She began her artist’s career as the town fool, selling painted rocks and acting up in Victoria’s Bastion Square. It was a way for young Anna Banana to make friends – granted, an unusual way. This year the Roberts Creek resident celebrates a 45-year career as an artist with two retrospective shows in Victoria – one at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) that opens Sept. 18 from 8 to 10 p.m. and a corresponding interactive one at an artist-run gallery, Open Space, that opens on Sept. 19 from 4 to 6 p.m.
“I focus not on making things, but on making things happen,” she explains. Performance artist, Dadaist, absurdist, graphic artist, stamp designer, newsletter editor – she has taken on many roles. “My art is about connecting with people.” To that end, she will be artist in residence for the duration of the shows.
A new book edited by a gallery curator Michelle Jacques, titled 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, offers a collection of articles and is available locally from Talewind Books. The many photos from the past include Anna dressed in her Tarzana leopard skin costume or performing at the Western Front, an avant-garde Vancouver venue. They take the reader through the years to a show in Germany where she asked: “But, Is It Art?” More recently, she engaged the public in a local project, Mapping Banana Culture on the Sunshine Coast.
Why bananas? They’re funny – slipping on a banana peel is an old joke. They also have a sexual connotation, but Ms. B backs off from exploring that angle. Many of the references to bananas throughout history and culture are documented in her magnum opus, Encyclopaedia Bananica, and these mighty tomes compiled by the artist will be on display during the Victoria show. Anna Banana started out as a playful nickname given to her by kids at the New School where she taught, but when she fell into a box of bananas during a party at Big Sur, Calif., she got the message and has since changed her name legally.
Though the theme may be banana, the art ranges widely. She lived in San Francisco from 1973 to 1981 where her reputation for fun flourished. She designed parade entries using fun costumes and street entertainment. She placed classified ads for those wanting a degree in bananaology and started the first track and field event called, not surprisingly, the Banana Olympics.
“It was the most wonderful place to do these things,” she recalls. (Back in Canada she tried to submit a parade entry to the Pacific National Exhibition but they were “uptight,” in the 1970s parlance, and placed too many restrictions on her ideas.)
The mail art began very early in her life. “I like to get letters,” she said, and the exchange of tiny artist-rendered images on postage stamps connected her with others in the art world. This interest was helped along by the publication of her long-lived newsletter, the Banana Rag, that first appeared in 1971.
When she met wealthy artist and art collector from Italy, Guglielmo Cavellini, through mail art, she designed a dress made completely of food product stickers that said, “Cavellini is stuck on Anna Banana.”
This was not the only banana foolery image to hit the media. Over the years her story has been documented by magazines such as Maclean’s and newspapers in Canada and abroad, usually in articles bristling with puns. She became the top banana of performance art, you might say.
When one is a representative of the banana, one can expect a deluge of fruity memorabilia. Over the years people from all parts of the globe have sent her almost 1,200 items relating to the tropical fruit – from tacky kitchen gadgets to sublime sculptures. She had them displayed on her yellow kitchen counters until recently, and now these items will be re-gifted at the Open Space show. The public is invited to view the items and select up to three, in exchange for listing their names in a catalogue.
In the immortal words of Dr. Anna Freud Banana, one of her many performing personalities: “Everyone can relate to a banana.”
The Open Space show runs to Oct. 24 and the AGGV show runs through December.
