John Walker: 'New Paintings' At Ikon, Birmingham

John Walker, 'Still Life I', Oil on Canvas, 2018

I was over in Birmingham recently, visiting my friend Andrew Smith, and found myself at Ikon, reacquainting myself with the paintings of John Walker, after nearly four decades.

Birmingham-born Walker seemed to have garnered quite a lot of favourable attention, around the time I was studying Fine Art, in the early 1980s.  And yet, as an abstract painter -  and one whose work was largely landscape-derived, it also felt like artistic fashion was fast leaving him behind.  Behind his roughly scumbled brushwork and clotted surfaces, and despite the suggestion of recessive or theatrical illusionistic space, in his work - the fact remained that Walker was rooted in the essential language of formal abstraction.  In 1982, when I was hesitantly moving in a similar direction, that could often feel like the increasingly obsolete language of a previous generation.

John Walker, 'Recent Paintings', January 2020

John Walker, (R) 'Passage', 2015 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas

John Walker, (R) 'Nomad II', 2018 & (L) 'Looking In', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

A year earlier, Norman Rosenthal's massive 'A New Spirit In Painting' survey at The Royal Academy had laid down a pretty unmissable marker.  It covered a wide gamut of styles, and included not a few established names.  However, the message was still pretty clear: if painting was to contradict the 'painting is dead' brigade, in a world where photography and Conceptualism had apparently claimed the future - it wouldn't be by extending the legacy of Modernist abstraction, apparently.  I remember trudging round the Academy, wanting to be pleased by the sheer quantity of painting on offer, and yet simultaneously perplexed that there was so little of kind of stuff I had begun to identify with.  Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Delaunay, and assorted Cubists and colour-field painters, were my newly-found heroes -  but now, no one else seemed particularly interested in them.  Expressionism was definitely a thing, but it was the figurative, German kind - not the American abstract variety.  The figure definitely trumped landscape, where subject or sources were concerned.

John Walker, 'St John's Bay Red, Yellow, Blue', Oil On Canvas, 2011-18 (Detail Below)

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it's now possible to see how I was there, just as painting had taken an official right-turn into what became labelled Post Modernism.  At the age of 19, however, I rather lacked the perspective to appreciate that - taking it all rather too personally, instead - I fear.   When I discovered Walker, in the library of Bristol Polytechnic's Arts Campus, shortly afterwards, I was pleased to find a contemporary abstractionist of the kind I wanted to affirm, but equally disappointed to note he was already resorting to depicting skulls alongside his trademark folded planes.  They felt like corny shorthand for some synthetic, non-specific angst - and like he was suddenly trying to play catch-up, with a spot of fashionable cartoon voodoo.   And that was pretty much the last time I thought much about him - until I walked into Ikon, with Andrew, 38 years later.  

John Walker, 'Fishing With Tom And Les', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Lowe Lode', Oil On Canvas, 2019

Well, the good news is, the skulls are gone (although replaced by the occasional cut-out fish), the language is once more, resolutely abstract, and the overall context - clearly landscape derived.  Ironically, though, it's now me that has come to accept that the natural landscape (be it Cornish coastline, or American desert), isn't really my subject at all - and that painting in its pure sense, isn't even really my first language any more.  But, enough about me - this is supposed to be about John Walker's painting.  This deep into his career (and indeed - his life) there seems to be some vindication, in this late work, of the idea of sticking to one's guns, or at least reconnecting with one's original motivations.

John Walker, (R) 'John's Bay Pollution', 2017 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

As for the paintings themselves, there's clearly no lack of confidence or assertion there.  Walker evokes his current adopted home environment, on the New England coast, with a vocabulary of crudely-daubed  angular waveforms, parallel bands, wonky chequerboard grids, truncated ellipses, and those occasional dangling fish motifs.  Although distinctly maritime, the palette is bold and direct, sometimes reverting to a monochrome (or something close-to) scheme of largely unmixed colour - often contrasting with clean whites, and with an impact that might be described as emblematic.  There's a distinct echo of Jasper Johns or even Frank Stella in all those repeating rhythms of lines and alternating stripes - although they're being employed here for far more imitative, and far less conceptual reasons, it should be recognised.

