CIRCA ESSAY
Fiona Banner: MESSAGES IN THE SKY
In his 1964 text Language and Reality, philosopher Vilém Flusser scaffolds a planet of language. At its equator of reality are words at their most banal: conversation and small talk, everyday gestures at meaning. At both poles sits silence—both the authentic and inauthentic variety—a total refusal. Things get weirder in the hazy atmosphere above its two hemispheres, where a climbing latitude yields the nonsensical and prophetic: mumbling, poetry, word salad, prayer. While he never calls it outright (to name the thing is, in a sense, to lose it), Flusser drops hints that these sideways stabs at meaning-making are the most substantial and revelatory. These are the coordinates where language is sticky, vague, chimerical and airborne, buoyed by possibility, always on the cusp of becoming something else.
The British artist Fiona Banner, who also operates under the para-organizational seal of The Vanity Press, takes an adjacent approach to language. Across print and film, doctored photography and gargantuan ominous sculptural installations that thrust military jets and pneumatic navy appendages into the hallowed halls of soft power enclaves like Tate Britain, Banner toys with language as a plastic medium, both a brute weapon and seductive technology, whatever you want it to be. Like a car crusher at the cosmic junkyard of human civilization, language, Banner suggests, is the ultimate leveling device, compressing all worlds into a single consensus reality.
