Collection Study
Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade, 2007

Text by Emily King
January 2016

Every Word Unmade (2007) by British artist Fiona Banner (b. 1966) consists of 26 white neon letters on paper templates (100 x 70 cm each), with clamps, wire and transformers. When installed in one row, the work measures 21 metres long. Each letter has been hand made (blowing and bending glass tubes) by Fiona Banner herself, her first attempt at bending neon. The bent, semi-molten and still hot glass, is checked against the paper template on which the letter is drawn, slightly burning the paper in the process. Banner first exhibited this work at The Power Plant, Toronto, Fiona Banner: The Bastard Word (3 Mar–22 Apr 2007).

Banner made her first neon work, Neon Full Stop, in 1997. Since 2007, she has made a number of works in the medium including Beagle Punctuation (2011), a composition of punctuation marks in white neon; and The Vanity Press (2013), an ISBN number which is published under Banner’s imprint The Vanity Press.¹

¹ the above three works were also included in the exhibition Collection Study: Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade at DRAF, 2016.

Banner’s exploration of language spans from vast wall drawings, covering gallery walls with lengthy descriptions of films and nudes, to the substantial publications produced by The Vanity Press, to sculptural studies of letters and punctuation and their formal expression through fonts. Every Word Unmade focuses our attention on the structure and materiality of language.

I was thinking about a kind of unmaking of language. As if you could make every word, or story imaginable, from these 26 letters. All the potential is there, but none of the words.

— Fiona Banner, 2007

Every Word Unmade was acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection from Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, in 2007, where it was part of an eponymous solo exhibition (Every Word Unmade, 8 Sept-21 Oct 2007). The work has since been lent to The National Glass Centre, Sunderland, for the group exhibition Neon (1 Dec 2007–24 Mar 2008), where it was installed in two equal superposed rows (as opposed to previous presentations as one continuous line).

Every Word Unmade was also included in Banner’s recent major exhibition Scroll Down and Keep Scrolling at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (10 Oct 2015–17 Jan 2016). For this presentation, the letters were re-arranged (and supplemented) to spell THE BASTARD WORD (a reference to the title of its debut exhibition). At DRAF, the work is displayed in its original form, as an alphabet on one line.

Interview

With virtually no experience of working in neon, Fiona Banner made all the letters of her alphabet Every Word Unmade (2007) herself. She laboured in sequence, starting with the A and ending with the Z – although the last letter doesn’t seem significantly better executed than the first. Making neon is a tricky business, involving manipulating a glass tube over a flame while blowing into it to fill out the curves.¹ Fiona describes her inexpert craftsmanship as “one big stutter”, a metaphor that plays on the use of breath. Revealing the struggle involved in controlling the material, the piece is an expression of Fiona’s troubled infatuation with language. Jokingly, she calls it the “ultimate piece of concrete poetry” with “all of the potential, but none of the content”.

¹ The neon sign is a late 19th century evolution of the earlier Geissler tube, an electrified glass tube containing a “rarefied” gas (the gas pressure in the tube is well below atmospheric pressure). When a voltage is applied to electrodes inserted through the glass, an electrical glow discharge results. Neon signs became popular in the US from the 1920s for commercial signage. Since the 1960s, neon signs have been used by artists including Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, etc.

We met to talk about and around Every World Unmade at Ciao Bella, an old-school Italian restaurant on Lamb’s Conduit Street.² In the company of Fiona’s Bedlington Terrier Poppit, we sat under the heaters on the pavement outside and ate pasta — spaghetti with broccoli and anchovies for Fiona and penne al’arrabiata for me. The setting brought to mind the Financial Times feature ‘Lunch with the FT’:

² This interview took place on 10th December 2015.

Fiona Banner: In those features people often choose very simple places to make a point, rather than going la-di-da.

Emily King: Would you go la-di-da?

FB: Probably.

EK: It’s like Desert Island Discs: people choose their ‘Lunch with the FT’ restaurant, just in case the call comes.

