Fiona Banner
Trance
London, UK: The Vanity Press, 1997
23 x 17 x 8.8 cm.
Edition of 10
In 1997, Fiona Banner published THE NAM - a thousand page book of continuous, undivided text (280,000 words) in which the artist describes six Vietnam War movies simultaneously: Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Platoon.
A proofreader concluded that the book was unreadable, which Banner responded to by printing posters declaring it as such (see below) and producing this twenty-hour reading of the work.
Released in a limited edition of ten copies, Trance consists of twenty-two cassette tapes housed in a plastic box with a unique pencil drawing as its cover. Reportedly, the reading was recorded in its entirety, in one sitting.
An excerpt from Trance appeared on an obscure 1997 compilation CD called Blueprint, which also featured works by David Shrigley, Pierre Bismuth, Joseph Grigely, Amy Vogel and Erik Weeda.
Note: Some listings cite the length of this work as fourteen hours (not twenty) and as being published by Frith Street Books (not Vanity Press, Banner’s long-running self-publishing project).
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