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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Nude performances in the practice of Fiona Banner, 2006-2010

(USC Thesis Other)

Nude performances in the practice of Fiona Banner, 2006-2010

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Nude Performances In The Practice Of Fiona
Banner, 2006-2010

By

Katherine Rosenheim

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere)
May 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Fiona Banner 7

Chapter Two: Performance Nude 12

Chapter Three: Naked vs. Nude 32

Chapter Four: The Passage from Image to Text 36

Chapter Five: The Nude as a Cultural Category 39

Conclusion 42

Appendix 45

Bibliography 48

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure One: Fiona Banner, The Nam, 1,000-page book, 1997 8

Figure Two: Fiona Banner, War Porn, 10
Pencil on Paper, 2470 x 1630 cm, 2004

Figure Three: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 14
with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival,
Cornwall, United Kingdom, July 2006

Figure Four: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 18
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes,
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007

Figure Five: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 19
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes,
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007

Figure Six: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 20
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes,
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007

Figure Seven: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 20
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007

Figure Eight: Fiona Banner, Mirror, 25
with Samantha Morton, 3 minutes,
Whitechapel Gallery,
London, United Kingdom, September 3, 2007

Figure Nine: Fiona Banner, Mirror, 26
with Samantha Morton, 3 minutes,
Whitechapel Gallery,
London, United Kingdom, September 3, 2007

iv

Figure Ten: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 28
with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes,
DVD on Monitor and Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240 cm, October 8, 2008

Figure Eleven: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 31
with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes,
DVD on Monitor and Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240 cm, October 8, 2008.

Figure Twelve: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 31
with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes,
DVD on Monitor and Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240 cm, October 8, 2008.

Figure Thirteen: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 42
with David Salas, 30 minutes,
Other Criteria Book Launch, at Claire de Rouen,
London, United Kingdom, March 5, 2010.

v

ABSTRACT

This study explores Fiona Banner’s nude performances and the differences that occur
in the analysis of artwork that privileges the process of creation instead of the completed
aesthetic object. Banner realized five nude performances: Nude Performance, July 2006,
Nude Performance, April 3, 2007, Mirror, September 3, 2007, Performance Nude, October
8, 2008 and Nude Performance, March 5, 2010. Banner’s role and positionality in producing
sexually charged portraits of nude models is analyzed in this thesis from a set of feminist
theoretical perspectives. The study also highlights select key uses of the terminology
surrounding the description of the unclothed female form, for example the nude versus the
naked (Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form 1956 and Lynda Nead, Female
Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality 1992). The distinction between Banner’s acts of writing
and the viewer’s reading process, I argue, is fundamental to the denaturalizing of
representation that occurs in the work, an interpretation that is supported by Michael
Bracewell’s 2009 article “Life Writing.”

1

INTRODUCTION
In 2006 Fiona Banner, an English conceptual artist and sculptor, staged her first Nude
Performance at the Port Eliot Literary Festival. The performance, held on the Port Eliot
Literary Festival stage in front of an audience, consisted of Banner, dressed in loose fitting
studio garb, writing a description onto a vertical canvas of the nude female model who was
standing before her. In the performance Banner demystifies the artist in the studio and
denaturalizes the practice of painting or drawing of the female nude. This demystification
occurs as Banner exposes the audience to her process of technical observation as she chooses
words and phrases to describe the naked female body. This process illuminates the social,
cultural and political mediation that occurs within any representation of the nude human
body by an artist, reminding us, who, as audience, are in the position of voyeurs, that “art and
artists are made on earth” and we give them the power to “shape culture.”
1

This master’s thesis offers an examination of five works realized by Banner between
2006 and 2010. The works that I examine are Nude Performance, July 2006, Nude
Performance, April 3, 2007, Mirror, September 3, 2007, Performance Nude, October 8, 2008
and Nude Performance, March 5, 2010.
2
Nude Performance, July 2006, described above,

1 Carol Duncan, “The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art,” Heresies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan 1997): 50.

2
Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival, Cornwall,
United Kingdom, July 2006, last modified September 2013,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeportelliot /index.htm?i09; Fiona Banner, Nude Performance,
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery,Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007,
Accessed September 2013, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12;
Fiona Banner, Mirror, with Samantha Morton, 3 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, September 3, 2007, London,
United Kingdom, in Performance Nude, by Fiona Banner (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 66;
Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, DVD on Monitor and Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240cm, October 8, 2008, last modified September 2013, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance /
performancenude/index.htm?i18;

2

was staged at the Port Eliot Literary Festival with Marianne Hyatt posing as the nude model.
Following this work, Banner staged Nude Performance at the Power Plant Contemporary Art
Gallery in Toronto, Canada on April 3, 2007. Nude Performance, 2007 featured Ame
Henderson as the nude model and mimicked the format of the previous Nude Performance,
2006. This work was followed by Mirror, 2007 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In
Mirror, Banner changed the format of the piece, removing the process of writing the
description from the performance. Instead Banner asked Samantha Morton to read the
description of her nude body, which Banner had written earlier in the studio, to the audience
of the Whitechapel Gallery. After Mirror, Banner produced Performance Nude with
Marianne Hyatt in 2008. Performance Nude was exhibited as a video of Banner writing a
description of Marianne Hyatt’s nude body, playing on a monitor mounted next to the
plasterboard canvas that contained the completed unedited description of the of the female
model’s body. Two years later Banner revisited the nude performance series at the Other
Criteria book launch for her artist book, Performance Nude, hosted by Claire de Rouen
Books in London.
3
This last Nude Performance repeated the structure of the first two nude
performances. However, this one featured a male nude model, David Salas. Fiona Banner’s
decision to use a male model, instead of a female model, in this last piece, suggests she had
reconsidered the format and function of the series.
This master’s thesis offers an examination of five works realized by Banner between
2006 and 2010. The works that I examine are Nude Performance, July 2006, Nude

Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with David Salas, 30 minutes, Other Criteria Book Launch, Claire de Rouen,
London, United Kingdom, last modified September 2013,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeothercriteria/index.htm?i26.

3

Performance, April 3, 2007, Mirror, September 3, 2007, Performance Nude, October 8, 2008
and Nude Performance, March 5, 2010.
4
Nude Performance, July 2006, described above,
was staged at the Port Eliot Literary Festival with Marianne Hyatt posing as the nude model.
Following this work, Banner staged Nude Performance at the Power Plant Contemporary Art
Gallery in Toronto, Canada on April 3, 2007. Nude Performance, 2007 featured Ame
Henderson as the nude model and mimicked the format of the previous Nude Performance,
2006. This work was followed by Mirror, 2007 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In
Mirror, Banner changed the format of the piece, removing the process of writing the
description from the performance. Instead Banner asked Samantha Morton to read the
description of Morton’s nude body, that Banner had written earlier in the studio, to the
audience of the Whitechapel Gallery. After Mirror, Banner produced Performance Nude
with Marianne Hyatt in 2008. Performance Nude existed as a video of Banner writing a
description of Marianne Hyatt’s nude body playing on a monitor mounted next to the
plasterboard canvas that contained the completed unedited transcript. Two years later Banner
revisited the nude performance series at the Other Criteria book launch for her artist book,

4 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival, Cornwall,
United Kingdom, July 2006, last modified September 2013,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeportelliot /index.htm?i09; Fiona Banner, Nude Performance,
with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery,Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007,
Accessed September 2013, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12;
Fiona Banner, Mirror, with Samantha Morton, 3 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, September 3, 2007, London,
United Kingdom, in Performance Nude, by Fiona Banner (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 66;
Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, DVD on Monitor and Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240cm, October 8, 2008, last modified September 2013, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance /
performancenude/index.htm?i18;
Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with David Salas, 30 minutes, Other Criteria Book Launch, Claire de Rouen,
London, United Kingdom, last modified September 2013,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeothercriteria/index.htm?i26.

4

Performance Nude, hosted by Claire de Rouen Books in London.
5
This last Nude
Performance repeated the structure of the first two nude performances. However, this one
featured a male nude model, David Salas. Nude Performance, 2010 was Banner’s first nude
performance that used a male nude. Fiona Banner’s decision to use a male model, instead of
a female model, in this last piece, suggests she had reconsidered the format and function of
the series.
Within this master’s thesis I engage with a number of vital texts, which center around
the question of the female nude. For primary verbal sources I reference a number of
interviews conducted with Banner that discuss the evolution of this body of work.
6
An
essential interview with Fiona Banner that provides much of the context for this work was
conducted with Stewart Home and Cosey Fanni Tutti in 2009.
7
This text provides an
important context for Fiona Banner’s practice of which critics have defined as “life writing”
and the evolution of the Performance Nude series.
8
I also address the history of the
terminology surrounding the description of the unclothed female form, i.e. the nude female
versus the naked female, by discussing the evolution of the discourse from Kenneth Clark’s
text The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form from 1956 to Lynda Nead’s text the Female Nude: Art,
Obscenity and Sexuality from 1992.
9
I analyze the positions of Kenneth Clark, John Berger,

5 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009).
6 Joanna Pocock, “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” In Exhibition Catalogue Snoopy vs. The Red Baron (Berlin:
Galerie Barbara Thum Catalogue, 2011); Gregory Burke, “The Bastard Word,” In Exhibition Catalogue Fiona
Banner at The Power Plant (Toronto: Power Plant, 2007); Stewart Home, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Fiona Banner,
“A Sort of Portrait; Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and Cosey Fannit Tutti in Conversation,” In Performance
Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 9-16; Jack Hutchinson, “Peep Show,” Twin, November 2009.
7 Stewart Home, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Fiona Banner, “A Sort of Portrait; Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and
Cosey Fanni Tutti in Conversation,” In Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 9-16.