John Walker, 'Tidal Change', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Place', Oil On Canvas, 2018

For, what Walker is actually doing, is to both distill and compile his landscape experience into a collision of separate glimpses and impressions.  This is the kind of simultaneity first devised by Cezanne, before being fully capitalised upon by Braque, Picasso, and the subsequent waves of Cubists, who followed them.  It also feels related in some way (albeit - with far less west coast shimmer, or refined elegance) to Diebenkorn's distillations of a coastal landscape.  Actually, a more apposite connection might be with a painter like Peter Lanyon, whose synthesis of the Cornish landscape famously came from swooping over it in gliders, and whose energetic, looping calligraphy and sweeping painterly gestures captured, within them, both time and motion.  Like Lanyon, Walker eschews the horizontal skyline (the portrait orientation of these canvases is no accident), and all those repeating stripes and zig-zags must surely chart the endless rhythm of waves, possibly observed on separate tides, and subject to varying marine temperaments. 

However, whilst Lanyon's best work appears to soar above his coast in a vortex of light, weather, and free movement, these paintings by Walker describe a far more rugged, and possibly constrained, situation.  The geometry may be wonky, but it's structural nonetheless - suggesting perhaps the funnelling of ocean tides between harbour walls, jetties or quaysides.  Walker may evoke the sea, but he appears to do so with his feet firmly on dry land.

John Walker, 'Nomad I', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Another feature which strikes me is his almost wilfully careless approach to paint application, along with the stark economy of much of this work.  In Lanyon, there is often a veiling of colours, or a kind of overwriting of marks, however rapidly they may have been laid down.  However, in many cases, Walker's marks appear to be the first and only thing he put down, before simply moving on to the next, equally slapdash statement.  In this situation, it's the accumulation, and the method in which those marks are all packed into the overall composition, which give the painting its sense of gravity.  In this respect, the paintings remind me of the way Patrick Heron's late garden paintings became comprised of hastily-sketched, and increasingly insubstantial, notations for the plants he wanted to describe - whereas he might have once immersed the viewer in lush fields of unbroken colour.

John Walker, 'Nomad II', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Is this something that happens to certain painters as they work on into old age - I wonder?  Does the urgency to still make paintings press up against the dwindling away of the time remaining in which to do so?  If I'm honest, the lack of tension in so many of Walker's marks, or concern over their perceived 'quality', disappointed me rather on first viewing.  First impressions can, of course be deceptive, but even now, I find these canvases far more pleasing when viewed across the room, or even - as here, in miniature reproduction.  In either case, a degree of internal tension returns as the image becomes more condensed upon the retina.  If his direct, unmodulated attack, represents a thoroughly courageous, and unselfconscious method of painting (as it certainly does), my own, rather more weaselly sensibilities are still drawn more towards those canvases upon  which a degree of layering, modulation, or visible over-painting has occurred.

John Walker, 'Stern View', 2017, Oil on Canvas

John Walker, 'Black Paint', Oil On Canvas, 2015 (Detail Below)

John Walker, 'John's Bay Pollution', Oil On Canvas, 2017 (Detail Below)

Perhaps then, John Walker is one of those artists with whose work I'm destined to always have a slightly strained relationship, (despite approving of it whole-heartedly, in principle).  Perhaps it's just a question of commitment.  Walker seemingly wields his brush with the minimum of hesitation or concern for the crippling niceties of painting.  He also pushed on through the vicissitudes of fashion, and inconvenient Art History, to pursue his core vision, regardless.  I, on the other hand, gave up even trying to be anything as noble or straightforward as a pure painter, some years ago.


