Plinth

Fiona Banner’s new exhibition at Frith Street Gallery ‘started with the word “disarm”,’ she says. ‘I started thinking about the arm – its connection to the body. There’s something sinister but also potentially absurd about that word.’

DISARM (landscape) (2024), which also showed last year as part of CIRCA between the adverts on Piccadilly Lights, shows a military flypast that spells out DISARM in all caps, an irony so unlikely, simple and concrete it could have its own term – a Bannerism perhaps (although, let’s not). The work started with a low-frequency roar in 2023, the artist rushing outside her Hackney studio to watch 18 Typhoon fighter jets form the letters ‘CR’ in the sky – Charles Rex, for the new king. ‘It was just an inversion of the insane ego of that moment,’ she says. ‘And also, how weirdly, even as someone who makes this kind of work, I still surprise myself how susceptible we are to being excited about these things, whilst also knowing they are obscene. Because I run out and look at them, and I actually feel some kind of bodily thrill.

‘It’s that slippage between an intellectual reaction and a sort of embodied or seductive moment,’ Banner continues. In 2011, this commingling of awe, beauty and terror was explored up close in Harrier and Jaguar, as the artist put two fighter jets in Tate Britain’s neoclassical galleries. Then, as in DISARM (landscape), the jets are all named after forces of nature. D is a Flying Leopard, I is a Typhoon, and so on. ‘The planes needed to come from different countries – countries that would never fly together, only against each other,’ she says. The naming suggests ‘nature at war with itself – which is, really, who we are.’

A jet also appears physically at Frith Street Gallery, albeit far more discreetly. Banner first melted down a Tornado ZE728 to create a bell for her 2010 show at Frith Street. Now, using the leftover aluminum, she has recast it as frames for graphite drawings (2024-5) of the DISARM flypast. Reflecting on graphite’s use as a lubricant, ‘I realised that’s what I was doing: the purpose of the drawings was to meditate on how to bring flexibility and possibility back into language — the word — and then considering this as a bit of language in action.’ Applying frames is like publishing the drawings. ‘When pages are bound, they become a book. It has a similar sense of enclosing and finishing them. Otherwise, especially as they’re a series, they could go on.’

It is perhaps unsurprising how frequently Banner loops back to language and action, having registered herself as a publication in 2009 with her own ISBN (0-9548366-7-7, which she also tattooed on her back). ‘I guess everything for me is publishing,’ she says. ‘There’s a dialogue and a play between what a publication is and the theatre of it—the space in which ideas move and exchange.’ Having always made books, ‘I started to see the books as work. They became no different, really, in priority from sculpture or drawing. It was a natural extension for sculpture and drawing to meet publishing.’

Nonetheless, society conceives of artists and publishers quite differently. Artists are romanticised by a market obsessed with rarity and originality, while publishers are often undervalued, reduced to zine fairs, DIY counter-culture, or commercialized ‘low culture’ like crime fiction and Mills & Boon. ‘I think the job of the artist is to break down these conventional identities,’ Banner says. ‘That’s how I feel about it — to be playful with what is expected is where the work lies.

‘You could say, with my self-portrait as a publication, that it’s performative,’ she says. ‘It’s a subversion of the notion of biography or autobiography. It’s sculptural. It’s about time. It’s many things, and hopefully, it has humour.’ This openness to interpretation runs through her work, blurring the lines between object, action, and meaning. ‘I find that almost everything I do can be identified as several different things at the same time,’ she says, gesturing towards a maquette in her studio of a boulder-sized full stop – in 2020, together with Greenpeace, she dropped the granite versions into the sea. ‘You could say they’re sculptures, performative language, negative space, or that they just plop into the water. You could say they don’t exist because humans will never see them again, or you could say it’s just abstract language. I don’t know.’

As it happens, DISARM (portrait) (2023) also throws linguistic detritus into water: mannequin parts spin in slow motion through the air, labeled with puns like disarm, obsolete, delegation that also reference the body politic. Shot on a phone from below, they freewheel against the sky, casting off droplets of water so evocative of summer days wiled away in a swimming pool you can almost smell the suncream. ‘It’s got quite a digitised feel to it at times,’ Banner says, despite these details – or perhaps even because of them (the blend of realism, stylisation and nostalgia recalls a Pixar animation). ‘But it's actually literally lying in the water, hurling legs, arms etc up and filming.’

DISARM (portrait) was envisioned for an abandoned Topshop unit in Chester, where the artist formerly shopped. ‘It was quite potent to me, but also just as an idea of that whole era – hope through shopping is gone. Somehow the defunct shop spoke of that forlorn end to that experiment in consumerism as a positive space.’

Yet to linger too long in the film’s sunniness and its commentary on those brighter days for the high street would be to miss its far more savage undercurrent. It is easy to see bodies being blown to bits, beyond the lens flare. The film is by turns absurd, amusing, and horrifying, resisting any singular emotional response, and all this allows the viewer to sit with the work for longer. Before you know it, the score (think, jam session for sticky floors) begins to swell. Limbs keep raining down.

‘Obviously, the world has been so weighed down with conflict — it’s very hard to talk about. Though we all do, and we all listen a lot,’ Banner says. It is hard to talk about. Particularly now. The past few years have recorded the highest number of conflicts since the Second World War. ‘I think climate change is stimulating profound insecurity and fuelling territorial concerns. War is about territory, whether that is religious territory or physical or rare minerals, weather… whatever.

‘For me, the work is about the universal concept of “disarm” — which may sound naive or ridiculous today but is also something I wanted to find a way of working with.’ As much as ‘disarm’ can be read as an imperative, ‘I'm not getting into specific conflicts necessarily with this work. It's just, as an artist, if you can't speak the impossible, or even just envision it — well, I think that's something an artist can do, and that's, I suppose, the calling in this work.’ While Banner is always ‘very enlivened to what’s going on in politics, particularly before showing work, equally, I try to stay steady in the knowledge that you know the world is always changing around the work. Does that make some sense to you?’

It does. As much as senseless violence, the global arms trade and the shifting news cycle can remain in anyone’s head before promptly slipping away or flying out of sight. Fortunately, Banner has a way of bringing us back. Her latest exhibition invites viewers to ‘reconsider again this word disarm and how it sort of calcified in cliché and impossibility. It feels redundant, and it's possibly – of all the words – one that shouldn't be.’

By Sammi Gale

Find out more about Fiona Banner

Cover image:
Fiona Banner,
DISARM (landscape), 2024
HD digital film, soundtrack
4.41 mins
Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
Photo: Fiona Banner Studio
© Fiona Banner Studio*