8
Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” In Performance Nude, Fiona Banner (London: Other Criteria, 2009).
9 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972); Lynda
Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992).

5

T.J Clark and Lynda Nead in relation to the description of the female body as naked versus
nude and how these theories affected the development of Banner’s body of work. I ultimately
conclude that no depiction of the body can exist outside the realm of representation or
mediation, thus the female form can never be naked, or exist in an unmediated state.
Other texts that I utilize in the analysis of this body of work are Michael Bracewell’s
article “Life Writing,” 2009 and Liz Kotz’s text Words to Be Looked At, 2007.
10
These texts
provide a context and historical basis for Banner’s textual compositions and an analysis of
Banner’s process of life writing.
11
Using Michael Bracewell’s article “Life Writing,” I divide
Banner’s process into her act of writing and the audience's act of reading.
12
I use this division
to demonstrate how the process of transcribing the female figure into text denaturalizes the
practice of painting the female nude. It also illustrates the levels of social, cultural and
political mediation that occur within this process of transcription. Finally, I discuss the issue
of the female nude as a cultural and sexual category and the moral implications that goes
with. I utilize Lynda Nead’s article “The Female Nude: Pornography Art and Sexuality,” to
address the rigid boundary in the Western tradition that influences, dominates, and controls
perceptions of the nude female form by categorizing it as either aesthetic or pornographic.
This study addresses the challenges of analyzing work which focuses on the process
of creation instead of centering on the final, completed aesthetic object. The emphasis on
exposing the process of producing these portraits demystifies the role of artist in the studio,

10 Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” In Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009); Liz Kotz, Words
to Be Looked At; Language in 1960s Art (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007); Simon Morley, Writing on the
Wall; Word and Image in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

11 Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” In Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009); Liz Kotz, Words
to Be Looked At; Language in 1960s Art (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007); Simon Morley, Writing on the
Wall; Word and Image in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

12 Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” In Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 5-6.

6

and reveals the layers of social, cultural, and political construction that occur in the depiction
of the nude female form. Banner’s production of sexually charged portraits of the naked
female form from a feminist perspective, also seeks to challenge the existing representation
of the female nude within cultural institutions. This practice is critically complex because it
uses the flawed system of nude representation to uncover a power structure that still exists in
the representation and distribution of images of the nude body in society.
Fiona Banner’s practice reminds us that all art comes from a human hand, which is
not immune to the pressures of society. But artists are not the only mediators here. Their
work finds their place within curated exhibitions, which also convey certain definitions of
gender, identity and sexuality. All of these works are included in exhibitions, and therefore
curating is another angle to analyze in addition to her practice. I contend that Banner is
thinking about her work as it will find its place within the institutions of culture, and
therefore hopes to transform the ways those institutions depict the female nude. I hope that
this thesis will promote a reexamination of the state of the representation of the nude body in
contemporary culture, and how, in turn, that representation influences our perceptions of our
own bodies.

7

CHAPTER ONE: FIONA BANNER
Fiona Banner, born in 1966 in Merseyside, in the North West of England, studied at
Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey from 1986-1989 and at Goldsmiths College in London from
1992-1993.
13
Banner is considered to be part of a group dubbed the YBAs or Young British
Artists who emerged from Goldsmiths in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s with B.A.s in fine
arts.
14
The Young British Artists’, or YBAs’, practices are characterized by their engagement
with popular culture, and a focus on the common antitheses in everyday life, such as “life and
death, good and evil, and pleasure and pain.”
15
Parallel to their public appeal, the YBAs’ also
directly engage with theoretical issues surrounding the production of art. Banner’s first solo
exhibition after graduating from Goldsmiths was at City Racing, an artist run space in
Kennington, South London in 1994.
16
This was followed by her inclusion in the 1995
exhibition at the XLVI Venice Bienniale, General Release: Young British Artists.
17
This
exhibition included the work of Jake and Dino Chapman, Gary Home, Sam Taylor-Wood,
Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon.
18
This engagement with popular culture and the antitheses
of modern life will continue to be prevalent themes in Banner’s artistic practice.

13 Lisa Pearson, ed., It is Almost That: A Collection of Image and Text Work by Women Artists & Writers (Los
Angeles: Siglio, 2011), 90.
14 Jack Hutchinson, “Peep Show,” Twin, November 2009.
15 Kate Bush, “On the YBA Sensation,” Artforum International 43.2 (Oct 2004): 105-106, last modified
January 8, 2014, http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/214337159.
16 Tate, “Fiona Banner,” Art & Artist, last modified, January 16, 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/fiona-
banner-2687.
17 Tate, “Fiona Banner,” Art & Artist, last modified, January 16, 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/fiona-
banner-2687.
18 Ibid.

8

In Banner’s early work, we see that she explored themes of life, death, war, sex, and
pornography through the manipulation of text and imagery found in pop-culture films.
19
The
NAM, considered by Banner as her first work, is a 1,000-page book composed of dialogue
from Vietnam War films. These films include The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now!, Born on
the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.
20

Figure One: Fiona Banner, The Nam, 1,000-page book, 1997
21

For The NAM, Banner spliced together the scripts from each film; creating a final script for
an unrealized 11-hour super film.
22
The following text was selected from the script of The
NAM:

19 Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2003), 85-86; Morley discusses Banner’s practice and her engagement with popular media: “ Another
English artist, Fiona Banner, also seemingly drawing on the dislocations inherent in media overload, engineered
confusion of a different kind, making crazy translations across media by transcribing into works the narratives
of classic films…But her walls of words deliberately and dramatically fail to capture the complexities of their
sources, while inserting the artist’s own cautious subjectivity into already-given mass-media forms.”
20 Fiona Banner, The NAM,1000-page book, 1997, last modified October 14, 2013
http://www.fionabanner.com/vanitypress/thenamhb/; Francesca Richer and Matthew Rosenzweig, ed., First
Works by 362 Artists (New York: Distributed Art Publications, 2005), 30.
21 Fiona Banner, The Nam,1000-page book, 1997, last modified October 14, 2013
http://www.fionabanner.com/vanitypress/thenamhb/.

9

The machete floats free through the shadows, catching glints of light. The blade
smarts. Everything is very quiet, and the people move around like they’re in slow mo,
and only partially visible in the shadow. You can vaguely make out the blurry image
of Lance, swaying about in the dark…Then the even, muffled sound comes through
on Eden’s radio. It crackles, “…Red one six. This is Red Six. Over. Red one six. This
is Red six. Over.
23

This text exists as an unedited film script that was never translated into film. Banner
described The NAM as the “ultimate unedited text in a world in which nothing is
prioritized.”
24
In this work we see Banner’s first attempts to negotiate the relationships
between image and textual representation. Banner produced a text that described the ultimate
war environment without providing prioritization for particular aspects of the text. This
practice of technical description and mediation between different mediums appears
throughout Banner’s practice.
Another important early work, which informs Banner’s nude performances, was War
Porn.
25
Created by Banner in 2004, War Porn continued Banner’s exploration of the use of a
script to represent the imagery in an unrealized film.

22 Francesca Richer and Matthew Rosenzweig, ed., First Works by 362 Artists (New York: Distributed Art
Publications, 2005), 30.
23 Fiona Banner, The Nam, 1997, last modified October 14, 2012
http://www.fionabanner.com/vanitypress/thenamhb/.
24 Fiona Banner, War Porn, Pencil on Paper, 2470 x 1630mm, last modified October 14, 2012
http://www.fionabanner.com/works/warporn/index.htm?i21.
25 Fiona Banner, War Porn, Pencil on Paper, 2470 x 1630mm, last modified October 14, 2012
http://www.fionabanner.com/works/warporn/index.htm?i21.

10

Figure Two: Fiona Banner, War Porn, Pencil on Paper, 2470 x 1630 mm, 2004
26

Banner describes War Porn as “a description of a fantasy war and porn film. Neither film
actually exists. The text weaves from one to the other, in and out; the descriptions merge
seamlessly.”
27
Within the work Banner produces a fantastical reality that bends society’s
grasp of either subject. The following is a transcription of some of the text found in War
Porn:
Then down at the side onto her skin the light absorbing all colours at once, making
her blush, and then go blue and purple, pink, orange all colours. Can’t make out
anything—all blurry for a moment, everything smearing, then you see her face up
close, blurry and her eyes white as, and lined with black, like her eyes are painted
onto her face, greasy tears spilling out beneath, cheeks sparkling, hair falling over one
side, questions, questions passing across her vacant face, and her slick skin, arm up
around her face, hand running through her hair…then another girl comes in from the

26 Fiona Banner, War Porn, Pencil on Paper, 2470 x 1630mm, 2004,
http://www.fionabanner.com/works/warporn/index.htm?i21.
27 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 79.