FB: I once did something similar for a magazine called Port, which a friend of mine is editor of, but I didn’t realise it was a lunch-out interview until I read it. At the bottom of the text it said we’d been to St John and it itemised everything we’d had including the wine, but the interview had been entirely at my studio, so I called him up and said “where’s my bloody free lunch!”

EK: No! It was a complete fake?

FB: He still owes me that lunch, I am going to get it!

EK: Many years ago I was eating lunch at the French House³ and I saw Will Self⁴ at another table. He didn’t have a single companion, but various people kept coming and going from his table — he was never alone. Then he wrote up the meal, I think it was in The Independent, as an exercise in solitary dining. It was a lesson for me in terms of understanding how what you read bears on the truth. That relates to this interview too. When I was just starting out, the writer Stuart Morgan⁵ told me that a good Q&A interview has very little to do with the exchange that took place. It’s a kind of fiction.

³ The French House is a listed pub and dining room at 49 Dean Street, Soho, London. The French House was and is popular with artists and writers, among them Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Franck Auerbach.
⁴ Will Self (b. 1961) is an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality.
⁵ Stuart Morgan (1948–2002) was a Welsh art critic and editor.

FB: You don’t know that until it is revealed to you in some way, do you? But it’s so obvious when you know. It says a lot for our ability to suspend disbelief.

EK: Yes, I am often amazed at people’s willingness to accept that a photograph is ‘real’ and to act shocked when they discover it’s been retouched, even when the retouching is very obvious.

FB: It’s a choice that we make. A pact with fantasy.

EK: Tell me about your display at DRAF?⁶ Is it all about demonstrating your relationship with language?

⁶ Collection Study: Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade on display 29 Jan – 5 Mar 2016.

FB: Yes, except, is an alphabet language? It’s the building block of language, it’s the materiality of language…

EK: When did you first notice the form of letters?

FB: Only when I started using them a lot. I honestly had no conscious interest in the visual dimension of language until I started using it, until it became my medium. That was in the early days of desktop publishing — digital technology offered so many more choices. My interest came from a practical not an academic point of view.

EK: It was that shift to digital design that sparked my interest in typefaces too. Suddenly fonts went from being machine parts that were designed by the employees of typesetting firms to being software that could be designed by anyone with a desktop computer. For a few years, graphic designers were very excited by that.

FB: Yes, I remember, starting out, there were just a few fonts available on those big old Amstrad things, or whatever they were. Making the full-stop drawings and sculptures was the first time I really got into the formal appearance of typefaces, but with those pieces I was really negotiating the opposite of language. They came out of a point when I didn’t want to use language, I didn’t want to construct narrative and meaning. Using the full stop was a way of working through that, and also dealing with an empty moment within my own practice.

EK: Which was your first full stop?

FB: When I had just finished The Nam⁷, I made this little neon full stop, which is also going in the DRAF presentation.⁸ That was in 1997, I made it after publishing the book. It was quite an onerous thing publishing that book back in those days, without the resources. And it had been quite a big deal writing it. I remember thinking that the full stop at the end of the entire book is completely different to the full stop after the first sentence. The last full stop. After that I started investigating full stops!

⁷ Published in 1997, The Nam is a thousand-page compilation of complete present-tense descriptions in the artist’s own words of six well-known Vietnam War films: Full Metal Jacket; The Deer Hunter; Apocalypse Now!; Born on the Fourth of July; Hamburger Hill; and Platoon.
⁸ Neon Full Stop, 1997, was on display in Gallery 1 at DRAF, Camden

EK: How is the book punctuated generally? Does it have a standard sentence structure?

FB: Yes, but it doesn’t have any paragraphs, or chapters.

EK: Colons, semi-colons?

FB: It has those and parentheses, but it is written in quite a peculiar way. It doesn’t have any metaphor, or at least I tried not to use any. It’s unliterary in that way. Except in the description of Apocalypse Now, which is so impressionistic that you need the odd bit of metaphor. At the end of the film nothing happens but dust, and there are two pages of the book that just describe the dust, the endless plumes of smoke. Writing that book was the first time that I really got into language, because of the different language required to describe the various films. I didn’t come with a certain tool kit, or particular approach, so I was subject to the visual events of each of the films. Looking back, it is interesting to see how they each prompted a different kind of language. Take Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, there’s no metaphor in that film whatsoever, everything is shown.

