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Lot Essay
Vivid red words cascade down a vast white page, growing closer together and tougher to read. Letters are truncated by the framing edge, leaving the narrative incomplete; meaning is lost as the eye follows the rows of text from edge to edge, and is swallowed by the letters’ increasing density. Fiona Banner’s Break Point (1998) is a typically adroit instance of the artist’s play with the limits of language. Her ‘wordscapes’ – large-scale text works that recount the plots of feature films – paint a thousand pictures; particularly concerned with our fascination with violence and the numbing of our critical faculties, she often retells scenes of action and war, exploring how societal attitudes are constructed by the framing and narrative devices of fiction. For her epic work The Nam (1997), she published an unreadable 1000-page tome relating in minute detail the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and The Deer Hunter; the present work subjects a chase scene from the movie Point Break to similar treatment, its reversed title punning on the artist reaching the semiotic breaking point of language, as well as the film’s car-crash speed and intensity.
In Banner’s own words, ‘BREAK POINT is kind of a fast painting … It describes the chase scene out of the Bigelow film POINT BREAK (1991). I was thinking about a few things concerning that picture. In actual fact, what happens eventually is that the picture plane gains this recessive space to it, which is different to the other, similar “pictures” that I’ve made. And the reason it has that space is because of the way the letters drift and become compressed. So I was thinking … in terms of painting, obviously, and landscape, obviously, and in terms of this being a very fast painting; all this stuff about the lines on the page becoming lines on the road and it ending in this kind of text crash. It’s impossibly, unsustainably fast. So that’s why it’s written in this hazard red. The space suggested visually in the painting is distance, and the painting is about how fast it takes to cover that distance and the unattainability of that gesture, of even considering the possibility of doing that. And it’s this particular chase, because, well, the chase is so ridiculously great that when it’s translated into words it comes this kind of shaggy-dog story, you know, the opposite of keen imperative momentum. No. it’s because in the end Keanu gets Swayze. He’s there within his range and instead of shooting him, he lets him get away – his choice’ (F. Banner, quoted in P. Staple, ‘Fiona Banner Talks to Polly Staple,’ Untitled, Autumn 1998, No. 17, p. 6).
In Banner’s own words, ‘BREAK POINT is kind of a fast painting … It describes the chase scene out of the Bigelow film POINT BREAK (1991). I was thinking about a few things concerning that picture. In actual fact, what happens eventually is that the picture plane gains this recessive space to it, which is different to the other, similar “pictures” that I’ve made. And the reason it has that space is because of the way the letters drift and become compressed. So I was thinking … in terms of painting, obviously, and landscape, obviously, and in terms of this being a very fast painting; all this stuff about the lines on the page becoming lines on the road and it ending in this kind of text crash. It’s impossibly, unsustainably fast. So that’s why it’s written in this hazard red. The space suggested visually in the painting is distance, and the painting is about how fast it takes to cover that distance and the unattainability of that gesture, of even considering the possibility of doing that. And it’s this particular chase, because, well, the chase is so ridiculously great that when it’s translated into words it comes this kind of shaggy-dog story, you know, the opposite of keen imperative momentum. No. it’s because in the end Keanu gets Swayze. He’s there within his range and instead of shooting him, he lets him get away – his choice’ (F. Banner, quoted in P. Staple, ‘Fiona Banner Talks to Polly Staple,’ Untitled, Autumn 1998, No. 17, p. 6).