11

side, confusing arms legs, both the same as each light skimming flash. The other
planes on the left, coming in from somewhere else, no more cloud.
28

Within this text we see an evolution of a descriptive style that is found in Banner’s next
group of work, which deals specifically with the representation of the female nude. The
language and tone found in War Porn is repeated in Banner’s performance nudes. The
repetition of this language suggests that Banner is negotiating the boundary between the
pornographic films found in pop culture and the female nudes from the “realm of high artistic
culture.”
29

28 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 81.
29 Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” Signs, Vol. 15 No. 2 (Winter, 1990):
325.

12

CHAPTER TWO: PERFORMANCE NUDE

Fiona Banner first conceived of the nude performance after a visit to an exhibit on the
nude at the Tate Modern,
In a recent exhibition about history and the body at Tate Modern, I noticed that there
wasn’t a single female nude by a female artist. I thought this was an interesting
exposé. In these ways our weird preconceptions are revealed, and it’s inevitable that
art and art institutions will reflect this. So this too makes for a kind of fallibility.
30

Banner noticed that the Tate Modern failed to present the female nude from the perspective
of a female artist, reinforcing the conception that cultural institutions are maintaining the
domination of a patriarchal perspective. As mentioned in the introduction, the first
installation of Fiona Banner’s Nude Performance occured in July 2006 at the Port Eliot
Literary Festival. In this performance, Marianne Hyatt posed nude for Fiona Banner on the
stage of the Port Eliot Literary Festival in front of a mixed gender audience designated by
Banner as a literary crowd. On the Port Eliot Literary Festival stage, Banner reconstructed a
traditional artist's studio, with an easel to prop up the canvas and a white pedestal for the
female nude to stand upon. For the performance, Banner dressed in loose fitting clothing,
typical of an artist working in their studio, while Marianne Hyatt, unclothed, adopted the
pose of contrapposto with one hand resting lightly on her hip. During the 32-minute
performance, Banner wrote an impromptu description of Marianne Hyatt’s naked body onto
the canvas. The final score for Nude Performance has been printed in Fiona Banner’s artist

30 Gregory Burke, “The Bastard Word; Conversation between Gregory Burke Director of the Power Plant and
Fiona Banner,” in Power Plant Exhibition Catalogue (Toronto: Power Plant Exhibition Catalog, 2007) 3.

13

book Nude Performance. Within the score Banner lists both herself and Marianne Hyatt as
the performers.
31

Within this work, we see a female artist construct a sexually charged image of
a female nude model. Banner placed herself in the role of the artist studio, which within
classical art history was traditionally occupied by men. Banner’s clothes, the placement of
the easel, and the positioning of the nude all reference the tradition of figure or life
drawing.
32
The consumption of the female nude by a mixed gender audience at the Port Eliot
Literary Festival occurs on a cultural and social level. Such cultural consumption of the
female nude has historically been associated with a patriarchal position of power. In this
sense, Banner’s placement in this position of power challenges the patriarchal position while
it highlights the cultural and social lenses through which women are depicted.
Another way that Banner calls attention to the historical, western tradition of painting
and drawing the female nude is through her use of the practice of “life writing” to depict the
female nude. In the following text, Fiona Banner and Stewart Home discuss the distinction
between the practices of life writing and life drawing in relation to Banner’s Nude
Performance:
SH: Life Writing as opposed to life drawing?

31 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria), 63; The following is the final score, in which
Banner provides the location of the work, a succinct description of her action and of the setup for the
performance, as well as its props (in which she mentions the audience) and its duration: “Title: Nude
Performance, Location: Port Eliot Literary Festival, outdoor stage, July 2006, Marianne Hyatt, Fiona Banner,
Artist painting nude live on stage. Canvas filling with words, nude visible beyond, Props: Easel, ink primed
board, Literary crowd, Duration: 32 minutes.”
32 See
Joanna
Pocock,
“Snoopy
vs.
The
Red
Baron,”
In
Snoopy
vs.
The
Red
Baron
(Berlin:
Galerie
Barbara

Thum
Catalogue,
2011);
Pocock
discusses
Banner’s
practice
of
life
drawing
and
its
connection
to
figure

drawing,
“Banner’s
Life
Drawing
Drawings
2007-‐2011,
an
ongoing
series
of
sixty-‐six
drawn
and
rebound

dummy
figure
drawing
manuals,
also
reference
and
apparently
simplify
our
relationship
with
our
own

image.”

14

Figure Three: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes,
Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2006
33

FB: Yes, although it was both: life writing with a reference to life drawing and all that
goes with it, but also life writing as an attempt to describe something that was in front
of everyone—in the present tense, in the moment, exposed, without the device of
editing. It was so literal, it was on the edge of being something incredibly funny, but
actually, it was very taut. It was also a serious engagement with all the layers of
voyeurism involved, both in art and in the image. The artwork itself became
vulnerable because the mechanisms around it were stripped back-exposed. The
performance exposed the layers of voyeurism: my voyeurism looking at the model,
and the audience’s voyeurism looking at me making the art, the way we treat and
present works of art, is itself erotic. There is always that voyeuristic distance in the
end. A stage is a good representation of that distance.
34

Within this discussion, Banner describes life drawing as analogous to life writing, though the
term “life writing” is traditionally used to describe a piece of non-fictional writing about

33 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2006 with
Marianne Hyatt, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeportelliot/index.htm?i09.
34 Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and Cosey Fanni Tutti, “A Sort of Portrait,” In Performance Nude (London:
Other Criteria, 2009), 12.

15

oneself. Banner employs the term to describe the act of creating a portrait of words that
describe another person’s unclothed form. This use of life writing suggests that the portrait of
the female nude reflects not only the model but also aspects of the author. The use of life
writing exposes this process of mediation in the translation of the female nude into text,
revealing the actions of the artist in the studio to the audience of the Port Eliot Literary
Festival.
In the discussion between Banner and Home, Banner identifies the different levels of
voyeurism that exist in the life writing performances. Banner identifies these as the audience
of the Port Eliot Literary Festival watching Banner write a description of Marianne Hyatt,
Banner herself watching Marianne Hyatt, and the way that the completed art work will be
gazed upon by the larger society of art connoisseurs. Banner’s use of the stage in the
performance also symbolizes the constructed levels of voyeuristic distance that already exist
in relation to performance art. The crux of this work exists in the audience observing the
process of the artist creating the description of the female nude. Banner exposes these layers
of voyeuristic pleasure, and social and cultural mediation, by stripping bare the mechanism
of the creation of the female nude with the practice of life writing.
In the following description of Marianne Hyatt’s body, Banner not only includes a
description of Hyatt’s unclothed body but also how Hyatt’s body shifts and changes during
the 32 minutes of the performance. The following is an abbreviated transcription of the final
text produced during Banner’s 32 minutes with Hyatt:
Her arm dark against the white behind. Kind of ruddy. Hand hanging loose by her
thigh veins blue, pushing through the skin. Hand vaguely moving, breathing. Tummy
button a dark spot right in the middle, in and out. Breasts pale, an outline against her
arm. Fingers on her hip, pointing at the dark. Scribble of pubic hair, a zillion tiny

16

hairs curling onto each other and creeping onto her mauve stomach. ….Hand purple
with the rushed blood clutching the air, swinging all the way up to her shoulder, a
blade of shadow at the base of her neck. Collecting in a dip at the centre, hair
brushing the violet, yellow shadow spinning around her neck, falling behind her back,
totally utterly still breathing in and out.
35

From the transcription we see that the text is written in small segments, often ending lines of
the text with partial words. The fluidity of the language allows the viewer to enter at any
point in the text, while the small segments of writing fail to completely portray the female
nude. This technique denies the full description of the form of the female nude and in some
ways prevents her transformation into a complete aestheticized object. The text also remains
unedited, preserving the aura and importance of the process of description that happens
during the performance.
36

Banner followed this Nude Performance, 2006 with a Nude Performance at the
Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada on April 3, 2007. With this work,
Banner moves the institutional context of the work from the stage of The Port Eliot Literary
Festival to the stage of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
37
The change of venue is

35 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 64; The complete transcription of the
Nude Performance, with Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2006 with Mariann appears
in the appendix.
36 For an analysis of this work, see Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” In Performance Nude (London: Other
Criteria, 2009), 6; Bracewell discusses Banner’s practice and the connection to figure drawing, “Rather, she
employs text and language as a visual medium, in which the reading of words runs parallel to their visual and
conceptual function within the work…In ‘Performance Nude’ (2007), Banner creates textual portraits of her
subject in a manner resembling, in part, the process that would be employed within a traditional figurative
drawing of the same life model. As the viewer experiences Banner’s written engagement with the figure—most
particularly the process of close observation—one becomes aware of her creative decisions in making the work.
She must ceaselessly refer to the model, checking and adjusting her artistic response, and making necessary
adjustments to the direction and nuance of her line of thinking. (Just as, for a draughts person, it is necessary to
maintain and direct the relationship between looking and drawing).”

37Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 97; The following is the score that Banner generated for Nude
Performance at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto on April 3, 2007; “Title: Nude
Performance, Location: Power Plant, Toronto, 04.03.07, Ame Henderson, Fiona Banner Artist painting nude
live in gallery. Canvas filling with words, nude visible beyond. Props: Easel, Ink, Primed Board, Art Crowd,
Duration: 40 minutes.”

17

important for this work, because it places the discourse for the Nude Performance within the
context of the contemporary art world. This change in venue also shifts the intended audience
from an audience cast by Banner in the role of literary crowd to the role of art crowd.

38
Thus
labeling the audience functions to incorporate them into the performance, designating them
as the intended observers for the construction of this particular female nude or work.
The Nude Performance, 2007 mimics the structure of the Nude Performance, 2006 at
the Port Eliot Literary Festival. In Nude Performance, 2007 Banner again lists both herself
and the female nude model, Ame Henderson, as performers in the score, which appears again
in Banner’s artist book Performance Nude. The score for the action also has similar
descriptors “Artist painting nude live in gallery. Canvas filling with words, nude visible
beyond.”
39
However, in this score Banner highlights the act of writing the description. This
focus on the act of writing the description of Ame Henderson’s nude form creates a dialogue
between the practices of figure drawing, life writing and painting. This emphasis on the act
of writing places the performance, and the observation by the audience of The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery, at the center of the piece.

38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.

18

Figure Four: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson The Power Plant Contemporary
Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007.
40

In the text and performance of Nude Performance, 2007 at the Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery, Banner pushes against the tradition of depicting the female nude
from an andocentric perspective. The text that Banner produces during her 40 minute
performance with Ame Henderson at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery follows the
style and format of the text of the Nude Performance at Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2006.The
following is a section from the final text of the Nude Performance, 2007:
Two Perfect Beads Of Light / Reflected In Her Pupils / Moving About As She Scans /
The Space In front, Blinking, / Head Fixed Ahead. Nipples Lip /…The / Shadow
Breathing On Her White, Blue / Chest. Legs Redder All The Time, Fe / Et Suctioned
Onto The Warm Wooden Floor / The Improbable Plinth. A Ghost Of Her / Shadow
On The Wall Behind, So They Are / Three. A Fine Frown, Two, Between Her Now /
Fixed Gaze, An Arrow To Her Eyebrows, / Dark Accents Or Commas Above Her E /
Yes. Shadow Now Spilling From Her Bl / Inking Eyes, Beating Out The Rhythm Of
Her / Thoughts. Hot Pink From Head To Toe, Starting / Pale Then, Whiter On The
Breasts, Darker As She / Sways Forwards Almost Red Where She Meets The Floor.
41

40 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada, April 3,
2007, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12.

41 Ibid.,103; The complete unedited transcription of Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, April 3, 2007, with
Ame Henderson, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, appears in the appendix.

19

For a second time Banner produces a series of disjointed sentences that appear to have no
beginning or end. She continues to record both the stationary body and the strain the body
experiences under this intense scrutiny of both her and the audience’s gaze. However in this
text we see a shift in the language and tone. In the description Banner employs a harsher tone
and portrays more freely the sexual characteristics of the female body “Sha/dow Running
Down Her Inner Thigh, The / Other Highlight. Badge of Fine Brown Pubes Growing Out
From Her Pussy Onto/ Her Flat White Yellow Stomach.”
42
This text describes the vagina and
pubic hair of the female nude, breaking with the tradition of seeing the female nude as a
purely aesthetic object.

Figure Five: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes, The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007.
43

42 Ibid. 103.

43 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery,
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12.

20

Figure Six: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, April 3, 2007, with Ame Henderson, 40 The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery.
44

Figure Seven: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes, The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007.
45

44 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson, 40 minutes, the Power Plant Contemporary Art
Gallery, Toronto, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12.
45 Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with Ame Henderson, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery,
Toronto, Canada, April 3, 2007, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudetoronto/index.htm?i12.

21

In Mirror, at Whitechapel Galley, in London in 2007 Banner changed the format that
had been previously used in the Nude Performance works and introduced a new aspect to the
performance. Mirror has a distinct title differentiating the performance from the other two
Nude Performances. In terms of the format, Banner moved the life writing session to the
privacy of her studio. Banner then asked the model, Samantha Morton, to read the text in
front of an undesignated audience at Whitechapel Gallery.
46
Having Samantha read the text
alone on stage severed the visual link between the canvas of words and the female nude
model.
47
This shift also gave Samantha Morton a voice, allowing her a certain degree of
agency in describing her body and reacting to the description. In this work, we see Banner
hiding the process of creating the description of the female nude and simply presenting the
text though the medium of the voice of the woman reading her portrait.
The following is the score that Banner generated for Mirror; it includes the life
writing session in the studio and Samantha Morton’s reading of the text at the Whitechapel
Gallery:
Title: Mirror, Location One: FB Studio, 06.03.07, Samantha Morton, Fiona Banner,
The actress will come to FB Studio to pose for a nude portrait. FB will write a
description of her. The actress will not see the text, Location Two: Whitechapel
Gallery, 09.03.07, Still having never read the text, the actress will read out her
portrait in front in an audience, performing a kind of striptease in words, Duration: 3
minutes.
48

Banner included an amendment to this original score several months after the performance
of Mirror. The amendment reads:

46 The audience in Mirror was not cast in a specific role but the intuitional context of the Whitechapel Gallery
suggests that it would be qualified as an art crowd.
47Fiona Banner, Mirror, Performance, Samantha Morton, Whitechapel Gallery, September 3, 2007, Duration 3
Minutes; Image will appear at the end of the paper.

48 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.

22

3-minute DVD, Camera: Dave Reeve, It was agreed at the time that this performance
would not be filmed. But several months later someone contacted me to say that he
had caught this performance on camera whilst warming up to film another event. A
subsequent film was made from this footage.
49

This addition of the found footage creates an added layer of framing of the performance. In a
way, the found footage from an audience member incorporates the audience into the final art
work. Incorporating the film into the final piece demonstrates how the audience themselves
can be placed on stage for consumption by others. The inclusion of the film within the art
work also allows for a broader audience to view the work and shifts the focus of the work
from the process of creating the work to the final product of the performance.
The text generated for Mirror has many similarities to the other two Nude
Performance pieces. Here is a selection from the text of Mirror that Samantha Morton reads
to the mixed gender audience at the Whitechapel Gallery,
One hand on each breast, / Fingers ruddy and worn against the underexposed skin. /
Nails shell pink. / Her tits spill out from behind her massive hands. /A shadow strikes
her side, on the other, a glowing highlight. / Her profile’s electric. /Arse moon white.
/Both feet facing forward, foreshortened, kind of classical… Pubes a zillion lines
twisting to a soft quiff, / A crazy scribble of shade collecting at the stem of her thigh,
/And growing onto her stomach. / All shadows pouring in to her navel, /Darkest full
stop, right in her middle, / The beginning and the end.”
50

The format and language choice remains consistent with Nude Performance, 2007. However,
the reading of this text to the audience gives it a more erotic tone, rendering it a “striptease”
of words.
51
It is a striptease of words because Morton is fully clothed during the
performance. Banner’s is also using striptease to indicate a sense of truth that is found in this
performance. This sense of truth is there because Morton is not acting but revealing herself.

49 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.
50 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.
51 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.

23

Within the text Banner also follows the model of Nude Performance, 2007 and expresses the
sexual characteristics of Samantha Morton more aggressively. The description of the breasts
becomes more active, denying the stationary position of the nude model “Her tits fall out
onto her chest, warn against the deadpan wall. / Nipples erect, lip pink. / Breathing, blinking
shadow.”
52
This description returns some agency to the female nude model, allowing her
body the room to shift, change, and become erect. Within this text Banner also employs the
use of full stops in the descriptions of the female body “All shadow pouring in her navel /
Darkest full stop right in her middle, / The beginning and the end.”
53
Banner states that the
female nude embodies a verbal full stop. The use of the female body as verbal full stop
suggest that both the being and end of life exists within the female body. “The narrative is
stripped off, the clothes are off, and the surroundings are drifting away—not a story, but just
the bare protagonist, suspended in time.”
54

The performance at the Whitechapel Gallery, as described above, consists of
Samantha Morton reading the description of her body, that she has not previous read, to an
unfamiliar audience. During the performance Morton breaks her composure, laughing and
almost crying at times. This is the first moment in the performances where the female model

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and Cosey Fanni Tutti, “A Sort of Portrait,” In Performance Nude (London:
Other Criteria, 2009), 15; The following is the complete quote from the interview, “One of the things I like
about the nude is that it’s a kind of verbal full stop: an end (or a beginning). The narrative is stripped off, the
clothes are off, and the surroundings are drifting away—not a story, but just the bare protagonist, suspended in
time. I suppose the nudes are similar to my full-stop drawing, which were like one-page , completely edited
books. Only there you were left with a visual resister or sign; with the nudes you are left with a literal one. In
the case of this piece, the nude is stripped even further bare, to just its ISBN.”