John Walker: 'Recent Paintings', continues until 23 February, at Ikon, 1 Oozells Square, Birmingham, B1 2HS

'A New Spirit In Painting', ran from 15 January - 18 March 1981, at: The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1S 3ET

Something & Nothing, And The Work Of Haroon Mirza

West Leicester, 31 December 2018

This post is primarily about three categories of subject.  Firstly, it's about frames - both geometric and referential; secondly, it's concerned with what's not there - within the frames, and otherwise; and thirdly, it involves connections - between the first two categories, between ideas generally, and in functional circuitry.  Ultimately, it's probably about what might be found - just as it seems that other things have been lost.

It begins with two photos - taken in fading light on the last day of the old year.  Both images display the kind of spare urban geometry that always draws my camera.  Indeed, both represent the kind of imagery that informed my 'Vestige', and 'Change Of Use' series, back in 2006.  In each case, the subjects feel delicious in their mundane inconsequentiality, implied entropy, and bleak framing of - pretty much nothing.  When I first started to collect such motifs, my idea was that they spoke of something that had once been, or communicated - and which was now departed, forgotten, or silenced.  This time round - on a drab afternoon, on the cusp of 2019, and in a nation seemingly beset by nihilism - it was equally possible to imagine there might have been nothing of value left to miss in the first place.

In the light of the third category outlined above, it now seems like both images (and the second in particular) might be interpreted as primitively rendered circuit diagrams.  To the communication or transmission of exactly what they might be dedicated, however - one might only guess.

West Leicester, 31 December 2018

The rest of the images here were collected a few days later, at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, whilst visiting Haroon Mirza's current exhibition, 'Reality Is Somehow What We Expect It To Be', with my friends Andrew and Tim.  Mirza's show is one of those I entered with  expectations already somewhat 'managed' by at least one slightly ambivalent review.  In such situations it is, of course, important to keep an open mind, and I was pleased to find various pieces (and the exhibition as a whole) increasingly resonating with me - the longer I spent with them.  Resonating is an apposite term too, as Mirza's mixed-media, audio-visual work is as much (if not more) about sound, as it is about what is seen.

Haroon Mirza, 'LED Circuit Compositions', Found Materials & LEDs, 2015-16

Most of the work on display features powerful noise elements, be they of the found variety, or in the form of powerful abstract frequencies.  However, the pieces which initially captivated me - from his 'LED Circuit Composition' series,  were actually amongst the most silent.  This collection of illuminated assemblages, initially drew me in with their spare, geometry - perhaps predictably enough.  Certainly, with those first two New Year's Eve images still very fresh in my mind - there was a comforting recognition of something familiar, in formal terms, at least.  I quickly realised that it was also because, in an admittedly more sensuous way - they also have as much to do with what isn't there, as what is.

Haroon Mirza, (L.): 'LED Circuit Composition 12', 2015, (R.): 'GMT (LED Circuit Composition 24)', 2016,
Both: Turntable Components & LEDs.

In fact, what materiality they do exhibit, is largely to do with framing of open or transparent spaces - through which the insubstantial effects of their coloured light might be observed on the wall behind.  As the series title indicates - the main point of those physical elements is to carry the circuit which enables the illumination.  One result, for me, was that what might have initially resembled a slightly 'thin' collaging of inconsequential found materials, came to embody a distinctly contemporary variety of poetic, immaterial spectacle.

Haroon Mirza, 'Serpent/DNA (LED Circuit Composition 26)', Various Found Materials
& LEDs, 2018

Superficially, Mirza's slightly ramshackle deployment of found or junk elements might be seen as partially belonging to the tradition of Rauschenberg, Johns, et al - forebears who were essentially about piling up the consumer debris of the twentieth century (in a densely substantial way) to release their theoretical or philosophical associations.  However, Mirza's readymade assemblages also speak eloquently of how the products and materials with which we now surround ourselves, seem to be ever more flimsy, lightweight, or even virtual.  Thin, sheet-metal pressings replace heavier ironmongery; moulded perspex draws slender lines in its own transparency via nothing more than edge perception; traditional, oil or wax-borne pigments are replaced by industrial coatings; and brushed aluminium display board edging becomes as likely a framing device as a wooden window frame.

