Fiona Banner

b.1966

Fiona Banner was born in Liverpool in 1966. She studied Fine Art at Kingston Polytechnic and went on to complete an MA at Goldsmiths College, London, in 1993. Her first solo exhibition was in 1994 at City Racing, London, and since then she has had many solo shows in Europe and North America, most recently at Kunstverein Aachen, and Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Every year Turner Prize time signals the renewal of the same old discussion as to what constitutes art - or rather what some critics have decided is not worthy of the name of art. The debate promises to be even more heated because one of the shortlisted artists has chosen pornography as her subject matter. This means that only GCSE and A-level students will be able to see this section of the show.

Fiona Banner is fascinated by the relationship of words to images and her work forces us to consider things we usually take for granted. Are words as potent as images? Which do we value more? If we watch a film, for example, which affects us more, the words or the images? If the cinema screen were filled with words rather than images how would this affect our experience? What if films went back to being silent?

In the balance between words and images as means of communication, images may seem to weight the scales because they have instant impact. Films and television have become more popular sources of information than books and newspapers. Images pursue us even into our dreams and enter our minds as we read or listen to the words of others. But we accord them less value than words. We use our intellect to select words; images appear unbidden.

Banner makes us question our responses by presenting text as if its prime function were visual, so that the meaning of individual words becomes of secondary importance. Normally we read a text word by word in order to understand the whole. We only consider its appearance if the book is particularly finely produced. Banner makes it difficult for us to read individual words because there are so many of them stretched out over a vast area, similar in size to a cinema screen. On the other hand, the collective visual impact of the words is great and carries its own meaning.

In “The Desert” (1994) Banner retold the story of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia. Because the text was almost unreadable on such a scale the spectator had to consider it afresh as image rather than words. The stretch of words resembled a desert, with the accumulation of words creating an effect of unending expanse and boredom.

Banner has recently continued her investigation of language by focusing on pornography. By focusing on the visual aspect of words she plays down their meaning. By choosing pornography she fixes on extreme situations in which words play a minor part because acts and emotions take precedence. Obscene words (she includes them in her text) fill a gap where no adequate vocabulary exists.

As in her other works based on film, her text is so vast that the writing is virtually unreadable. To attempt to read it you would have to put yourself in the position of a voyeur, gazing intently so as not to miss any detail.

The installation entered for the Turner Prize, “Arsewoman in Wonderland” (2001), is four metres high and six metres wide and consists of a description of the film printed in bright pink and pasted, sheet after sheet, on to the wall like a billboard. At once alluring and repulsive, the initially shocking words soon deteriorate into crude descriptions. The long sequence of unreadable words could be seen as mirroring the detachment of pornography from human feelings.

There are two versions of this X-rated version of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. In one of them, Banner diligently describes what happens in a pornographic film. In the other, called “Mother” and also included in the Turner Prize, she starts with her reactions to the same pornographic film and moves on to a description of her own sexual fantasy. Just as “Arsewoman in Wonderland” is virtually unreadable because of its scale, so “Mother” is hard to decipher because it is handwritten.

The play on public and private space underlying Banner’s work is enhanced by a “space confuser” through which the viewer must pass to approach the work. This is a coloured canvas cut in strips like the blinds in the windows of porn shops. It defines the barrier between the everyday world and the fantasy spaces of our imagination.

Fiona Banner has chosen to investigate pornography as the logical outcome of her exploration into the ways we interpret meaning through words and images. Although primary teachers will be unable to visit the exhibit with their pupils, they may find it relevant to their classroom work. Do children learn to read as much through visual stimuli as from learning the names of individual letters of the alphabet and how to string them together? Do children with good visual memories have an advantage because they can learn to read by identifying the shapes of words?

Tate curator Katharine Stout feels frustrated by the annual knee-jerk reactions to Turner Prize “scandals” by people who condemn without ever seeing the exhibits. Many contemporary artists see art primarily as philosophy and believe that it is no good condemning their work without considering its ideas.

Miquette Roberts is education resources officer at the Tate Britain