24

displays emotion unregulated by the artist. Banner describes this aspect of the performance in
a conversation with Stewart Home and Cosey Fanni Tutti,
FB: Samantha Morton. Well, she came to my studio and posed for me, without any clothes.
So I made this portrait of her in words, and she left without reading it. The next night she did
read the piece-her portrait-for the first time, out loud, in front of an audience at the
Whitechapel Gallery. It’s odd because she didn’t act it; at times she tried to control it, and
take ownership of the words, while at other times the words sort of owned her, and
overwhelmed her, creating a moment of un-acting really. At one point she cracked up, then
she gained composure. So it was very revealing-a kind of striptease in words. I called the
piece “Mirror.”
55

This action illuminates the relationships between the artist’s description of the model, the
model’s self-image in relation to the text, and the audience’s reaction to the performance.
This interplay of relationships between the artist, the subject and the model brings up
questions around what degree of agency the female nude possesses. Banner has Samantha
Morton speak directly to the audience, breaking and exposing the veil hiding voyeuristic
pleasure. Though the veil continues to exist, to a certain extent, due to the context of the high
culture setting and the self-consciousness of the audience considered to be the cultural elite.
The boundary between artist and subject disintegrates by having Morton perform and react to
her own description. In this moment Morton becomes the artist, creating meaning and
emotional reactions unintended by Banner. These techniques grant the female nude a voice
and a small degree of agency, allowing her to leave the realm of the aestheticized object.

55 Banner, Performance Nude, 16.

25

Figure Eight: Fiona Banner, Mirror, 2007, with Samantha Morton, 4 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, London,
United Kingdom.
56

56 Banner, Performance Nude, 18.

26

Figure Nine: Fiona Banner, Mirror, 2007, with Samantha Morton, 4 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, London,
United Kingdom.
57

Banner revisited the Nude Performance format again in October 8, 2008 at her studio
with Performance Nude. In addition to following a similar format, Banner employed
Marianne Hyatt from the first Nude Performance, 2006 as the model for Performance Nude.
Though Performance Nude, 2008 features these similarities, it also signifies a major shift in
both institutional context and production. Instead of having the performance in an art gallery
or at a literary festival, Banner moved Performance Nude to the privacy of her studio. The

57 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.

27

title of the work also changed from the original format of Nude Performance to Performance
Nude, possibly to signify the shift in context and show performance in its more elemental
form.
Performance Nude features both Marianne Hyatt and Fiona Banner as performers.
The following is the score for Performance Nude “Artist painting nude. Empty canvas on
easel. Artist arrives, model arrives, assumes a pose. Artist faces model. Model faces out.
Canvas incrementally fills with words artist observes, nude poses visible beyond.”
58
The
performance lasted 50 minutes. The inclusion of both Marianne Hyatt and Fiona Banner in
the score again casts them in the role of performers.
Banner exhibits Performance Nude, 2008, as a video on a monitor next to the
plasterboard containing the description of Hyatt’s unclothed form. This format preserves the
aura of a performance, emphasizing that it exists in a single iteration at a certain moment.
59

This display also retains the work’s focus on the process of writing the description and
exposing the levels of mediation that occur during this process. Having the film and the
canvas exist side by side widens the possible audience for the overall work, but also limits
the interaction between female nude model and artist to the studio.
60

58 Banner, Performance Nude, 76.
59 Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and Cosey Fanni Tutti, “A Sort of Portrait,” In Performance Nude (London:
Other Criteria, 2009), 10.
60 Banner, Performance Nude, 76; Banner describes the environment for the performance, “ambient studio
sounds, radio in back ground, scuffle of artist’s brush.”

28

Figure Ten: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, Ink on Plasterboard,
116.5 x 240 cm and
One-Off DVD on Monitor, October 8, 2008.
61

As with the other Nude Performance pieces Banner produces the text during her
limited 50-minute session with the model. Similar to the other texts, no part of the following
selection of text was pre-scripted and the text remained unedited after the completion of
Banner’s session with Marianne Hyatt,
Warm against the deadpan wall fingers / Hanging down loose. Curled one hand
touching / her mauve hip. Veins stretching through her hand, / Shadow breathing,
blinking; she’s half leaning / One knee bent forward throwing the other leg / into
shadow. Toe nails pearlescent, ochre feet / Melting into the floor. All Shadow running
down / From her head hair falling onto her face, over one / eye. The other gazing
down, focusing on nothing, or / focusing on the floor. Her breasts roll down chest,
/…. She stretches and her bones click, eyes drunk /Smiling not smiling. Frowning
into the distance. One /Arm strokes the wall. She lift one ankle from the floor / of her
leg solarized against the floor knee ben /T as if she might run, but she’s as still as a

61Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 2007, Ink on Plasterboard, 116.5 x 240 cm and One-Off DVD on Monitor,
Duration 55 minutes, installation view,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/performancenude/index.htm?i18

29

breath /Ing statue. Lurching into her own shadow! Some /How Balancing on an
improbable plinth, waiting or not /Caught in between arriving and leaving. Red
Redder, /Ochre yellow, purple blue the gap between her /Leg tapering flame shaped
highlight. Shaking up between / her trembling legs an arrow of dark pointing at her
pubes / The faintest crease of her cunt smiling through the scribble /Of hairs. Eyes
gazing out ahead nipples wider, erect balls of /Shadow rolling onto her moon white
sinking chest.”
62

With this description, the viewer sees Banner attempt to describe the sexual characteristics of
the female nude figure. As in the other work, Banner describes both the physical attributes of
the model and the strain of posing nude for 50 minutes. This text differs slightly, in that
Banner attempts to address Marianne Hyatt’s changing mood. Within Performance Nude,
Banner attempts to give Marianne Hyatt agency over her own emotions. In this interaction
Banner describes Hyatt’s emotions “Smiling not smiling. Frowning into the distance.”
63
In
this moment it is the female nude who is controlling the description that the artist is
producing with her change in emotions.
Throughout Banner’s practice she maintains the unfinished, in-process quality of the
performance. This emphasis on the process of creation exposes and demystifies the artist in
the studio. From Nude Performance, 2006 to Nude Performance, 2010, the live art practice is
preserved. In Performance Nude, 2008 we do see Banner move towards a more contained
aesthetic presentation of the Performance Nude as an object. However, the video of Banner
creating the description preserves this in-process quality, while also widening the potential
audience of the piece. The only work in this series that hides the artistic process is Mirror in
2007. In Mirror, Banner writes the description of Morton in the privacy of the studio, and
then has Morton read the finished, unedited description to the Whitechapel Gallery audience.

62 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 79; Transcribed from photograph.
63 Ibid.

30

This work still maintained the aura of the performance, but it also shifted Banner’s focus to
the agency of the female nude model, which was further accentuated in her descriptions of
the female nude’s body.
What does alter in Banner’s Performance Nude is the tone and detail used in the
descriptions of the nude female models. In the first Nude Performance, 2006, Banner
described the model with the technical accuracy of a figure painter “Hand hanging loose by
her thigh veins blue pushing through the skin.”
64
The tone and focus of the description
changed with Mirror, 2007. The following is the text Morton read to the audience of the
Whitechapel Gallery “Inking eyes, beating out the rhythm of her / thoughts”
65
In this work
Banner allowed the model’s thoughts to appear in the description while also describing the
body in a more abstract way. This tactic allows the model more agency and individuality. In
Mirror, Banner seems to be less focused on the description of the physical body and more
focused on its placement in space. We see this shift fully evolved in Performance Nude,
2008. In this work Banner describes the limits of the artist’s ability to depict the female nude
fully “Smiling not smiling. Frowning into the distance. One / Arm strokes the wall.”
66
In this
final female nude performance, Banner allows the model to dictate her description instead of
superimposing a prefabricated vocabulary onto the model’s body.