Perhaps most apposite to contemporary experience - these pieces can seem to reach for no actual meaning necessarily more specific than their own display.  Admittedly, the subtitles Mirza appends to certain of the 'LED Circuit Compositions' suggest clues to possible associations but without the necessary due dilligence, we are mostly offered a kind of glowing vacancy - which we're invited to fill-in for ourselves.

Haroon Mirza, 'Hibernal Solstice (LED Circuit Composition 27)', Various Found Materials
& LEDs, 2018

In general terms, and certainly as I spent longer with the work - I came to realise that this apparent absence of any simplistic message was a strength, far more than a weakness.  A symbolic, or otherwise 'meaningful' repurposing of the 'found' are all thoroughly established within contemporary art, and we are perhaps far enough up the post-Duchampian, Conceptual road to have become a bit mentally lazy when presented with the familiar tropes of bricolage or the Readymade in a gallery.  The temptation nowadays is to move straight past the tension of bafflement, and crack straight on with solving the 'puzzle' presented by a particular work or installation - using whatever toolkit of familiar background theory we may possess.

I write here, of course, as someone benefitting from a modicum or elitist/specialist education, and a little familiarity with some of the philosophical and theoretical frameworks surrounding contemporary art (even if, actually - in a rather 'middle-brow' fashion).  But we can't un-know what we know.  Nevertheless, reflecting on Haroon Mirzas's work reminds me that this habitual rush to decipher; the need to 'understand' on an intellectual level - can often rob an artwork of its full resonance (that word again), on a more experiential level. 

Haroon Mirza, 'A Chamber For Horwitz: Sonakinatography Transcriptions In Surround Sound',
Custom A/V Device, LEDs, Speakers, Foam, 2015

And so, it occurs to me that, whilst Mirza's oeuvre is certainly not without its possible cultural or sociological associations - they as likely to be a by-product of his rudimentary circuitry and cheerful hacking of consumer electronics, as they are an important point that must be put across.  Because, ultimately, I think that all his improvisatory, slightly post-apocalyptic wiring-up of connections between disparate discards - is to find out how the resulting frequencies of sound and light might stimulate the senses, as much as (or at least, before) the intellect.  The real agenda may actually be an attempt to hold the two sides in a kind of non-conclusive balance.

Osman Yousefzada (Video) / Haroon Mirza (Sound), 'Welcome To The Machine',
Video, Photovoltaic Panel, Arduino, Headphones, Mixer, 2018  

I found that the order in which I reacted to each piece was generally: 1. An immediate reaction to the particular buzz, hiss, or quality of illumination being emitted.  2. Some, vaguely nerdish attempt to explain the (often crude) manner in which such effects were generated.  This involves the following of cables, identification of contact mics, photo-voltaic cells, etc., or the pressing of ears to speakers - in a general quest to discover exactly what is triggering what.  And that is important, because only then is it followed by... 3. An attempt to interpret meaning on an conceptual/theoretical level.  And with that, comes the realisation that the specific imagery on a video screen, or bound up within some found object, is as likely to have been suggested by items 1 and 2, as it is to have brought them into being.  And that, in turn, seems even more relevant, once one realises that much of that material may even have been appropriated from, or input by, another artist altogether.

Thus, in a simple piece like 'After The Big Bang' , in which a silent, looped video of a waterfall plays next to a Mashall amp, hissing with static in a thoroughly convincing simulacrum of cascading water  - we're left to wonder which element suggested the other.  It constitutes eloquent little comment on the nature of sensory illusion, and the way that we might be fooled into making completely synthetic associations.  From there, it's completely up to you/me to decide whether it might also refer to the possible correspondence between the flow of different currents, or even the residual tinnitus provoked by over-amplified Rock music.

