Found in books (Fiona Banner)

Fiona Banner's "Performance Nude" with

probably the perfect bookmark -

This is a ploy to trick myself into writing about Banner's performance nudes, which may be one of the case studies in my "when does writing become drawing" essay.

She has written about the on-screen action of various films, most notably The Nam (1997), describing the scenes that were being enacted, as though she was running alongside the action. It starts: "Trees, like palm trees in the distance, fill the foreground. They hardly move, maybe the tops are swaying a bit, the sky behind is dull and pale blue" and goes on for 1000 pages.  "It is a compilation of total descriptions of well known Vietnam films, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now!, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. The films apparently never begin or end, but are described in their entirety, spliced together to make a gutting 11 hour supermovie." These arose from a collision between her fascination with the image, and the impossibility of the image, she says.

How, though, did this descriptive writing ("you see what you see") become Performance Nude? The link from the descriptions of war and pornography films - in which she became increasingly involved in what she describes as "the intimate space between the characters, and the odd moments and mistakes that you don't necessarily see in mainstream films" was to work with a striptease artist, describing her actions - which segued into a riff on traditional life drawing (given that life drawing is the interaction of the artist's eye, mind, gesture with the surface of the paper), the result of which was a writing, rather than a drawing, describing the model. The "performance" aspect is that she's done this life-drawing in front of an audience, for instance in "Performance Nude, Toronto" (2007).

The series began in 2006 and ended in 2009 with the book above, recording over 20 sittings and related works. Banner sees the solitary figure as "very much like a character dropping out of one of those [pornographic] films but losing all context and narrative space. They are a bit like one of my full stop sculptures, a person standing in the room, stripped back and bereft not only of costume but of any kind of context."

Full Stop sculptures, table version; some full-scale stops can be seen near Tower Bridge

She's called these subjective observational encounters as "life writings" and regards them not so much as the depiction of an individual person as a portrait of a complex and multi-layered encounter: "I was trying to represent that moment and all the failures and false starts of that moment," she says. "Then there's the space between me and the model, and in the public performances the space between the audience and me and the audience and the model. The layers of voyeurism and both the mystique and the mechanics of the creative act get exposed and we all feel a bit vulnerable."

Her ISBN works, which are part of a series about how works are represented and circulated - and can be read as publishing as a performative act - are another part of her practice that resonates in a "bookish" sort of way, subverting the idea behind ISBNs - assigning one number for a uniform work, incorporating the mechanism of legal deposit to record and archive that work. In response to a request for the required legal deposit copies of these (unique) works, she offered to compile a work incorporating all the individual ISBN works; presumably this work would be given its own ISBN - and cause headaches for the legal deposit librarians, who are merely trying to compile a national archive of "books".

Banner's  Harrier and Jaguar at Tate Britain last year was very popular with the public - two big fighter planes in the grand central space - and the little film that went with them (which you can watch here) got me interested in her work. "For Banner these objects represent the 'opposite of language', used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy," says the Tate website.