro, and the emergings and disappearings, and the sort of head-twisting journey. And then Full Metal Jacket is almost phenomenally boring. It’s really harsh. But the fact that when I read through the description of that film from the book, I realised that there is virtually no metaphor in that film. It just shouts itself off the page. There is a bizarre symmetry in that film, a bizarre lack of detail, you know what a control freak Kubrick was, it is really literal. So that film required a different sort of language to Apocalypse Now! But I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. In a way I think it is very lucky that I wasn’t. There is something about getting to know your language better that makes it harder because you are more aware of your position. In a way ignorance is quite an amazing thing.
JP: You also did the Bob Dylan film, Don’t Look Back. You transcribed it three times.
In a way that is kind of telling yourself how personal it is, because each of the three times will be completely different.
FB: Yeah, that was a smaller more personal project. That was about my love of Dylan and how impossible it is to be a fan. What an impossible situation it is.
JP: laughs…
FB: I mean, could you ever be further away from something that you want so totally? And those three descriptions are all from memory. I suppose whether it is a memory from life or of a film, it’s all sort of on the same frequency. Reality functions on one frequency, but once things are translated into memory, they become very personal because they are all from the recesses of your own brain. And it was an exploration of that, but it was also an experiment to see — through the process of trying to recall something really hard — what you then actually excavate.
JP: To me there is an element of the ungraspable in the Don’t Look Back pieces. Dylan just is ungraspable. The minute you feel you have a handle on him he goes and does something that confounds you. There is something terrifying about this ungraspability.
FB: Yup. He is so elusive.
Also I am really interested in the failure of success, the disaster of success. How Dylan is ultimately a grand failure. Because he’s no good at all anymore. I feel very, very clear about that. He is this kind of pathetic figure. The notion of hero is an impossible notion.
JP: You could almost say that the moment someone becomes a hero they are no longer one. It’s a bit of a cliché, but…
FB: Yes, Kurtz or Brando. It’s the same thing isn’t it? Big fat grumpy assholes.
JP: Lots of the things you have chosen to work with are huge American icons. There is no way you can get away from that when you look at your work. You know, Vietnam, Dylan …
I guess what I am trying to get at here is Britishness. When your work is seen abroad do people think of you as a quintessentially British artist?
FB: I think they do.
JP: How does that work in the art world?
FB: Well, I find it odd, because I show a lot in Germany. Obviously they speak German in Germany. But educated people understand English. But America stole visual culture. That’s how it felt at the time that I started doing those works. America had the best and the biggest pictures, and the best and the biggest pictures weren’t to be found in art anymore. It seemed pathetic to try and make pictures in art when anything grand or extraordinary seemed to exist in advertising or films. Those media did it better, and America did it better.
JP: I think it is interesting that one of your first ’still films’ was a David Lean film, Lawrence of Arabia, which is a quintessentially British film about empire among other things. It is almost as if you couldn’t get any bigger from there. In order to get bigger you had to look to America. And this is a trajectory that a lot of people have to make.
FB: Yeah, Maybe. And certainly this goes for language as well. I did a load of book readings from The Nam in America, and I didn’t know how people would react at all. The first one I did people started laughing. They found it incredibly funny. The reason why they did, it transpires, is because of the translation (she laughs). The language is so, so ultimately American. And not only was I speaking it in English but also my interpretation, my whole syntax and the whole language was so English. So people found that sort of bizarre.
JP: An English they couldn’t understand.
FB: Yeah, yeah, not really a bastardisation of it, just an absurd version. But I quite liked that because I think there has to be an element of the human in there. I saw all those films and I understood Vietnam through those films. So in a way it was a complete exploration of that ignorance. I have lately been thinking about and working with this idea of ‘whose language is it’. Just thinking more about that element of translation. It’s partly why I’ve really enjoyed doing those nudes so much. I think people really didn’t understand those nudes. But that doesn’t matter. They’re much more direct, because the thing is right in front of you. You are describing the thing so there is no frame. That’s what I find intriguing and complex. You know the edges are blurring. Of course it is a re-interpretation of the fact that through history the nude is a male domain. You know you still have that in the art world. You can still go to the Tate and it’s full of pictures of naked ladies made by men. And there’s not a lot of discussion about that.
JP: No, not any more.
But one of the interesting things about your stuff is that it does deal with politics, gender politics, sexual politics — it’s all there, but it’s not what drives it. Have you ever had animosity directed towards you from people who think a woman shouldn’t be working with military hardware?’ Has there ever been a sense that war isn’t a woman’s subject?
