Fiona Banner at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

This exhibition ended in Birmingham on 17 January but will be in Nürnberg, Germany from March to May 2016. 

SCROLL DOWN AND KEEP SCROLLING at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham was, according to Fiona Banner, the artist whose work it featured, “… not a survey – more of an anti-survey. A survey suggests something objective, historical, and fixed. This is subjective; nothing else is possible.” My first encounter with her work back in 2010 was difficult to avoid at Tate Britain, the Duveen Commission that year being Harrier and Jaguar, an installation of two decommissioned fighter aircraft, the former, a Sea Harrier, suspended from the ceiling (below left). Both would later be melted down as Harrier and Jaguar Ingots (2012, below right):

More recently, a 2008 neon of hers, Brackets (An Aside) was one of a couple representing that particular element at Compton Verney’s Periodic Tales. Visiting the Ikon show provided more demonstrations of Banner’s continuing interests in military aircraft and in neons, but the strongest impression it left was of her long-term preoccupation with words and books, and hence printing, which has led to her recent synthesis of a new typeface, Font, an amalgamation of typefaces she has worked with previously:

An explanation probably best not taken at (type)face value (above top) – and it’s a font (above lower) which marks the entry to the show. This starts with one of the artist’s “wordscapes”, NAM (1997), a transcription of her scene-by-scene account of six films based on the Vietnam War. NAM now comes in several forms: a notoriously ‘unreadable 100-page paperback, a screen print billboard (below) and a coffee table (below foreground):

Another screen print billboard transcription follows, her controversial 2002 Turner Prize entry, Arsewoman in Wonderland (below left), in which she describes a pornographic film of that name. Banner states that:

This work was always awkward and uncomfortable, and that has been exaggerated because of the changing nature, context and ubiquity of porn in the internet age. I have installed the work upside down to reflect that and mess with the act of looking, interpreting and reading.

Then come some neons, including The Bastard Word (2007, below top), Paolo Pellegrin’s photographs of the City of London, commissioned by Banner for the Archive of Modern Conflict and a video from 2007 of an uncomfortable-looking Samantha Morton reading out Banner’s description of the actress, observed when posing for a nude life-drawing.

On the floor above was an impressive demonstration of the Murano glassmaker’s craft, Work 3 (2014, above lower), not with much relationship to the other pieces, except that Banner spends a lot of time up towers like it when setting up wall drawings. Then a room full of items - too many to describe here (below left), but I will pick out a bronze, Unboxing (2012, below right), which, like Work 3, could be interpreted as making a comment about the variance between appearance and substance.

Finally, on the military aircraft theme, notable are Chinook (2013, below) a video of the twin-engined helicopter engaged in an aerobatic display at RAF Waddington, projected alongside a list of the manoueuvres it was undertaking:

and 1909-2015 (2010-15, below) a stack, four metres high, of the annual editions of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft: Apparently, Banner has said that

... the stacking of the books tells the story of the history of flight and with its inevitable collapse exposes the fallacy of a linear approach to history.

I was told by one of the gallery attendants that there is a hole drilled through the books - perhaps health and safety considerations required that the inevitability of the collapse was postponed by a concealed pillar.

SCROLL DOWN AND KEEP SCROLLING is, according to Ikon’s Director, Jonathan Watkins, “ … a survey of work by one of the leading lights in the British art scene, at a pivotal moment in her career.” It will be at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg from 24 March to 29 May 2016.

Steven Spielberg’s ‘Bridge of Spies’

Can the normal considerations about spoilers apply to this film? There may be some people who will read this but not know what happened at the Glienicke Bridge –so look away now!

Bridge of Spies’ plot is easy to describe. In 1957, Rudolf Abel, a Soviet agent in the USA is arrested by the FBI. He is defended by, apparently, a small-time New York insurance lawyer, James Donovan, who, in the absence of anyone else, is prepared to take the case on. By the time the appeal reaches the Supreme Court in Washington, Donovan has suggested not applying the death penalty in Abel’s case so that he could be exchanged for any American agent caught by the Soviets at some future time. Soon an American Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is shot down over the USSR and its pilot, Gary Powers, is captured. With the CIA looking over his shoulder, Donovan negotiates the exchange of Powers for Abel in Berlin and secures the release of an American student, Frederic Pryor, at the same time.

As might be expected of Spielberg, Bridge of Spies is handsomely filmed, the recreation of the Berlin Wall and the shooting-down of the U-2 particularly so, and is sure to make Americans feel good about themselves. And, of course, they should, for example the treatment in prison that Abel received would certainly have been far better than that meted out to Powers by the Russians. It was well acted with Tom Hanks as a stolid Donovan and a deservedly Oscar-nominated Mark Rylance as Abel.

But I came away feeling that the film was long enough to have carried a little more complexity and respect for historical accuracy and inferior in that regard to Spielberg’s Lincoln. Not so much the “that type of Buick only came out in 1966” or “Powers’ U-2 was too early to have that particular bulge” carping at details of authenticity, or even the fact that Donovan’s overcoat wasn’t actually stolen, nor was his home shot at - dramatic licence after all. More attention could have been paid to dates and the passage of time between Abel’s arrest and the exchange. But, although there was a mention of Donovan having been an assistant to the US prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, his wartime service as General Counsel at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a key precursor to the CIA, was a major and misleading omission. After the war Donovan became a partner in his own New York law firm.  He was hardly the small time hero the film implies him to be. If he had not died in 1970 at the age of 53, he would surely have served his country and his government again after his work in Cuba.

Probably less significant is the fact that Powers had left the USAF and as a U-2 pilot was a civilian employee of the CIA. As for Pryor, now an emeritus professor, he recently commented “Well, I enjoyed the movie. “It was good. But they took a lot of liberties with it.” And his exchange “… didn’t happen like it did in the movie at all.” As an aside to Pryor’s article and the game between the Russians and the East Germans to which he refers, as does the film, the map below of occupied Berlin and its four sectors might be of interest. The Glienecke Bridge was between the US sector of Berlin and the surrounding East Germany, Checkpoint Charlie between the US and Soviet sectors.

There are some particular points for a British audience to note, apart from Rylance’s performance:

• Abel was born William Fisher in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1903 and moved to post-revolutionary Russia in 1921.
• The U-2 was flown from UK bases at home and overseas and in the past was piloted by RAF personnel. A U-2 aircraft can be seen in the Imperial War Museum’s American Air Museum collection at Duxford. Late models have flown into RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire (SW England) as recently as 2015.
• A Briton, Matt Charman, co-wrote the screenplay for Bridge of Spies with the Coen brothers. He previously worked with Saul Dibb on Suite Française, a film which also put dramatic development ahead of historical particularities.
• And finally, pandering to the odd interests of this blog and a previous post here, it’s just possible that James Donovan is shown in Laura Knight’s The Nuremberg Trial, (below) worked up in situ in 1946 and, coincidentally, held by the Imperial War Museum (in London). He would be in one of the two left-hand rows or on the far side of the court.