64Fiona Banner, Performance Nude (London: Other Criteria, 2009), 64; The complete transcription of the Nude
Performance, Port Eliot Literary Festival, 2006 with Marianne Hyatt appears in the appendix.
65Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 17.
66Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 79

31

Figure Eleven: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, Ink on
Plasterboard, 116.5 x 240 cm and
One-Off DVD on Monitor, October 8, 2008.
67

Figure Twelve: Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, Ink on
Plasterboard, 116.5 x 240 cm and One-Off DVD on Monitor,
October 8, 2008.
68

67 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 2008, Ink on Plasterboard, 116.5 x 240cm and One-Off DVD on Monitor,
Duration 55 minutes, Video Still, http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/performancenude/index.htm?i18

32

CHAPTER THREE: NAKED VS. NUDE

Within this series of works, Banner addresses the issues of the naked female body
versus the nude female form. As Banner mentioned in her interview with Gregory Burke
about the inspiration for the nude performance series, she traces the series back to the Tate
Modern’s exhibition on the history of the body, and how she was stuck by the fact that the
Tate Modern failed to present a “single female nude by a female artist.”
69
This failure to
represent this perspective sparked a series of works that engaged directly with the historical
discourse surrounding the female nude. The titles of the works Nude Performance, Mirror
and Performance Nude place these works within the historical discourse of the female nude.
Numerous scholars within the western art historical discourse have addressed the issue of the
terminology surrounding the description of the female form. Kenneth Clark was the first to
initiate a formal academic analysis in his 1953 Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts.
70
These lectures
were followed with the publication of Clark’s text The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form in
1965.
71
In the first pages of this text, Clark defines the difference between the naked form
and the nude form. Clark states that the naked body is the body without clothing “huddled
and defenseless” and the nude body is “clothed” within the context of art.
72
Clark’s definition

68 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 2007, Ink on Plasterboard, 116.5 x 240 cm and One-Off DVD on Monitor
with Marianne Hyatt, Duration 55 minutes, Installation View,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/performancenude/index.htm?i18.

69Gregory Burke, “The Bastard Word; Conversation between Gregory Burke, Director of the Power Plant, and
Fiona Banner,” in Power Plant Exhibition Catalogue (Toronto: Power Plant Exhibition Catalog, 2007) 3.
70 Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ed. “The Nude,” In New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4 (Detroit:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005), 1649.
71Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972).
72 Nead, The Female Nude, 16; Kenneth Clark, The Nude: The Study of Ideal Form, 1. See Lynda Nead’s
discussion of Kenneth Clarks’s The Nude: The Study of Ideal Form; “the nude is the body re-formed rather than
deformed, “balanced, prosperous and confident.”

33

of the naked and the nude places power in nude body, which is transcendences its cultural
and social confines through its translation into art. However the naked body is condemned to
the defenselessness of its present social sphere and context.
T.J Clark takes up Kenneth Clark’s definition of the naked body versus the nude body
in “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865” which he extends in his text
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers from 1985.
73
In
“Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865” Clark provides this simple
definition of the Nude “[it] is a picture for men to look at in which Woman is constructed as
an object of somebody else’s desire.”
74
In this dialogue, the naked woman is being cast in
this role of the contained, aestheticized object desired by an androcentric society. However,
Clark also asserts that the distinction between nakedness and nudity can be blurred.
75
He
argues that this is seen in Manet’s Olympia where the nakedness is the sign of class and the
female nude defies the traditional reading of female sexuality.
76
Clark goes on to state that
nakedness signifies a connection to “material reality” that traps the individual within the
body, whereas the nude body transcends historical and cultural containment.
77
In Clark’s
description of the naked versus the nude they no longer exist as opposites.
78
Instead the
naked and the nude reflect levels of cultural and social mediation. Within this system, the

73
T.J Clark, “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865” Screen, 21:1 (Spring 1980): 18-41;
T.J Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1985): 79-146.

74
Nead, The Female Nude, 16;T.J Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 131.

75
Ibid.

76
Nead, The Female Nude, 16.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

34

nude is the highest achievable realm for the unclothed body, while the naked, unclothed form
is still defined by the signs of social class and gender.
79

John Berger adds to these questions in his text Ways of Seeing.
80
Berger argues that to
be naked “is to be oneself” devoid of mediation.
81
To be considered nude, for him, is to be in
front of other people and not seen as an individual. Berger also situates the naked and the
nude within specific contexts. Nakedness, he argues, “reveals itself,” whereas nudity is
resigned to the realm of public display. He continues to define this realm of public display in
the following text,
To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own
body, turned into a disguise, which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The
nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
82

In Berger’s discussion of the naked versus the nude, nakedness is the purest form of
unmediated existence. This conforms with T.J Clark’s and Kenneth Clark’s assertion of the
levels of social, cultural and political mediation that surround the nude form. However,
Berger reverts to Kenneth Clark’s assertion that the nude and the naked exist in states of
polarity, though Berger values the naked existence over the cultural and historical mediation
of the nude.
Using theories that have already been articulated above, Lydia Nead, in her text The
Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, argues that the naked and the nude can not exist
in polarity because there can be no “naked ‘other’ to the nude, for the body is always already
in representation.” The body, even on the most basic of levels, always exists within “social,

79 Ibid.

80 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 54.

81 Ibid.

82John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 54.

35

cultural and psychic formations.”
83
Thus we must always consider that the female body
exists in some form of mediation and reflect on how this mediation portrays a particular
cultural or social context,
…but even at the most basic levels the body is always produced through
representation. Within social, cultural and psychic formations, the body is rendered
dense with meaning and significance, and the claim that the body can never be
outside of representation is itself inscribed with symbolic value. There can be no
naked ‘other’ to the nude, for the body is always already in representation. And since
there is no recourse to a semiotically innocent and unmediated body, we must be
content to investigate the diverse ways in which women’s bodies are represented and
to promote new bodily images.
84

Nead concludes that no naked body can exist in opposition to the nude because no seen body
can avoid representation. Using this framework, we can understand Banner’s Performance
Nude, Nude Performance, and Mirror as mediations of the naked female body, and consider
how Banner constructs the particular social, cultural or political mediation of the body.
From the discussion above we see that within this series of work, the female models
that pose for Banner are mediated by Banner’s descriptions and placed in a position of
display for a mixed-gender audience. Since the naked female figure can never exist outside
of the realm of mediation, Banner’s translation of these female figures reclaims the power of
the female artist to produce a representation of the female figure from a female perspective.

83 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, 16.
84 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude, 16.

36

CHAPTER FOUR: THE PASSAGE FROM IMAGE TO TEXT

A crucial aspect of Banner’s work is the textual drawings, or descriptions, produced
during Banner’s life writing sessions with the female models. In these textual drawings
Banner is addressing the importance of the image of the female nude in our culture and is
trying to defuse its power. Instead creating an image of the female nude, Banner produces
textual drawings that explore the issues of cultural and social mediation that occur during the
translation of the nude female form to a textual description. In these descriptions, Banner
employs textual strategies that force the viewer to identity the layers of framing that are
present in the viewing of the body and the action of performance. With this format, Banner
also explores the limits of the physical frame of the canvas, investigating how text can break
the frame, and once again become sculptural.
In his essay “Life Writing,” British author Michael Bracewell analyzes Banner’s
techniques for constructing textual drawings. Bracewell describes Banner’s works as being
“in tune with the coolness and brutality of an age of mass mediation and related in form and
intention to a lineage of literary experimentation.”
85
In “Life Writing” Bracewell divides the
process of understanding Banner’s textual drawings into two categories, writing and reading.
Bracewell describes Banner’s process of writing as a lateral translation of the female form
rather than a hierarchal translation. This lateral translation suggests that Banner exists on the
same social and cultural level as the female model that she is describing. I agree with
Bracewell in that both Banner and her model occupy the same gender roles, though Banner is
still in a position of power as the artist who is describing the nude model. This lateral

85 Michael Bracewell, “Life Writing,” 5.

37

translation can also be viewed as the act of transcribing the female nude without imposing
overt cultural or social judgment onto the description. Banner’s use of text versus image in
her work renders this process more transparent. Through the text, the viewer is able to
identify more clearly any social or cultural mediation that may not be as apparent in painting
or drawing.
In Bracewell’s section devoted to the reading of Banner’s work, he argues that
Banner employs “text and language as a visual medium, in which the reading of words run
parallel to their conceptual function within the work.”
86
The lateral movement between
mediums parallels the lateral transmission of culture between artist and female model. As
Bracewell continues to argue,
Banner creates verbal description in a prose style that is both forensic in its pursuit of
accuracy, yet open to poetic nuance and adjective color. Unlike a literary use of
language, however, Banner is not attempting to create an authorial style her intention
seems more to create a verbal shadow (or “negative image) of her subject.
87

In this description Banner is using flat language to show its distance from the artificiality of
portraiture. The transparent translation of the female nude to a textual drawing highlights and
exposes the process of transforming the female nude into an aestheticized object. Banner’s
practices plays with these issues of social and culture filtration of the depiction of the female
nude, while simultaneously constructing an accurate portrait of the female nude form from a
female perspective.
In this series of works, Banner also explores the relationship between words and
sculptural forms. This lateral transmission between text and sculptural is emphasized by the

86 Michael Bracewell, Life Writing, 5.
87 Michael Bracewell, Life Writing, 5.

38

small poetic lines that push at the frame of the canvas. This practice invokes issues of
language as site and the concrete poetry of the 1960’s.
88
Liz Kotz in her text Words to Be
Looked At discuses the historical precedent and the process of establishing language as site,
In this context, language is increasingly understood not just as a material but as a kind of
“site.” The page is a visual, physical container—an 8 ½ x 11 inches white rectangle
analogous to the white cube of the gallery….Understood in its most general sense, as
“language art,” poetry is a form that explores the aesthetics, structures, and operations of
language as much as any specific content .
89

In Banner’s practice the female nude form is transferred from the sculptural to the container
of the canvas. In this “white cube” environment Banner’s text pushes the edges of the frame,
exploring the aesthetic representation of the female nude. In Mirror, 2007 and Performance
Nude, 2008 the text breaks free from the canvas becoming a verbal and a sculptural
installation. Banner’s practice began as a translation of the nude female into a textual
description contained on a canvas. It is a significant shift in Mirror and Performance Nude
when she releases the female nude from the structure of the canvas, perhaps, suggesting that
the female body cannot be truly or justly represented through textual or painterly translations.

