First displayed the previous year in the Hayward Gallery’s Spellbound exhibition, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press published her artist’s book The Nam in 1997. Consisting of 1000 pages, The Nam is a frame-by-frame description of five Hollywood films depicting the Vietnam war: Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Born of the Fourth of July. Converting moving image into text, The Nam reflects upon Banner’s status as a British artist born in the mid-1960s fascinated by films replaying a conflict that she could not experience first-hand.

And yet, The Nam indicates that, in some sense, Vietnam was experienced; not as direct experience, but through layers of mediation. One aim of this paper, then, is to elucidate how Banner’s use of text functions as an endeavour to experience the war. More strongly, it proposes that the act of writing, of attaching words to perceptions, is the basis for experience rather than a retrospective account. And if trauma—war, for example—is often comprehended psychoanalytically as the evacuation of language and the near-suspension of experience, then The Nam’s compulsive textualization moreover constitutes an exploration into the traumatic.

This paper also contends that question of experience become deeply fraught after the 1991 Gulf War. Jean Baudrillard notoriously claimed that the Gulf War “did not happen,” by which he meant that its mediation through cameras and transformation into televisual spectacle precluded any experience of its actuality. In that case, Banner’s The Nam can be read as an effort to reclaim experience through and as mediation, freed from the alienating effects of spectacle.