Since it was conceived in the early 1960s, the Boeing Chinook has been used in many conflicts: Vietnam, the Falklands, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. What’s more, thanks to TV news reports, films and photographs, the double-engine, double-rotor helicopter has developed an alarming iconography, looming ominously in the skies. Yet the artist Fiona Banner has a different take on it. “You know Doctor Dolittle? That animal, the pushmi-pullyu? It’s always arguing with itself, isn’t it? That’s what I think of the Chinook as.”
Banner is right: there is something animalistic about it. In fact, seeing it waltz through the sky in her new video-art piece, it seems like nothing so much as a sausage dog crossed with a clumsy bee. “It’s so anthropomorphic,” Banner says. “When it’s grounded, it looks like a dark, forlorn Disney creature, with its blades hanging down like massive ears.”
These contrasts and incongruities, the endearing mixed with the dangerous, are what inspired Banner to make the Chinook the subject of a show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The exhibition is titled Wp Wp Wp, thanks to the relentless, breathy whipping sound a Chinook’s blades make as they chop through the air.
For the Turner prize-nominated Banner, 48, it’s progress, but not necessarily a surprise. She has form. After all, she is the one who strung up two beautiful stripped-down fighter jets, a Harrier and a Jaguar, in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2010, to critical acclaim; she is also the one who, in her 1,000-page book The Nam, described every single shot in cult Vietnam War movies such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. She has produced various strands of work, but again and again returns to war imagery, and tries to pick apart its mix of fascination and horror. Is she a war artist, then?
“I think there is an element of conflict in all the work,” she says. “I’m not sure if it’s war. You could say war is of us, somehow. We live in a way that requires wars to happen. None of us can be entirely innocent.”
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The centrepiece of Wp Wp Wp consists of two huge helicopter blades in a former riding school to the north of YSP’s 500 acres. In the vast main room, the blades — bought at great cost from a depot in the Czech Republic — hang from the ceiling, whirling in tandem, overlapping but never quite touching. The speed will vary from funereally slow to dizzyingly fast, but the aim isn’t to scare, it’s to seduce. Typical Banner: she wants to create something balletic and elegant — “mesmerising, possibly meditative” — out of something harsh and militaristic. “I see it, weirdly, as a portrait of us, of our contradictions. It is made and used and required by us, however strange that seems, and however much we might reject that.”
Around the blades are dotted several more Banner pieces, each reflecting a different facet of her fascination. The windows are covered in UV lining, but she has carved little holes in the paper, peepholes to see in and out. She is obsessed with text and font, the way words appear, how they both signify and signify nothing at all. So each hole is the shape of a different full stop in a different font: Bell, Peanuts, Klang. In an inner room is a series of video pieces. One shows a Chinook fluttering through the air, swooping around, even somersaulting, a send-up of the military parades that are a fixture of a certain British way of life.
Another video is more tongue-in-cheek: she calls it her “bonnet drama”. Two windsocks filmed in the park’s grounds communicate in wordless blusters as the wind batters them throughout the day; gradually they come together, in true panting, hero-and-heroine fashion. It’s Wuthering Heights, but even gustier.
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It’s eccentric, in a way, but then the commission is an eccentric one, full stop. Banner, after all, is not a sculptor, but is showing in a landscape dotted with Moores, Hepworths, Miros and Caros. “I see myself as the opposite of a sculptor,” she says, with the slightly nonplussed air she always has. Yet she clearly has a place here, with her knack of exposing and reworking objects and giving them the formal whoomph sculpture thrives on.
She also collaborated, in 2012, on the houseboat, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that sat atop the Southbank Centre, awaiting visitors. If she isn’t, as she puts it, a “biennale artist”, she is discreetly everywhere. She is one of our more successful contemporary artists because, if she is often conceptual, her ideas can end up taking shape in the reassuringly figurative. Often there’s a lean, stylish classicism to her work, such as those clean blades whirring, or the scrubbed-down surfaces of the Harrier and Jaguar. “I’m trying to work it out,” she explains. “I’m trying to edit it back to the bones, and ask, what is this?”
The question seems to matter more than any kind of answer. Take the treatment meted out to those fighter jets: they were potential collector’s items, but after the show she had them melted down into aluminium ingots. These are lovely — but not as nice as the originals, or indeed the potential pay packet, surely? “I did disappoint a few people there,” she chuckles ruefully. But it turns out her ambivalence towards these objects isn’t just a catalogue blurb: it persists.
“I just didn’t want to live with the image of those aircraft any more. I’d done a lot of research into what they had performed during their working life, and one had been very active.” By “active”, of course, she means they had been on the killing fields. Banner makes her living, instead, by selling more neutral objects such as her full-stop sculptures, neat and bright and blood-free.
This summer, she showcased a collaboration with the Archive of Modern Conflict. Instead of curating something from the archive’s vast pool of war photography, though, she ended up adding stuff, commissioning a Magnum photographer to snap the City of London as a conflict zone. “Do we really think conflict is elsewhere, and in another time and place?” she says, not a little bemused.
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Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, from Sept 20