Haroon Mirza, 'Tika Tak', Various Found Elements, Audio System, LEDs, Video, 2008

More complex, and perhaps more ambiguous still, is 'Taka Tak', which features a video of a contemporary Pakistani street food vendor preparing his ingredients as a kind of ritual performance.  This is connected to an old cabinet speaker, surmounted by a record deck - itself bearing a transistor radio and a small Sufi statuette.  Between lies a Qu'ran stand, containing red LEDs, which I couldn't help sensing as a source of heat (they aren't).  Whilst there is clearly some thematic reference to Islamic culture here, it's hard to really perceive much other than the increasingly hypnotic footage of food preparation, for minutes on end - complete with circular motions and the metallic scrapings of the chef's spatulas.  At one point, I experienced a strange nasal hallucination of cooking meat - which may have simply wafted from the Ikon's cafeteria, but somehow felt integral to the work.  Only once one has given up on much else happening, does the audio suddenly split - sending a crescendo of oscillating sound, to the transistor - spins aboard the record deck with an improvised Leslie effect.  Subsequent research reveals that Sufism contains the Dervish sect - themselves, of course, famed for their whirling ritual dance.

And so, what might at first appear just another video-augmented bric-a-brac assemblage, suddenly unifies itself into an elegantly allusive riff on the tensions between the contemporary and the traditional; the corporeal and the spiritual; and perhaps between ritual - as an integral element of Eastern experience - and a dilettante activity in the West (in the form of DJ/Dance Music culture).  All of that is neatly linked by the theme of circular motion and repetitive rhythm, but most importantly - it is unlocked primarily through sensory experience.

Haroon Mirza, 'Open Source / Copyright (Rules Of Appropriation 5)', Magnet, Levitation
Device, Vinyl, Fake Designer Purse, Photovoltaic Panels, Mirror, Metal Legs, 2018 

That spinning motion is actually something which recurs through Haroon Mirza's work, and so - I'm led full circle, and to the following realisation. Just as one might feel there's nothing  much there, or that a search for pat meaning has foundered amidst carelessly compiled junk (and maybe, that's actually enough) - do possible interpretations start to multiply in a far more organic manner.  Nothing (or not very much) might really be something, after all.

Perhaps this post is really just about free-association... 


Haroon Mirza, 'Reality Is Somehow What We Expect It To Be'  Continues Until 24 February 2019, At: Ikon Gallery, Brindley Place, Birmingham, B1 2HS    

Fiona Banner, 'Scroll Down & Keep Scrolling' At Ikon, Birmingham (Art Woman In Word Land)

Fiona Banner, 'Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling', Artist's Publication, Vanity Press, 2015.
Cover Image Shows: 'Font', Typeface, 2015, And: 'Font', Carved Limestone, c.1880/2015

The Half Term break came and went in the traditional blur, but I did find time for a trip to Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, to take in Fiona Banner’s exhibition, ‘Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling.’  It feels like many of my most meaningful gallery experiences have happened in Nottingham or Birmingham over recent years and, just like Nottingham Contemporary, Ikon is an invaluable regional resource.  This is actually the second stimulating show of a distinctly conceptual stripe I’ve seen there this year, having already enjoyed Pavel Buchler’s ‘Honest Work’ in the spring.

Fiona Banner, 'The Bastard Word', Neon, Paper Templates, Transformers, 2007

Whilst my own practice remains rooted in the tradition of the primarily aesthetic, portable Art object, both Buchler and Banner prove there’s plenty of interest to be found in more self-consciously ideas-based stuff for me too, regardless of the medium in which it is manifested.  As noted before, I really want to have my cake and eat it.

Once upon a time, during an earlier wave of self-proclaimed Conceptualism, it seemed that an especially rigid set of ideological constraints might replace any notion of ‘the art object’ with the idea alone, expressed in the least aesthetically seductive manner possible.  Indeed, though the moment had rather passed, I have vague memories, even from my student days in the early 80s, of more than one exhibition comprised almost wholly of typewritten texts, usually requiring a thorough prior knowledge of Marxist theory.