88 Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 138.
89 Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 138.

39

CHAPTER FIVE: THE FEMALE NUDE AS A CULTURAL CATEGORY

Along with confronting issues of the representation of the female nude and
highlighting the denaturalized practice of painting the female nude, this series of work
confronts the female nude as a “a cultural and sexual category.”
90
In this body of work,
Banner plays with the traditional role of the female nude as a barometer for social codes of
morality . In these works, Banner blurs the boundary between “high art” and the
“pornographic,” embracing more complex signifiers to convey a female nude with sexual
characteristics and its own sexual vocabulary.
In Lynda Nead’s article “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” she
addresses the oppositional relationship between art and pornography.
91
In the article, Nead
argues that though art and pornography are set in an “oppositional relationship” they actually
exist within a greater system of signifiers that is continually being redefined.
92
The
categories in this system include “obscenity, the erotic, and the sensual.”
93
Nead continues
that “all of these terms occupy particular sexual and cultural spaces; none of them can be
understood in isolation since each depends on the other for its meaning.”
94
Thus the female
nude is a specific sexual and cultural category that contains specific definitions of sexuality
and gender that reflect the moral and social preconceptions of the society it belongs to.

90 Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1990):
325.
91Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1990):
325.
92 Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art and Sexuality,” Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1990):
325.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.

40

This patriarchal system informed Kenneth Clark’s testimony on the difference
between art and pornography in the moral crusades in Britain in the 1970s.
95
Clark argued
that the difference between art and pornography is that art is “pacifying and contemplative,”
whereas pornography “incites the viewer to action and therefore cannot belong to the realm
of high artist culture.”
96
For Nead, continuing in the same vein, “paintings of the female
nude had to be closed off from any associations with commercialism or sexual arousal.”
97

Banner’s practice releases the female nude from this system of asexual representation.
In Mirror, Banner has Samantha Morton act out a striptease of words to a mixed-gender
audience. Morton read lines like “One hand on each breast / Fingers ruddy and worn against
the underexposed skin / Nails shell pink. / Her tits spill out from the massive hands.”
98
This
striptease negotiates the boundary between the established system of the aesthetic and the
pornographic. Samantha Morton’s performance of the “striptease of words” confronts a mix-
gendered audience with a depiction of a sexually charged female figure with a sexual
language to describe her own body. The act also unveils this layer of the aesthetic found in
performance and truly reveals Morton’s own identity.
Another example of an instance where Banner blurs the boundaries between purely
aesthetic and the pornographic are her descriptions of the female nudes. In Performance
Nude, Banner describes Marianne Hyatt’s body with a sexually charged tone “Shaking up
between / her trembling legs an arrow of dark pointing at her pubes / The faintest crease of

95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97Ibid.
98Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 16.

41

her cunt smiling through the scribble.”
99
This description the female nude has an erotic
charge and presents an image of a sensual female from the feminist perspective. It is from a
feminist perspective because the female nude assumes an active role in this performance.
Also erotic charge of the work is not for a particular audience. Instead it embraces multiple
forms of pleasure or voyeurism from which a viewer could engage with the female nude
model. With this work Banner is thwarting the traditional patriarchal viewpoint and produces
an image of female sexuality for an audience of mixed-gender and mixed sexual orientation.
This image of female sexuality defies the stringent categories of art and pornography.

99 Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, 79.

42

CONCLUSION
Fiona Banner’s nude performances highlight the act of looking, and demystifies the
process of the artist creating in the studio. Within this work Banner also confronts western
society’s regulation and mediation of the portrayals of the female nude. Banner’s work can
be read through concepts concerning the nude and nakedness to Confronting demonstrates
how she effects her critique and her practice of revealing hierarchies in representation and
perhaps transforming them. Assuming the role of producer, Banner creates depictions of the
female body that are sexually charged and contain their own sexual vocabulary. Her work
reminds us that it is our responsibility to constantly question how the nude female body is
being portrayed in art and cultural institutions.
In 2010 Banner introduced her first male Nude Performance at the Other Criteria
Book Launch at Claire de Rouen in London. The Nude Performance with David Salas
mimics the structure of the other two Nude Performances created by Banner in 2006 and
2007.

Figure Thirteen: Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, with David Salas, 30 minutes, Other Criteria Book Launch,
at Claire de Rouen, 2010.
100

100Fiona Banner, Nude Performance, 2010, with David Salas, 30 minutes, Other Criteria Book Launch, at
Claire de Rouen, Accessed March 2, 2014,
http://www.fionabanner.com/performance/nudeothercriteria/index.htm?i26.

43

This late emergence of the male Nude Performance suggests a reconsideration of this series
of work. It is conceivable that Banner is drawing a connection between the mediation and
representation of the female and male nude. This connection and investigation of the male
form indicates that all forms of bodily imagery and sexuality are mediated by the cultural
controls that are imposed by Western moral codes. This male Nude Performance is also a
reversal of Banner’s original position. In this performance, Banner is constructing an image
of the male nude figure from a female perspective. Throughout this series, we see an attempt
to break the mold that contains the sexuality of either the male or female nude, while also
allowing some agency or voice to emerge from the subject itself. I maintain that these nudes
reflect a loosening of gender roles and empowerment of women to produce images of the
naked body.
At the end of Banner’s interview with Cosey Fanni Tutti and Stewart Home, she
discusses the implications of the female nude within contemporary culture “FB: “It is
interesting: whether you read Kenneth Clark, John Berger, or Lynda Nead on the nude,
they’re all overly reflective of the prevailing sexual politics of the day. The nude is the
perfect cipher, or metaphor, or container, for this stuff, which is why it’s so relevant—
because it mirrors us.”
101
In this case, we assume that Banner’s own construction of the nude
reflects the sexual politics of her particular moment. It is impossible to completely describe
the contemporary moment within which these nudes exist, or the sexual politics that they
represent. However this series of work remind us that we also perform our own social and

101 Stewart Home, Fiona Banner and Cosey Fanni Tutti. “A Sort of Portrait,” in Performance Nude, 13.

44

cultural mediation on these nude bodies, which prompts us to reexamine the type of cultural
politics that we project onto the world.

45

Appendix

1. Complete and uncorrected transcription of Fiona Banner Nude Performance, with
Marianne Hyatt, 32 minutes, Port Eliot Literary Festival, Cornwall, United Kingdom, 2006
“Her arm dark against the white behind. Kind of ruddy. Hand hanging loose by her thigh
veins blue, pushing through the skin. Hand vaguely moving, breathing. Tummy button a dark
spot right in the middle, in and out. Breasts pale, an outline against her arm. Fingers on her
hip, pointing at the dark. Scribble of pubic hair, a zillion tiny hairs curling onto each other
and creeping onto her mauve stomach. Mouth smiling, not smiling, slightly, slightly parted,
glimpsed bone white. Eyes open and not open, blinking. Hair, brown, blue, purple, every
colour pushed behind one shell pink ear. Head tilted, jagged fringe on her eyebrows. Eyes
blue. One leg bent, one locked back, taking the weight. Feet at a right angles, black toe nails,
veins snaking though the skin, bony ankle. Feet scuffing her dress, yellow ochre and formless
on the floor. She shifts slightly, her whole long body breathing and shifting against the
background, a cracked of light between her elbow and the curved waist, bleeding silver onto
her skin, following the nipples to the floor. A dark shadow beneath her breasts, fading onto
her ribs, bone molding her profile, shadow rushing down one leg, pulsing with tension and
her own weight she’s trembling slightly, shadow under her foot arching up onto the soft skin.
Hand purple with the rushed blood clutching the air, swinging all the way up to her shoulder,
a blade of shadow at the base of her neck. Collecting in a dip at the centre, hair brushing the
violet, yellow shadow spinning around her neck, falling behind her back, totally utterly still
breathing in and out.”

