Dimensions: image: 650 x 800 mm
Copyright: © Fiona Banner | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Here we have Fiona Banner's "Don't Look Back," part of the Tate Collection. A triptych, each panel measuring 650 by 800 millimeters, it presents a dense field of textual characters. Editor: It's almost overwhelming, a shimmering gray field that buzzes with an energy that’s almost painful to look at directly. It reminds me a bit of static. Curator: Banner's work often explores the relationship between language and visual experience. She's known for her "textscapes," and this seems to exemplify that approach. Editor: Right, and in that context, the title feels like a directive. Like, resist the urge to decode this. What happens if we don’t look back, don’t try to make sense of the text? Curator: Perhaps it’s about the impossibility of fully capturing or representing reality through language. The very act of trying to describe something reduces it, flattens it. Editor: Exactly, and maybe it's about resisting the linear narratives we impose on things. A radical disruption of meaning-making. Curator: Thinking about the political implications, I wonder if Banner is suggesting that we need to find new ways of seeing beyond traditional modes of understanding. Editor: It certainly challenges our expectations. I will definitely think about this work differently from now on. Curator: Absolutely, it invites us to reconsider our assumptions about language and representation, about image and text.
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Don’t Look Back is a text work, consisting of three large panels of dense black capitalised text on silver paper pasted directly on the wall. It is based on D.A. Pennebaker’s celebrated rockumentary film Don’t Look Back, 1967, about American singer Bob Dylan’s first British tour in 1965. Banner decided to make the work when she discovered the film was not available on video. She wrote three narrative accounts of the film from memory, placing each on a separate panel. Although all three panels look identical from a distance, each has a different content. The first sentence of each account describes the film’s opening scene in which Dylan stands in a street holding up placards that refer to the lyrics of his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, 1965, while it plays on the soundtrack. One panel emphasises the lyrics, another focuses on the placards which he discards after the lyric has been sung and the last concentrates on the run-down street scene. As the narrative progress the panels recount different aspects of the film, as though it is a story being told from three different points of view. Each panel is written in the first person present tense giving the impression of an eye witness account of events which the narrator experienced.
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