FB: Well, because lately I have been using all these plane parts, I have to penetrate …
JP: … That’s a good word. ( laughter)
FB: … penetrate the world of military hardware and collectors. That was very strange. Not only is that world hermetically sealed, so it took me a long time just to understand how to get into it. It is weird because you get into that world and they are very shocked that you are a lady. People don’t like it because they feel you are taking the piss.
JP: Do they feel you are taking some of their power or even knowledge away from them?
FB: Well, some of the people I buy parts from hate the idea that I am taking planes out of circulation. That I am making them into objects rather than flying machines that ….
JP: … are out there killing people.
FB: Yeah. I can’t work it out quite, but I have noticed hostility. I did this piece that is of all the world’s fighter planes as air fix models. It is a huge swarm of planes.
JP: How many of them are there?
FB: About 165. Some of them I had to make, and some are really obscure, like Israel has four or North Korea has eight — that kind of thing. But even in that world, even in model shops, you don’t see ladies. It is very isolated.
JP: But I find it interesting that you have gone from using mediations of war to actually getting your hands on the hardware, to using the real stuff of war.
FB: I love that stuff. I want to touch it, feel the texture of. It is so elegant and seductive.
Again I haven’t quite worked it out. An air fix model is a sort of photograph. They are also like body parts. That word you used earlier — you do sort of castrate the machinery a bit. I think that might be what the boys don’t like, the boys in the yard. The parts end up feeling very lame and in that lameness they become beautiful. But there is a sort of collapsing and distancing. I wanted to make something contemporary. In some ways you could see my work as being a bit historical. It is an excavation of my understanding of the mythologies of history and pictures. All this stuff, Vietnam and all that, they were the first pictures I saw. But then I wanted to make some work that is about now. About that thing that is happening now where you see all these pictures in the newspapers. You see them and you just want to see more. And yet you are horrified.
JP: So there is a political side to the war hardware you are working with now.
FB: Yeah there is, but it is not what would normally be seen as political because I betray my fascination.
JP: But isn’t that just being honest? We are all fascinated by the things that repel and disgust us.
FB: Yes, and I think it is difficult. But that’s why I only ever make work out of things that I am seduced by. The process of making work can sometimes confuse me more. It always makes me understand it more in way, even if what I understand is that there is some confusion. Things are conflicting. Things make you feel different emotions all the time.
JP: Out of your entire body of work, I think the pieces that I love the most are the full-stops. They work on so many levels that I am constantly astonished by them. They also feel really personal. Is there a sense of an ending, a sense that you are challenging yourself to create something new with them?
FB: Actually it was the other way around. I sensed an ending and confronted that challenge. So in a way that work was formed of frustration. I felt that I had lost my subject. I couldn’t feel from within that I had anywhere to go. I sensed or experienced a big blip in my language, in my personal language. And I wanted to make something of that rather than be done by it. I wanted to explore it. That’s when I started making the full-stops. So in a sense it seemed to me that instead of content or subject I had nothing. I had a space, I had a gap. And rather than that gap being an emptiness, I wanted it to be a fullness. But that is very literal. I found myself building, these big nothings, these big empty spaces, making them physical. Once language is formed, whether in writing or in art, one is often informed by its impossibility. That is how they developed. But then of course I started thinking ‘these are good!’ They’ve got their own characters. Blow them up and they are actually characters themselves and they speak. And of course they explore the space between things, between pauses. That’s how it happened. And again it was a personal thing but then I don’t think it is necessarily understood as that.
JP: When I saw the Turner show where you had Arsewoman in Wonderland printed in that beautiful bubble gum pink juxtaposed with those hard, shiny, black full-stop sculptures it seemed to me that these characters had escaped from the word picture. The image that came to my mind was that the pink lettering had given birth to these forms somehow or they had escaped from the text. I loved that relationship. I wondered when you conceived them the show did you know how they would work together?
FB: I suppose I’ve always thought of the full-stops as being fallen out of some enormous world of words, just dropped out.
JP: Almost like a cartoon character?
FB: Yeah. And both were very physical pieces. They both had quite an expressive quality to them. The way Arsewoman was made and unmade and wrinkled and rumpled …
JP: …In layers like a fly-poster.
FB: I wanted the full-stops to be resting points. And people do use them as that. I was really emphatic in that show, but of course the Tate is such a place for high art it was quite hard to tell people, ‘you can sit on these!’ But they were plinths for people to use. And I liked that, that you can pause and they are pauses. They are the opposite of words in way. But I never know how my work is going to work together. And it’s always different from what you expect because people bring their own meaning to it. That it how you learn how things function. I often really don’t know. And that’s why it is important to forget about destination and the viewer because it just confuses me endlessly.
