Fiona Banner - All the World's Fighter Planes 2004
This is the second artist's book made by Fiona Banner and the first publication from the Vanity Press. Her first book, The Nam, was a sizable 2.338kg volume of 1,000 leaves of text describing shot by shot six Vietnam War buddy movies (AM207). All The World's Fighter Planes, 2004, is very different. The book is also without text, except for the residual and fractured words around the images cut-out from newspapers: on page 74 a Lynx helicopter seems to have a rotary blade made from newsprint. The book is also smaller and much less of a three-dimensional object than The Nam, which is almost an artist's multiple. And where The Nam was published by Banner herself, and in an edition half the size.
There are 154 pages of both black and white and colour found newspaper cuttings representing every type of fighter aircraft (despite the title there are helicopters as well as planes - the launch publicity interestingly has the title All The World's Fighter Jets) currently in commission anywhere in the world. An index, black on red and red on white, forms the outer covers, as if the book, like the Centre Georges Pompidou, was disclosing its structure on the outside. All the World's Fighter Planes references the genre of Jane's Fighting Aircraft series or the other war-gaming or plane-spotting manuals. But instead of sitting, pristine, on the tarmac or prancing at air shows, these aircraft come from news reports of war and other conflicts. There is no average scale to the images, and these images often invade the gutter of the pages: one fills a double-spread, another is as tiny as a squashed aphid. They fly left to right and right to left, up and down the page, some receding, others approaching us full on. On some pages there are as many as five types of aircraft. It is not a manual in any traditional sense.
