Improving the Decor
 

How to liven up those empty spaces with real art.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesi...ain?intcmp=239




In the words of the artist:
The exhibits are Banner's largest work yet and part of her continuing fascination with war and jets. "I've slowly arrived at these sculptures," she said today , admitting that she was "seduced" by fighter planes. "Years and years ago I remember going for a walk with my dad in the Welsh hills. I must have been seven or eight and it was so quiet and beautiful and suddenly, out of nowhere came this Harrier jump jet which completely ripped up the sky. It was a completely transformative moment but we were left, literally with words knocked out of us, wondering how something that was such a monster could be so beautiful."

Banner said she was not trying to make some easily digestible point, nor was it an anti-war work. "This work is more about how people react to it, rather than a big black and white statement.

"We all hate war but these objects inspire a strange enthusiasm in us. When you reflect on their beauty it's a strange thing, people say surely they are designed with an aesthetic in mind and, of course, they're not. They are absolutely designed to function and that function is to kill, and that says something questionable about our aesthetic judgement and makes us ask questions about our moral position."

In person, Banner is not at all what you might expect of a sometime porn consumer, war-film aficionado and collector of military aircraft: dressed all in blue – blue shirt, blue jeans, blue jacket – she is wiry and casually elegant, with a direct, easy charm. Her work, too, is quieter, more delicate, intimate and many-layered, than its headline-grabbing subject matter might suggest.

On the ground floor of her studio, Banner shows me All the World's Fighter Planes, a work that was 10 years in the making, and which she completed last year. It's a glass case filled with pictures of aircraft cut haphazardly from newspapers, each one meticulously labelled like an animal specimen: Hawk, Harrier, Bear, Chinook. "I started making this years ago," she says. "I'd been cutting out pictures of fighter planes from newspapers for a while, and realised I'd started a collection. I became strangely excited by the idea that they all had these names from nature. On one level I find these planes incredibly beautiful, but on another level I'm horrified by them."

Favorite Quote from the Article
 

"When it was used in the first Gulf war, the Jaguar's nose was adorned with a large picture of the Viz cartoon character 'Buster Gonad' – known for his 'unfeasibly large ........."

Good airplanes should always be a work of art.

Tate Britain| Current Exhibitions | Tate Britain Duveens Commission 2010

Video interview of the "Artist"

Kind of cool, explains everything a bit more. Shows a pretty good detail of the feathers painted on the Harrier.

It's interesting though that, at least for me, something designed purely for function is often more beautiful than if an artist had created a non-flying aircraft purely for aesthetics.

Maybe it's seeing the aircraft so far removed from its intended purpose