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The nominees Catherine Yass | Fiona Banner | Keith Tyson | Liam Gillick Fiona Banner: words fail Fiona Banner (36) was born in Liverpool. She graduated from Kingston Polytechnic in 1989 and completed an MA at Goldsmiths College, London, in 1993. She had her first solo exhibition at London's City Racing Gallery in 1994. Fiona Banner is perhaps best known for her work with text, language and letter-forms using a range of media including silkscreen printing, drawing, sculpture and sound. The Nam (1997), for instance, is a 1000-page, 2 kilogram book containing an unbroken and virtually unreadable blow-by-blow account of the action of six celebrated films about the Vietnam war (Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon). Her text, and a recording of her reading it, render the screen violence and fantasy action meaningless. Her 2001 Arsewoman in Wonderland project included prints of texts taken from descriptions of porn movies treated in a similar way. She is fascinated by the difficulties of containing action and time in a prescribed form, and by language at its most extreme or banal. In Stainless Steel Full Stops (installed at The New Art Centre Sculpture Park, Salisbury, www.sculpture.uk.com) a series of three-dimensional painted steel full-stops (each from different typefaces and each having a very different form when enlarged to approximately a metre in diameter) interrupt the space just as the points and commas on a page punctuate or stop the text. The idea of turning abstract symbols into objects reverses the normal function of signs –that is, to represent reality. Here the representation is the reality. Like the maps and targets of American pre-pop artist Jasper Johns, Banner is making 'reflexive' signs – pieces that, while referring to something else, are interesting objects in their own right. Sticks and stones Again in Concrete Poetry (2002), words formed by large, clunky, closely spaced, plaster capital letters inhabit the gallery space in small groups. 'IDIOT', 'TART' and 'DRUNK' hang around together. 'FASCIST' sits squarely between 'EGOTIST' and 'SCUMBAG'. These are all insults Banner remembers being flung at her from time to time. Generously, she thinks of such words as a 'disenfranchised tenderness' or a 'momentary impossibility to love'. A need for communication is seen as a need to connect in some way, however confused, inarticulate or hostile. Courting controversy (and everyone enjoys the controversy of the Turner Prize, particularly those newspapers that run the 'Is this art?' kind of headline), some of the words Banner uses in this piece could offend - if you're easily offended. Further blurring of the real and the image is explored in Banner's more recent show, My Plinth is Your Lap, presented at Dundee Contemporary Arts this year, in which she exhibited her 'space confusers' - large paper works cut into strips and hung like blinds from the ceiling rather than on the walls. Banner thus encourages the viewer to contemplate the works both as drawings and as interactive objects. Love Double (1998) is a list of song titles beginning with the words 'I love you'. The titles are written on the wall, in red, looking like an announcement or a warning. We may recognise a title here and there and it may or may not mean something personal, even meaningful. Or perhaps the word 'love', repeated, and thus cheapened, loses its meaning. Perhaps we are back to Hollywood films. And probably this is Banner once again drawing our attention to the inadequacy of words at the extremes of human emotion. |
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