2. Complete and uncorrected transcription of Fiona Banner Nude Performance, with Ame
Henderson, 40 minutes, April 3, 2007, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto,
Canada April 3, 2007 “Two Perfect Beads Of Light / Reflected In Her Pupils / Moving
About As She Scans / The Space Infront, Blinking, T- / Head Fixed Ahead. Nipples Lip /
Pink Just Directly Below, Show Shadow /Swaying On The Wall, Hand Resting / Bony On
Her Hips. Blood Rushing To Her / Legs, Darkest Crack Under the Instep Of / One Foot,Vein
Blue Roots Growing Up / Through Her Ankles, Deepest, Red Sha / Dow Running Down Her
Inner Thigh, The / Other Highlight. Badge of Fine Brown / Pubes Growing Out From Her
Pussy Onto / Her Flat White Yellow Stomach, Navel /A Black Full Stop In Her Middle,
Silver /Rings On Each Finger Reflecting The / Spot Light. So Still But For Her Blink- / Ing
Dark Eyes. Hair, A Zillion Shades /Of Brown Bysecting Her Forehead, J /Cutting One Eye,
Not Smiling, Just Th- / Inking, Kind Of Turned Inwards. The / Shadow Breathing On Her
White, Blue / Chest. Legs Redder All The Time, Fe / El Suctioned Onto The Warm Wooden
Floor / The Improbable Plinth. A Ghost Of Her / Shadow On The Wall Behind, So They Are
/ Three. A Fine Frown, Two, Between Her Now / Fixed Gaze, An Arrow To Her Eyebrows, /
Dark Accents Or Commas Above Her E- / Yes. Shadow Now Spilling From Her Bl- / Inking
Eyes, Beating Out The Rhythm Of Her / Thoughts. Hot Pink From Head to Toe, Starting /
Pale Then, Whiter On The Breasts, Darker As She / Sways Forwards Almost Red Where She
Meets The Floor.”

46

3. Complete and uncorrected transcription of Fiona Banner, Mirror, with Samantha Morton,
3 minutes, Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom, September 3, 2007 “One hand on
each breast, / Fingers ruddy and worn against the underexposed skin. / Nails shell pink. / Her
tits spill out from behind her massive hands. /A shadow strikes her side, on the other, a
glowing highlight. / Her profile’s electric. /Arse moon white. /Both feet facing forward,
foreshortened, kind of classical. /Thin papery arches exposed. / Legs strong, kicked back, /
Veins showing through the skin like fluorescent roots. / Her face is tilted, dark in its own
shadow. / Lips parted as if to speak; / Glimmer of a bone white tooth. / One hand absently
stroking the back of her neck like it’s somebody else’s. / A tuft of dusty hair on her ochre
forehead. /Then she looks up; light making two mirrors in her black eyes. / Smiling not
smiling, / Smiling, cheek creased on one side. / She twists her whole body. / Waiting to find a
pose. / For a moment her hands clasp her tulip face, then they rest on her hips. / Scuffed
elbows point out to one side. / Her tits fall out onto her chest, warn against the deadpan wall.
/ Nipples erect, lip pink. /Breathing, blinking shadow. / Head thrown back. / Eyes like jewels,
a comma above each. / Her waist curves in, then out, wide hips stretching her baby-fucked
stomach. /Muscles taut over haunches. / Magnolia hips nudging the dark around her. / Skin
the color of bruised peach. Knees a knot of shadow. / Knees that have been knelt on. /Ribs
making zebra shadows, hollow grey where her diaphragm bellows. / A tapering crack of blue
black shadow between her thighs, / An arrow to her cunt. / Pubes a zillion lines twisting to a
soft quiff, / A crazy scribble of shade collecting at the stem of her thigh, /And growing onto
her stomach. / All shadows pouring in to her navel, /Darkest full stop, right in her middle, /
The beginning and the end.”

4. Complete and uncorrected transcription of Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with
Marianne Hyatt, 55 minutes, Ink on Plasterboard 116.5 x 240cm and One-Off DVD on
Monitor with Marianne Hyatt, October 8, 2008 “Warm against the deadpan wall fingers /
Hanging down loose. Curled one hand touching / her mauve hip. Veins stretching through
her hand, / Shadow breathing, blinking ; she’s half leaning / One knee bent forward throwing
the other leg / into shadow Toe nails pearlescent, ochre feet / Melting into the floor. All
Shadow running down / From her head hair falling onto her face, over one / eye. The other
gazing down, focusing on nothing, or / focusing on the floor. Her breasts roll down chest, /
Dark nipples, erect, sunless breasts white dark ruddy /shadow beneath, rolling down into her
navel, dark eye / in the middle, all shadows pointing to her pussy a zillion / of hairs
disappearing into the dark dark space in between / her thighs. Stomach bowing forewards
catching the highlights. Arse moon white. Shadow from her navel spilling / out onto her
slow pulsing stomach, shadow in her h / ip bones and the seam of her thighs making a v sha /
pe, an arrow to her cunt one hand pressed into her / waist. Dentin, The Flesh. She stretches,
lifting her tits / pulling her whole skin up onto its frame. Armpits Tur- / ned inside out. Ribs
breathing through the skin sto- /mach bellowing. Slowly in and out. Face tilted. Defiant /
Profile nuding the highlight wall, face thinking, of some. / Where else. Legs redder blood
rushing to ankles / One knee twitching, calf bowing, out behind. Feet turned / inwards. Red
hands, huge hanging in front of her thighs / Gaunt Check-Brown Eye meting brown mouth
nipples pink /She twists her foot on the floor darkest seam of shadow / Beneath curling up

47

onto her foot neon blue veins stretching / Skin growing up through her sock marked ankles
Toes knu /ckling the floor profile tight again her arm dark against her chest like a /shield
collar bones a grey necklace of shadow. Tilting / To one side hip swaying out. One leg
impossibly bearing / The brunt, the other shivering with weightlessness. Her / Whole
wrapped with highlights, held in shadows. /Hand purple with its own weight head leaning
back . Cl /Assical, shadow sinking into her eyes making the whites blue / She stretches and
her bones click, eyes drunk /Smiling not smiling. Frowning into the distance. One /Arm
strokes the wall. She lift one ankle from the floor / S of her leg solarised against the floor
knee ben /T as if she might run, but shes as still as a breath /Ing statue. Lurching into her own
shadow! Some /How Balancing on an improbable plinth, waiting or not /Caught in between
arriving and leaving. Red Redder, /Ochre yellow, purple blue the gap between her /Leg
tapering flame sharped highlight. Shaking up betwe /En her trembling legs an arrow of dark
pointing at her pubes /The faintest crease of her cunt smiling through the scribble /Of hairs.
Eyes gazing out ahead nipples wider, erect balls of /Shadow rolling onto her moon white
sinking chest.”

5. Complete and uncorrected transcription of Fiona Banner, Performance Nude, with David
Salas, 30 minutes, Claire de Rouen / Other Criteria Book Launch, London, United Kingdom
“Floor slightly scuffed, feet turned . Out, toes red, one knee taut, locked, / Other tense, then
not, massive crack / of light between lines. Bollocks resting / Dark in shadow at the top,
scribble / of pubes, and cock, quiet eye at the/ tip, blinding a shadow onto his hairy / thigh.
Hands splayed on this like a belt, / Navel between, rocking up and down, /Tall then short.
Whole body leaning / Over to one side, weight sliding / dark nipples on improbably smooth
ch / est, head thrown back making his neck / stretch and bob, eyes closing un / consciously,
Jet dark eyes. Smiling, not smiling, face stubble smeared, solid / nest of red dark hair, naked
ear, ha / ands hanging in front, just hanging th/ ere, like the first man. Fingers ever / redder,
filling with blood. Mouth mute / ring around bony teeth. Shadow smooth / On the wall
behind a, silent phantom, tip / toes, braced tall, then he’s doing nothing, /eyes turned inwards,
somewhere else, arms / crossed in front, holding himself, and / gripping his arms, like there
not his own. / Eyes half white, as he stares into the room, but / then looks down, nod, head
falling forward / as he gazes to the floor, making a big / shadow on his chest. Highlight on
his / breasts and down the side making / him look polarizd. Absently itching / his leg.
Shoulder silver. Possibly swe/ ating. Skin there turning blue in the hot / cool light. Hand
puce. Fingers curled round / nothing. White nail. Cocked purple, balls gone / in the shadow.
Tired leg. Chipped scarred knee / swaying his whole body finding a balance. Moving /
forward. curling toes. rocking. swaying shadow. Behind.”

48

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Excavating Beirut: a study of time and space in Ziad Abillama, Ilaria Lupo, and the Dictaphone Group

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Reinventing ephemeral forms: an investigation of the reinvention of Allan Kaprow's work in Allan Kaprow—Art as life (2008)

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Performed absence and a pre-formed audience: Martha Rosler's postcard novels and their implications for feminist art practice from the seventies to today

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Business casual: performing labor in the work of Harun Farocki, Pilvi Takala, and Melanie Gilligan

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Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

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The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

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A picture is no substitute for anything: intertextuality and performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo

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Surveillance surveyed: the effects of remote sensing technologies on perception through the films of Harun Farocki

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Perfomance of memory and ritual: selected works by Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera

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The art of staying: Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation

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Fragmented memory: William Olander and the exhibition as criticism

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Place & public longing: Sharon Hayes's love addresses as critical spatial practice

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Alison Knowles' Make a salad and Identical lunch: communal and sensory performance through open scores

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Prospering in resistance: the performance art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s

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Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

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Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

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Anna Halprin's Ceremony of us: pedagogy for collective movement and embodiment

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Parasite 1997-1998: "It's always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be moving"