Fiona Banner, '1909-2015', 105 Volumes Of 'Jane's All The World's Aircraft', 2015 (Ongoing)

Both Buchler and Banner seem representative of a less up-tight subsequent generation of conceptualists, (epitomised by the YBAs) for whom engagement with serious ideas is no obstacle to sly humour, sensory stimulation or the resonant artifact.  Perhaps the real issue here is the detachment of ‘ideas-based’ from the purely theoretical, and I’ve sometimes reflect that, if I want the latter, I might as well reach for a book.  As Emin, Hirst and their ilk slide into establishment respectability, (or fulfill their potential as undressed Emperors, in Hirst’s case), it’s easy enough to dismiss the YBA moment as a market-driven storm in a teacup, but the deployment, by various artists of the period, of a conceptual impulse combined with a greater component of humour, and the generation of some genuinely enjoyable objects in the process, do feel like valuable legacies.

Fiona Banner, 'Arsewoman In Wonderland', (Detail), Screen Print On Paper', 2002

Banner herself has made quite a name for herself, since first coming to the attention of many, when her ‘Arsewoman In Wonderland’ was included in 2002’s Turner Prize nominations. The perceived shock value of its pornographic content was of course typical of the period, and guaranteed to generate easy headlines and an attendant notoriety.  Installing whole decommissioned fighter jets inside Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries didn’t exactly hurt her profile, either.  For all that, this show at the Ikon is, by all accounts, her most significant British retrospective to date, and represents a number of her projects over the years.  I won’t pretend I responded to everything in the show with equal relish, but there is plenty in there that delighted, stimulated or amused me in equal measure.

There’s no doubt that the word lies at the heart of Banner’s practice, and this extends beyond content to include an engagement with the formal qualities of text.  Indeed, the first thing one meets at the show’s entrance is a carved stone font, entitled ‘Font’ and incised with examples of Banner’s own conglomerate font, (also entitled ‘Font’).  It’s a neat introduction to the multi-stranded thinking and willingness to pun that runs through her oeuvre.  Beyond the simple impulse toward amusing word play, I can’t help wondering if ‘Font’ (in either iteration), might also indicate how the actual mechanics of text might give birth to the thought, as much as the inverse.

Fiona Banner, 'The Bastard Word', Neon, Paper Templates, Transformers, 2007

Related issues of parentage emanate from another, higher-impact piece waiting within.  ‘The Bastard Word’, encapsulates its own title, with each letter formed from white neon.  We’re invited to question whether ‘Bastard’ is an expletive, a factual descriptor, or a subject under examination, and there’s a definite sense of the potential frustrations that may accompany a search for effective verbal communication.  That’s something that seems magnified by the amateurish wonkiness of each character’s formation and the scorched paper templates that back them on the wall.  Banner’s own attempts to communicate appear complicated by the need to simultaneously learn the neon-bender’s craft.  A little swearing was involved there, perhaps.

Fiona Banner, 'The Bastard Word', (Detail).

The paradoxical disjuncture between what is felt or meant, and what might be communicated verbally or textually is, of course been meat and drink to writers, philosophers and Conceptual artists alike.   Certainly, nothing about Banner’s work seems to exist on a single level alone and the cycling the neon legend through varying degrees of light intensity, further stresses the untrustworthiness of words.  Clear illumination is not always forthcoming.

In fact, the quality of lighting seems intrinsic to several of the pieces on the exhibition’s lower level.  ‘The Man’ is another impactful example of this.  The title reverses that of Banner’s book, ‘The Nam’, in which a number of notable Vietnam War films are transcribed as bald descriptions of everything that occurs.  Alongside the book, a wall papered with a collage of promotional posters represents the work at Ikon.  This allows Banner to détourn her own material, and one particular critic’s comment that the work was unreadable.  She went on to disprove this by recording a 20-hour reading, as the multi-cassette piece ‘Trance’.