JP: But that must get harder and harder as you and your work get known.
FB: The more you exhibit the harder it gets. And that’s why I have spent the last couple of years not showing very much. I wanted to prioritise the experience of making work over the experience of showing it. And I think it is very hard to feel unselfconscious when you have the idea of a physical space and a show and an audience there in mind. I think it limits the journey a bit. For me it does. Some people might work all for that. In a sense I do too. I make work to show, I don’t make it to store. But I do find it confusing to try and second guess how it might work. It takes some of the pleasure out if it.
JP: Going back to the time element we talked about earlier. I want to ask you about your neon work and your explosives. I guess they both have time incorporated into them – neon in a less obvious way. I’ve only seen pictures of ‘Spell’, your neon wall flower which literally has the power to kill. It is absolutely amazing. To me it’s what language is all about. Maybe your neon work is the bits between the full-stops?
FB: I haven’t finished ‘Spell’ yet. What I thought I was going to do with that is make a whole new alphabet with neon. But I only made a couple of pieces and got distracted… you know how it is. (laughs) But also that’s why I want to go to China because it’s not legal to make it here anymore. Joining the neon gives out very bad stuff. You have to blow into it and it gives out mercury. In China they still do this sort of thing.
JP: How do you feel endangering people like that?
FB: Oh you know, I’m bad, a fat westerner. I’m bad anyway.
JP: Yeah, aren’t we all …
FB: The neon is like the full-stops in that the full-stops are about the impossibility of language, the impossibility of communicating what you need. The neon pieces are about re-making broken language because they are all from cracked, broken letters. They’re optimistic because I am breathing life back into them. And then I made some other pieces called ‘Broken Hearts’, made from bits of broken hearts. I’ve only made two of them because you rarely find the pieces. I remade those and they’re very weird because they’re really physical. Once you’ve got the wires on and the red colour pumping through they look quite medical, like the wires are arteries or could even be something from a hospital. They are like a real heart. It’s quite odd.
JP: The neon pieces are similar to the full-stops but they are the other side of language.
FB: Yes, the neon is about breakdown, but then it’s also about not being broken down anymore. You can’t always say what you want to say, but you can always say something else. I really do want to make more of those neon pieces. But I need to go to China to do it. Also I want to get more involved in the process. I don’t like this whole art manufacturing thing. The studio is a really important place for me. And I like what I make to reflect my limits. You know, I am very limited in what I can make. I am not one of these extraordinarily versatile people in that way. I like what I do to reflect that.
JP: Yeah. Maybe that’s why you take such huge things and bring them down to your scale — certainly that’s true for the ’still films’. Although with the explosives it is the opposite, you are asking people to take something small and blow it up in size — to blow it up literally.
FB: I suppose it is a complete unframing, an exploding of the frame.
JP: Do you have any idea where the explosives are going to go?
FB: I had a really fun time last summer making sculptures of explosions. I got all these heavy duty fireworks and encased them in clay and then put them in tubes. So I was limiting them and trying to reflect the velocity of the explosions at the same time. It was great but when I made the first one I realised I had made a bomb.
JP: The home office might have a few things to say about that.
(laughs)
JP: You want to take the fireworks further don’t you?
FB: Yes. And for quite a long time something’s been sizzling away in a really low key way. I want to design the perfect firework. A lot of my work is very fragile. I love the fact that you can have it but you can only have it by destroying it. I made a piece called ‘The Works’ which is a boxed firework. It’s based on various abstract scenes from The Nam. I love that collectors can buy it but to have it they have to explode it.
JP: Back to the Dylan thing isn’t it? Perfection is gone once you have it or own it.
FB: Yeah a bit. I think secretly we all make art because we are absolutely devastated that life is so brief. It is an impossible attempt to hang onto time and to do something that will not necessarily be there after we’ve gone, but that isn’t completely transient either.
JP: …Leaving your mark.
FB: … Even if it’s just momentary.
1 Banner’s blow by blow account of Lawrence of Arabia called Desert
2 Banner’s 1,000 page book of unedited transcriptions of Vietnam films: Apocalypse Now!, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July .
3 A literary festival in Cornwall in which Banner did a word painting of a live nude. It was a performance as much as a finished piece of work.
4 Banner performed The Nam by reading it aloud in the States.