Fiona Banner

Photo courtesy Tracy Williams Ltd.

Fiona Banner, Installation view

Photo courtesy Tracy Williams Ltd.

Fiona Banner, "Parade" (2006)

Fiona Banner: "Nude"

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Best known for her laborious, handwritten descriptions of war films and epics such as Lawrence of Arabia, Banner has also used the art-historical genre of the nude to explore issues of violence, vulnerability and voyeurism; and has used sculptures of punctuation to investigate breakdowns and gaps in communication.

For her current solo show at New York’s Tracy Williams Ltd., on view through April 22, Banner is showing a new series of nudes: text-based descriptions of the female form, made from live models and written on the tail-fins of fighter planes.

A related installation, Parade, will also be on view at 462 Greenwich St., further focusing on her fascination with the “aesthetics of destruction.” Described as an “unedited war-scape,” Parade collects Banner’s hand-made examples of every fighter jet currently in commission somewhere in the world, with more than 100 models suspended from the ceiling. Parade is on view through March 31.

Banner has exhibited worldwide and is represented in various collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Tate Gallery in London; and the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis. She was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2003.

What draws you to working so intensely with language, as in your ‘still-films’—these blow-by-blow descriptions of war movies such as The Nam, a 1,000-page book describing films such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter?

With all of the subjects I work with, there is this fascination with the image—I was fascinated by those ’Nam films, and really seduced by them. But I was also really repulsed by them. I thought, “Am I repulsed by the film, or am I repulsed by the way I was involved in the film, the way I became fascinated by it?”

Using language is a way of stepping back from that, and stepping back from how the image works on us, yet at the same time still having the image there. It’s a way of being able to work with images without drowning in the deeply complex currency of those images. Hopefully, what’s gained in the process is an original moment of looking at something, or being able to look at something in a different way by side-stepping the image.

How did the “still-films” begin?

Originally, I was making lots of images of fighter planes, using the film Top Gun as a reference for all of these things you don’t really see in normal life. But I started to find it incredibly hard to draw a frame around the objects, deciding what should be in the frame and what should be out of it. That led to the desire to make this all-encompassing image, this image that negates the need for me to make such decisions. That’s why I describe those films, rather pompously, as being completely unedited texts—and being very much about the pornography of those films.

Why do you choose to work with particularly violent or pornographic films?

Why are so many people seduced by images of war, even though we hate war? Or do we? It’s those complex [questions] that I am fascinated by, in myself and in other people. Questions like “Why do we love these great, epic, violent, pornographic, killing films? Why are they our entertainment?” The pastoral—I don’t find so complex, so I don’t need to try to work that out. But the nude and the violence of how the nude as portrayed in the history of art for example—that I’m really fascinated by.

Let’s talk about your nudes. They work in this hyper-intimate way, in describing someone’s body in language, in a genre typically associated with the gaze of male painters….

Using words as opposed to line and color is a way of being able, on my own personal turf, to reinvent the nude. The writing is a sleight of hand, it’s a way to sneak around the side and look at something that I’m fascinated by.

Do you work from a live model?