Fiona Banner AKA The Vanity Press(London)
Artist
Contribution
Leporello N° 03 by Fiona Banner aka The Vanity press, published by LL’Editions in 2021.
Fiona Banner often works under the moniker of The Vanity Press. She established the imprint in 1997, with her seminal book The Nam. Since then she has published many works, some in the form of books, some sculptural, some performance based. In 2009 she issued herself an ISBN number and registered herself as a publication under her own name. Humour, conflict and language are at the core of her work.
Fiona Banner first became known for her “wordscapes” – often heroically proportioned works that capture in her own words films, from war blockbusters to porn. She often works with the “nude”, transcribing the human form into category-defying prose. Sometimes she repurposes military aircraft to brutal, sensual, and comedic ends.
In 1995, she was included in General Release: Young British Artists held at the XLVI Venice Biennale.
Since 1994 Banner has created handwritten and printed texts – ‘wordscapes’ – that retell in her own words entire feature films, including Point Break (1991) and The Desert (1994), or particular scenarios in detail. Her work took the form of solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. She also investigates the formal components of written language, giving significance to the symbols that punctuate sentences.
In 1997, when she published THE NAM, she started working under the imprint of The Vanity Press, and has since published an extensive archive of books, objects and performances, many questioning the notion of authorship and copyright. For Banner, the act of publishing is itself a performative one. Consequently, her work resits traditional notions of grandeur and exclusivity, instead deploying a pseudo formality that is playful and provocative.[1] THE NAM is a 1,000-page book which describes the plots of six Vietnam films in their entirety: the films are Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon.
Following her shows at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, and Dundee Contemporary Arts, Banner was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002.
Since early 2000, Banner has been working with pornographic film as a basis for an exploration of our obsession with sex, and the extreme limits of written communication. In large, densely filled works she transcribe the varied sexual activities taking place in Asswoman in Wonderland, starring Tiffany Minx, who also directed this X-rated version of Alice’s fictional adventures. Banner’s own Arsewoman in Wonderland (2001), presented in the Turner Prize exhibition, is a 4 x 6 m printed description of the film pasted and layered sheet after sheet onto the wall like and overladen billboard. ‘I wanted to make some work about sex but I couldn’t describe it. I was too close to it and I did not have the words that close to hand. I looked again at ports as a way of investigating my own taboo. Just as with the war films I enjoyed it but found it hard to grasp; it was intimate yet distant, seductive yet sometimes repulsive. My response to the film was very emotional.’ The Guardian asked, “It’s art. But is it porn?” calling in “Britain’s biggest porn star”, Ben Dover, to comment. The prize was won that year by Lancastrian artist Keith Tyson.
In 2009 she issued herself an International Standard Book Number (ISBN 0-9548366-7-7), and registered herself as a publication under her own name. She was then photographed with the ISBN tattooed on her lower back.
In 2010, she was selected to create the 10th Duveen Hall commission at Tate Britain for which she transformed and displayed two decommissioned Royal Air Force fighter jets.
On 1 October 2010, in an open letter to the British government’s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt—co-signed by a further 27 previous Turner prize nominees, and 19 winners—Banner opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts. In the letter the cosignatories described the arts in Britain as a “remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity.”
Banner’s work includes sculpture, drawing and installation; text is the core of her oeuvre. She is one of the “key names”, along with Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon, of the Young British Artists.
In 2021, LL’Editions published Leporello N° 03 with Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press. This artist’s book is part of LL’Editions flagship series; The Leporello Series. For the series, LL’Editions invite an international roster of celebrated artists to explore the possibilities of the accordion format. The series is continuously growing with new editions released yearly. To see all volumes in the series published to date, please follow this link: The Leporello Series.