Fiona Banner, (Foreground): 'Not So Much A Coffee Table Book As A Coffee Table',
Paint On Birch Ply, 2015.  (Background): 'The Man', Poster Collage, 1997.

Nearby, on the gallery floor, sits a large plywood replica of the thick volume.  For those unwilling to read it themselves, ‘The Nam’ functions mainly as a coffee table book, so, with her usual wit, the artist has supplied her own book-coffee table.  Were all of this not sufficient, the book’s eye-popping cyan & red livery and publicity material is bathed in alternate, cyan, magenta and yellow light, referencing full-colour print technology, magnifying its optical potential, and unifying the disparate elements into a somewhat more immersive experience, at a stroke.

Fiona Banner, 'The Man', (Detail), Poster Collage, 1997 

It’s worth noting that the publication of books as art pieces in their own right, (under her own Vanity Press imprint), is something Banner turns to regularly, and extends to the exhibition’s own ‘catalogue’.  Ironically, the latter eschews text altogether, being entirely image-based.  This idea of a text being simultaneously presented as an artifact clearly relates to some of this post’s early observations, and is magnified by the exhibition’s presentation of individual volumes on purpose-built plinths.

The willingness to let an idea spin off in a number of directions, in a form of fractal fee-association, is a recurring feature of Banner’s work.  It can be seen in the section of gallery devoted to ‘Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead’.  This is something of a half-and-half experience for me, in terms of its appeal.  There are clear references to Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’, (which itself loops back to her involvement with ‘Apocalypse Now’, of course, but he graphics pasted onto the wall here are far too dimly lit to really make any real sense of, (‘Heart Of Darkness’, OK, - I get that much).  Opposite, a video plays over a panel patterned with undulating pinstripes, - a motif which is extended over other adjacent elements, including a pair of bent plywood chairs.

Still From: Fiona Banner, 'Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead', HD Video, 2014-15

It’s the video that appeals to me most here, comprising a rapid-fire procession of still images dealing with the relationship between the City of London and the arms industry, and the sexism, conspicuous consumption and ostentatious partying that also characterise The Square Mile.  Pinstripe motifs reappear thick and fast, be it in the uniforms of city types or the repeated parallels of stern, corporate architecture [1.], and the whole thing is accompanied by a distinctly militaristic and percussive soundtrack. It’s worth noting that the starkly monochrome photos themselves were commissioned from Magnum conflict photographer, Paolo Pellegrin, and have a distinct flavour of war reportage.  For me, the video might stand alone quite satisfactorily its accompanying elements, but I am intrigued by the strategy of projecting over another piece of static imagery, as it’s something I’ve been wondering about myself, recently.

Still From: Fiona Banner, 'Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead'.

I guess we’d all have been secretly disappointed to miss out on the ‘Oo-er, Missus’ frisson of the piece for which Banner first gained notoriety.  She doesn’t disappoint, choosing to wallpaper ‘Arsewoman In Wonderland’s’ porno-flick transcription upside-down this time, in a format recalling a cinema screen.  It’s an enjoyable, if puerile gag, meaning that any attempt to read it at length soon becomes a right pain in the arse itself, (or in the neck, at least).  On a more high-minded level, I suppose it’s a pretty effective demonstration of how all this emphasis on bald description can denude words of their emotive or expressive potential.  It seems also to spotlight the eventual banality at the heart of all functional pornography.

Fiona Banner, 'Arsewoman In Wonderland', Screen Print On Paper, 2002

If the exhibits on Ikon’s upper level left me slightly less engaged overall, they do include something I find the single most poetically charged object in the show.  ‘Work 3’ is an accurate facsimile of a multi-stage, portable scaffolding tower, cast entirely (and expertly) in clear Murano glass.  It’s a profoundly self-reflexive item, standing as a ghost of exactly the sort of work equipment needed to hang an exhibition in Ikon’s high-ceilinged upper rooms.  In fact, one would require a real Zip-Up tower to assemble this replica one.  A palpable frisson derives from the paradox between our inner-primate’s instinctive urge to scale a literal climbing frame, and the rational understanding that to do so would result in shattering catastrophe, (there’s that interface between the physical/emotive, and the objectively understood, again).  For those that still care, ‘Work 3’ is also just plain beautiful, as well as potentially lethal.