EK: You weren’t tempted to set the description of each film in a different typeface?

FB: I did the opposite of that. I worked with the graphic designer Simon Joesbury, who is a friend. I wanted something very generic. I had been working with Helvetica when I was writing the text, so I wanted it to be in Helvetica. It isn’t edited, so I didn’t want to ‘edit’ its appearance. I wanted it to be like an overblown, absurd paperback. When you try to hold it, it just spills out. It is utterly familiar, but it is a really annoying object. It’s a breeze block.

EK: And the type is outsize too, isn’t it?

FB: Yes, it’s big, 13 point, I think. It’s like a dossier. That’s what we were thinking at the time.

EK: It’s interesting that you say you wanted something “generic”, yet there’s no real default. There are so many choices involved in making something look ‘normal.’

FB: Yes, that’s true. And it is also very difficult to try to use language ‘normally’. And saying the book is unedited is hubris. I always say that, but of course it is edited. You edit as you write, you edit according to what you see.

EK: The experience of writing The Nam led directly to the neon full stop?

FB: Yes, it is just a little bit of neon glass that I blew. I liked it because it is a breath encapsulated in glass, as a full stop is a breath in some ways. It represented a gap for me in terms of ideas. I wasn’t sure what to do next as an artist. After a while I tried looking at that awkwardness physically, in terms of making something of it, instead of it being an abstract pain. Also there are no neon full stops out there. I referred to it as “the smallest neon in the world.”

EK: And what made you think about there being different shaped full stops?

FB: Do you remember a place called Neal’s Yard Desktop Publishing? Back when Quark had just come out, if you didn’t have all that stuff, you could go there and pay some nice geeks to help set type for you. It was a bit of a weird place - it belonged to a mysterious guy that ran the whole of that Neal’s Yard area. He had translucent skin and lived upstairs in a kind of egg. I was typesetting the text for The Desert (1994)⁹, which is a description of the film Lawrence of Arabia, and I sent it to print, but somehow I set it at 1,000 point instead of 10. This full stop came out and I thought that’s interesting! Mainly because it’s so obvious - it was interesting that I worked with text so much, but hadn’t picked up on it before. Interesting in that it was revealed by dumbness, and became redolent of a sort of dumbness too, an un-language or the opposite of words, or of language itself.

⁹ Banner’s transcriptions, which began in 1994 with the film Top Gun, highlight the way in which actual or imagined events are fictionalised and mythologised. For example the dimensions of the work The desert, 1994, Banner’s retelling of David Lean’s epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, suggests the panoramic scale of a cinema screen, as well as the vast horizontal expanse of the desert.

EK: What shape was it?

FB: It was just weird, and I realised I had never thought about the shape of full stops until then. That’s when I started thinking of full stops as characters and when I got into making the sculptures. I thought it was fun to make them huge and three-dimensional, the opposite of the dot on the page. The first full stop sculptures were made out of white polystyrene which I sanded so they had this beautiful soft stone-like finish. I like the nature of that material, it’s really a non-material, because it’s for packing and props mainly. It’s a filler, not an end in itself – it’s more like space than material. They were first shown at Tate with a big text piece.¹⁰

¹⁰ The text work Breakpoint, 1998, a description of a car chase in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 film Point Break, was shown along- side Banner’s polystyrene full stops in the exhibition Art Now: Fiona Banner at Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) 3 Sept – 8 Nov 1998.

EK: Are the large-scale text pieces as much about the business of their making as the final outcome?

FB: When I am up a scaffold writing a massive text, it goes wonky as a result of working so close up, I enjoy how it looks wrong when you stand back. Those wall drawings in particular reveal the journey and the process. They are heroic in a certain way, but it is a failed heroism, a joke heroism. Also the subject is often heroism, our need for it, or desire for it – all sorts of associations with masculinity and so on. The work itself subverts that.

