Fiona Banner

The Beauty of Our Weapons

My candle burns at both ends.

It will not last the night

But ah my foes and oh my friends

It makes a lovely light.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

For Fiona Banner, it’s simple. It begins with predator and prey, tooth and claw—we call this hunting, unless we’re being hunted; then we’re dinner. Next it’s predators fighting predators over prey or territory—we call this war. Then there’s predators fighting predators but nobody gets killed—we call this sport, and, since everybody usually survives in sport, predators get better at predation. They come to admire its skills and its instruments. At the level of sport, refinement and craft become valued attributes, since those who don’t participate, watch. We celebrate this refinement and craft with ornament. Then, finally, we celebrate the refinement and ornament of our weapons above their instrumentality. We call this art, and in this democratic sport, the winner is elected as the most desirable fruit of the poison tree.

First death, then a simple hierarchy of sublimation in which, theoretically, fewer and fewer people die in the process of daily life. The people who survive get better and better at what they do. The people who watch get better and better at understanding what’s being done. So, the design adorns the dagger and the design becomes a painting. The shuffle becomes a march; the march becomes a dance; the fort becomes a castle, the castle a decorative ruin. (The Tate Modern is in fact a decorative ruin.) Renaissance men develop the trigonometry of aiming cannon fire. This manipulation is inverted and deployed as single-point perspective in verisimilar painted images, and then nuanced out of it by Veronese.

Fiona Banner, Harrier, 2010. BAe Sea Harrier aircraft, paint, 7.6 × 14.2 × 3.71 m. Courtesy of the artist. Photo © Tate, London 2014.

Fiona Banner has taken unto herself that task of reminding us of the roots of art in war and the roots of loveliness in pornography. In Banner’s work, war and pornography never disappear nor does the fraught residue of loveliness. We all feel the tug both ways. Today, we have become so safe that we try not to think about beauty anymore, lest we think of death. Conversely, we have become so fraught and anxious that we can no longer see the relevance of ornament and decoration, lest we think of death. The physical world can disappear under the threat of both eternity and oblivion. Fortunately, we do die, and everything teeters on the edge of predatory advantage. Ornamental layers are nested like Russian dolls, with death at the center. Without Tate Britain, and the fine manners of Georgian architecture, there would be no new predators like the fighter planes Banner has installed within it, the Jaguars and the Harriers, and no connection between Georgian architecture, the predatory aircraft and the natural predators whose designs they have appropriated.

So I started wondering what would have happened if these airplanes were installed in Tate Modern rather than Tate Britain? I realized immediately that the thought would never have presented itself. The building and the aircraft are not rhyming artifacts. In the Tate Modern’s stripped out, sexless, denaturalized environment, they would fit but they would not speak; they would risk becoming yet another progressive-minded repudiation of the roots of industry in conflict. Tate Britain, on the other hand, invests the aircraft with the vocabulary of its design, and the aircraft invest Tate Britain with the aura of worldly power that it once possessed. Place the aircraft in Tate Modern and nothing would happen. The building would be overpowered; it would be a hanger, an accessory, and a pragmatic umbrella to keep the rain off the machines. There would be no conflict, no confrontation, and no power struggle.

The function of the planes and the museum is interesting: the fighter planes have the rather pointed attribute of being able to fly and blow the shit out of everything. The Harrier, the Jaguar, and Tate Britain celebrate national life. They are fully evolved and refined artifacts in aid of blowing the shit out of everything. They each have a past and a future. They each hold a position in the narrative of evolving modernity, curvilinear and streamlined to emphasize the motion of historical time. In fact, if you gave Palladio, with his skills as a stone mason, a large chunk of granite, a chisel, a hammer, and some heavy timber-rebar, he could knock out a very sleek and persuasive Jaguar in a couple of weeks, since the plane’s shape accommodates itself to his vernacular. The plane wouldn’t fly, of course, but neither do Palladio’s angels. The dream of flying would still be there.

The most crucial aspect of Banner’s installation, then, is the “fit” of the objects together. Tate Britain and the fighter aircraft nestle symmetrically into and around one another because the aircraft and the building are both based on the scale of human beings. They have undergone manipulations to perform their separate functions, but they are human at their core. Like the Sforza galleries displaying armory in Milan, the rooms and the weapons seem to recreate the ghosts of warriors. The fighter planes are as small and streamlined as they can be to carry their armaments and their pilot; their shapes are extensions of the pilot. The Duveen Gallery is in the Palladian tradition. It is as large as a space can be without diminishing the scale of its occupants, which would be churchy, collectivist, and impolite. In this sense, both the building and the planes use the human body as a building block. As a consequence, human bodies fit rationally into the space and around the objects.

At Tate Britain, the bond between weapon and ornament remains unbroken. History, form, gesture, and direction are all an essential part of their armature. So the instruments of grandeur and death rather ominously cuddle up to one another. They rhyme like lines in some imperial epic, and this is unnerving. By letting them cohabit, of course, we acknowledge that it’s all about death. If we were all immortal, of course, we might make some very beautiful things, but why would we?

As it exists, Banner’s installation is an intimidating work of art and a sleek cultural aperçu.