Fiona Banner, 'Work 3', Glass, 2014

Beyond an intervening gallery of mixed exhibits that, if I’m honest, made rather less impression on me, stands another object with a similar air of potential threat.  ‘1909-2015’ revisit’s Banner’s prevailing interest in military hardware obliquely, being an immense stack of every volume of the book ‘Jane’s All The World's Aircraft’, ever printed, (all the ‘…Aircraft’, - you see).  An accompanying video, ‘Jane’s’ shows Banner piling one volume after another onto the teetering pile, reinforcing our sense that, were this tower of words to fall, it would make quite an impact.

Fiona Banner, '1909-2015', Detail

Like ‘Work 3’, this piece manages to combine elegant simplicity and considerable presence, with a definite sense of foreboding.  The Health & Safety nerd in me wants to establish that, (surely), a secured steel pole must pass up the centre of the books, (mustn’t it?), whilst the more primal part of my brain itches to give it all a good shove, in the hope it doesn’t.  I read in it, a fairly erudite comment on itchy-trigger syndrome and the self-fulfilling potential of weaponry.

‘Scroll Down…’ includes two remaining video pieces that seem worthy of mention.  ‘Chinook’ documents the strangely balletic movements of a Chinook helicopter going through its paces at an air display.  I always find these huge, twin-rotor machines profoundly sinister and, there again is that combination of beauty and threat.  The piece also represents a callback to Banner’s interest in the iconography of the Vietnam War [2.].

Still From: Fiona Banner, 'Chinook', 16mm Film, Transferred To HD Video,  2013

What interests me most, however, is the revelation, in an accompanying wall-based schedule of aerobatic terms, that the Chinook was filmed at RAF Waddington, in Lincolnshire.  That one-time nuclear air base [3.] is only a short distance from my Mother’s current home and, as a teenager I participated in more than one CND picket outside its gates on Air Show days [4.].  Huge, moth-like Cold War Vulcan Bombers from the base were a major feature of my childhood, as they wheeled over my home in Lincoln.  I’m bemused now by how easily potential annihilation became part of the background to our lives.

Still From: Fiona Banner, 'Chinook'.

The reference to air bases carries over into ‘Tête À Tête’, a video in which two orange aviator’s wind socks face off in a rural setting, and are alternately and partially inflated, (apparently by the breeze, but actually artificially, I’m guessing).  There’s something half-heartedly priapic about them, but I suspect the main intention is to suggest a form of conversation.  Could it be that the only real solution to all this stockpiling of weaponry, and its attendant threat of obliteration, is dialogue?  For Fiona Banner, it would seem, - it really is all about the deployment of words.

Still From:  Fiona Banner, 'Tete A Tete', HD Video, 2014

Fiona Banner:  ‘Scroll Down And Keep Scrolling’ continues until 17 January at Ikon Gallery, 1 Oozells Square, Brindley Place, Birmingham, B1 2HS.  I may even try to scroll down a bit further myself, if time allows.

[1.]:  A memorable image of a kneeling (and spewing?) gentleman, - arse-up, almost cries out “Kick Me!”  It appears to be the original source of all those undulating stripes.

[2.]:  In the interests of balance, it’s perhaps worth conceding that such machines are also employed in humanitarian operations, such as famine relief, as well as in the movement of military hardware or personnel.

[3.]:  The drones currently deployed in The Middle East are, I believe, now remotely controlled from the base.  Waddington, it appears, remains at the cutting edge of mechanised destruction.

[4.]:  I’ll always remember being called all sorts of names by an angry mother keen to access a photo-opp. of her toddler astride a dummy bomb casing.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to politely explain how her offspring would be vapourised, should such a device ever be deployed.