Text Based Artwork

Mixed Media unit

• Fiona Banner (b. 1966) is fascinated by the near impossibility of containing action and time in a prescribed form.

• She is best known for making hand-written and printed texts ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’, that retell in her own words entire feature films or sequences of events.

• These personal transcriptions, which began in 1994 with the film Top Gun, also highlight the way in which actual or imagined events are fictionalised and mythologised. In a recent body of work based on Vietnam war films, Banner has deliberately posed questions about the fictionalisation of historical events.

Fiona Banner

The Nam

• In 1997 she published THE NAM 1997, a one thousand-page book comprising her own frame by frame descriptions in continuous text of the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. Her texts, representing eleven unbroken hours of harrowing film, hint at the excessive nature of imagery in our culture. When Banner asked a friend to read THE NAM he concluded that in its entirety it was ‘unreadable’.

http://www.fionabanner.com/works/breathingbag/index.htm

Break PointBreak Point, is based on the chase scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s cult film Point Break (1991). The slogan featured in the advertisement for the film was, perhaps accurately in this case, ‘100% pure adrenalin’.

Banner transforms and contains the nail-biting and seemingly endless chase into an arresting landscape of words. As the distance between pursuer and pursued closes, the space between the letters and lines of text stencilled on to the canvas in hazard red correspondingly collapses, until the climax of the chase ends in a crash of words at the bottom of the canvas.

But significantly, the chase does not reach completion - when the pursuer finally catches his human quarry, he lets him get away

Martin Creed, Don’t Worry 2008• Martin Creed (born

1968) is a British artist and musician

• Creed's work is often a small intervention in the world, making use of existing materials or situations rather than bringing new material into the world.

Jenny Holzer

• Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American Neo-conceptual art artist who utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems so as to address the politics of discourse.

Barbara Kruger

• Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.

Dada

• Kurt Schwitters