During the Gulf War a fighter jet from 41 Squadron of the RAF flew 38 missions, acquired a crude but memorable nickname and helped to earn its pilot a mention in dispatches.
It is safe to imagine, however, that Flight Lieutenant “Frog” Tholen never considered that his aircraft might one day land in an art gallery. Yesterday it did, when the artist Fiona Banner unveiled her commission for Tate Britain’s neoclassical Duveen galleries.
For the next six months Flight Lieutenant Tholen’s Sepecat Jaguar XZ118 will be lying belly-up at one end of the grand hallway, its paintwork stripped away and polished to reveal a metallic surface like a mirror. Its position exposes the two giant afterburners that inspired the wartime nickname “Buster Gonad” after the Viz magazine character with the Unfeasibly Large Testicles.
At the other end of the hall a Harrier jet is suspended from the roof, handpainted with a plumage design so that it looks like a trussed bird.
The work, Harrier and Jaguar, is Banner’s response to the Tate Duveens Commission, which has previously seen Martin Creed send runners sprinting through the gallery and Mark Wallinger build a recreation of the peace protester Brian Haw’s Parliament Square camp.
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Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, calls Banner’s work “a project that speaks of invasion and of shock and awe associated with modern warfare”.
However, Harrier and Jaguar is not a simple anti-war piece or a comment on the current and recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the artist said.
Banner, 44, wants to see how visitors reconcile the sheer beauty of the fighters with their grim original purpose. “People have asked me whether these planes are designed with some sort of aesthetic in mind,” she said. “They are not. They are designed absolutely for a function and that ... is to kill. I hope there’s a reflection where people start to feel very uncomfortable with that reaction of being awestruck.”
Banner first exhbited in Tate Britain in 2002 when she was nominated for the Turner Prize, part of the show of shortlisted artists that the then Culture Minister Kim Howells dismissed as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bulls***”.
Her Duveens Commission is already faring better. The Harrier, in particular, seems destined for a special place in visitors’ affections, judging by the number of people who posed underneath it yesterday. Euan McGhee, 25, a marketing manager from Edinburgh said: “I like it because it’s very different. It’s challenging without being pretentious.”