EK: Was blowing the neon for Every Word Unmade a heroic act as well?

FB: There is a faux heroism imbedded in the act of trying to do something on a grand scale that is very expert, but that you have no experience in. You are there with the Bunsen burner dealing with all this hot glass, which becomes super brittle very fast - it’s elemental.

EK: Would you do it as a performance? Either writing the text or blowing the neon?

FB: I have never considered it, but I suppose making it is quite performative. I think it is interesting to reveal the struggle with stuff, or materials, and I think it is interesting to reveal the struggle with language. The two converge in the neon, but in a cartoon-y way.

EK: Is the neon alphabet a metaphor for how hard it is to express yourself in language?

FB: Yes, but I’m also blowing up that thought and making it funny. There’s something comical about the scale of those letters. A metaphor for our struggle to communicate, around art, around whatever. Our bid to be in control of language, as a cypher for our emotions etc. We move within the framework of language and there’s an absurdity to that.

EK: Has becoming a publisher made you look harder at the way that language is represented?¹¹

FB: It radicalises that moment when the work becomes an object. In my case most things are made into objects quite gradually, but that is not true of publishing. It’s an extreme case, which creates interesting tensions. Questions of readability are interesting, because so much that is published isn’t read, especially in the realm of art. Who knows about this interview, Emily? Vincent will read it, but will anyone else?¹²

¹¹ Banner founded The Vanity Press in 1997.
¹² Vincent Honoré has been Director of DRAF since 2008.

EK: Yes, the art world’s relationship to reading is quite particular.

FB: When I published Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling¹³ it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to have an essay in it – who reads those essays? What is the catalogue essay? It is a mystery to me.

EK: It’s an interesting form, written not so much to be read, as to make everything alright.

FB: Perhaps to explain or reveal it, but mainly to legitimise it. When I made the Font typeface¹⁴, I thought that it would be really difficult to read, but actually you just read it differently, perhaps at a different pace, because it is unexpected. Do you think a different typeface, a weird typeface, changes the way you read in some way that we don’t know how to describe?

¹³ Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling (The Vanity Press, 2015) is Banner’s artist’s book. She describes it as an “anti catalogue” published to coincide with her exhibition of the same name at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, 10 Oct 2015 – 17 Jan 2016 and Kun- sthalle Nürnberg, March 24 - May 29 2016. The book is on display in Gallery 1.
¹⁴ Designed in 2015, the typeface Font is an amalgamation of all the letterforms that Fiona Banner has worked with previously, from her full stop sculptures to her typeset and published works. “It was created via a family tree arrangement, in which the child of Avant Garde and Courier mates with that of Peanuts and Didot, and Bookman and Onyx mate producing a child who mates with the offspring of Capitalist and Klang”. Fiona describes the final font as “an unpredictable bastardisation of styles and behaviours”.

EK: I think it does influence meaning, but in a very complicated way. There was a time in the late ’80s when some American graphic designers were insisting that, because a lot of US corporations used Helvetica, to use the typeface was to inadvertently endorse the values of corporate America. You just have to look at your book The Nam to know the relationship can’t be that straightforward. Would you ever make a typeface from the neon letterforms of Every Word Unmade?

FB: I don’t think so. You know what I really hate is fake handwriting neon. I hate that you would get a skilled craftsman to painstakingly follow your scribble.

EK: What about digital handwriting, a digital font that apes your hand? In the early ‘90s, just after the digitisation of type, there was a moment when it seemed likely that some day soon everyone would have their own typeface.

FB: I don’t mind that so much, it’s a bit naff, but I see that as a good joke. But neon isn’t handwriting, it’s the opposite. It is used as signage - it’s expertly made to deny signs of expression. Neon is so wrong as language because it is untransportable, yet it is redolent of a fluidity. In a way this is all massively overblown because making Every Word Unmade was a form of practice. Apart from that one tiny bit of neon, that puff of neon full stop, I hadn’t physically bent anything in neon before I made the A of the piece. It’s just a cartoon, both in the sense of inflating and sending something up and also in the sense of it being a sort of study.