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Inside, Banner has culled together images from newspapers of fighter planes and helicopters from news reports on recent military actions. They have been cut out, identified and indexed in a scrapbook approach. The word ‘All’ in the title constructs a universe of totality, striving towards the control of achieving a complete collection, yet as any train-spotting mind will tell you, it is anything but complete. This is a front line version of Jane’s Aircraft Recognition Guide’ (the standard in aviation reference, providing exhaustive technical detail on over 950 civil and military aircraft). The list and the images add up to a powerful collection of war machines. Banner plays with the scale and format. She includes helicopters and transports. They are in action. They are at home in the book in our hands. This is where Banner’s list goes, to the heart of the matter and our desire to look at military power domesticated, contained. It is safe. It is what war is not. In a form we can comprehend and be attracted to, the book is simple in this desire and structure; it is when Banner translates this to moving image does All the World’s Fighter Planes take on a new and particularly complex reading. The pages from the book are projected one after the other accompanied by a looping sound track Banner has compiled from war film scores from 1960 to present. The film was originally devised for Banner’s book launch at Cubitt gallery in London. It served as a promotional backdrop. It used all the tactics of promotion to sex up the book, swelling music and action shots. The promotion complicates our reading. There is a blurring between fiction and truth. Depending on when and how you view the work could create a far different reading. Seeing the images coupled with the electric guitar riffs of ‘Top Gun’ you could assume that All the World’s Fighter Planes is a celebration of this machinery; a testosterone thrust to war and a fitting conclusion for such a promotion. The images parade past while the music compounds. There is the soaring overture for “Battle of Britain”, the adagio for “Platoon”, the haunting masmoudi of the final credits in “Black Hawk Down”, the refrain leading into the theme from “Patton”, and so on. The play list is independent of the visual list. We create the connection to the emotional response. We never get to the end of the play list; the images are made new by the ongoing soundtrack. We understand the structure from years of watching movies. Therefore, there are moments the images look to be heroic, macho, bold, powerful, playful, comical, ominous, menacing, poignant, rousing…sorrowful. Banner has created a spectrum of ‘all’ our emotions. There is no real knowledge of each aircrafts learned here. Banner does not divulge which one is fastest or its manoeuvring capability. Yet, like earlier works she uses the list as structure. Banner understands our familiarity to this language and our desire for it. Not just its use in the visual arts, but how we use the list in our daily life. She exploits our built-in curiosity to know ‘all’, however in each case the list unravels to reveal complex ideas about our human condition: love, hate and war.
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