While every other artist out there seems laden with the concept of meaning (that is, to understand the work or having their work mean something), Fiona Banner, a contemporary British artist, cannot help but keep her head above the murky waters of understanding. That's not to say that Banner's work is easy to "get" but rather, her works seems to be the product of an art practice that is constantly rethinking the means of meaning. Banner arms herself with the written word, using it to create vortexes of visual meaning.
For example, "Life Drawing Drawings" are a series of drawings/ sculptures in which Banner recreates the covers of drawing books by hand...i.e. drawing the drawing book.
Two of my favorite Banner projects are her written descriptions of films and her performance works about the nude. "Banner investigates the limits and possibilities of written language, drawing on source material from military hardware and films to pornography and the tradition of the nude."
In her work "Apocalypse Now," Banner gives in her own words, a rundown of the entire film production of Apocalypse Now. She does this with several other war moves as well as a porn entitled "Arsewoman in Wonderland".
I see Banner as an artist who is taking the way viewers typically see something, say an epic hollywood film, and runs the viewer's understand of the film's subject matter through the machine of language by using the written word and thus changing the meaning. Banner then recycles the subject matter again through the form her words take and the various histories that are attached to that form; "Arsewoman in Wonderland" is silk screened while "Apocalypse Now" is graphite on paper. By changing up her media, Banner is introducing different histories to her version, of a filmmakers rendition, of war or sex; thus, giving them a sense of permanence despite the continual reinterpretation of their original meanings--or even the original act.
Banner then took her crafted-text-interpretations to the nude by preforming her literary descriptions in the gallery, as if she were in her studio drawing a nude model.
What interests me most about this body of work, is that the multidisciplinary nature of Banner's projects seems to bleed into her collaborative efforts with her models. Banner's work entitled "Mirror" illustrates this best, in that the performative aspect of this piece was done by the model rather then the artist.
View Mirror here!
Mirror, 2007 Performance with Samantha Morton, 4 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, London
The actress (Samantha Morton) came to the artists studio where she posed for a nude portrait. This resulted in a piece of writing. Never having read the text the actress performed the portrait, in front of a large audience, at the Whitechapel Gallery the following evening.
Check out more from Fiona Banner at her website and also on itunes.
