Anna Banana

For those who weren’t there, it is truly difficult to comprehend the antic energy of the West Coast alternative art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. Hard to grasp, too, the importance of play and parody, collaboration and interactivity to the counterculture’s critique of the mainstream art world. It was a critique that focused especially on visual art’s market-driven materialism and the institutionalization of exhibition practices. From time to time, a retrospective of an individual or collective from this lost world of Dada-esque absurdity and hippy idealism appears to remind us that such activities and assertions were, for a while anyway, possible. The history of counterculture or fringe art practices is made all the more poignant in the context of the 21st century’s obscenely overinflated art market, not to mention the codependent role of public institutions within this manifestation of global hyper-capitalism.

Most of the alternative artists who have been honoured by survey shows in West Coast galleries and museums over the past couple of decades are men. It is, therefore, refreshing that Anna Banana has recently been the subject of a two-venue retrospective and a substantial publication, the former at Open Space and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the latter edited by AGGV chief curator Michelle Jacques and co-published with Figure 1. The show and book honour and document Anna Banana’s long and energetic career as a mail artist, performance artist, maker and publisher of books, magazines and artist’s stamps (“artiststamps”), facilitator of interactive public events, director of pseudo-scientific research projects in the field of “bananology” and instigator of the Encyclopedia Bananica.

Anna Banana is the creative alter ego (and eventual legal name) of Anne Long, who was born in Victoria in 1940, and in a sense reborn at the Esalen Institute in California in 1969 and 1970. What personal revelations exactly took place during the time she spent in that New Age community, which offered (and continues to offer) participants alternative approaches to psychology, spirituality and ecology, are not fully articulated in Jacques’s otherwise thorough and engrossing essay. Still, whatever occurred at Esalen must have been transformative, because Anna Banana abandoned her ties to conventional society—her teaching career, marriage, young child, and birth name—and claimed an alternative role for herself in the world.

That role, which would draw on Dada, Futurism, Fluxus and theatre of the absurd, at first took the form of Town Fool, a costumed persona she enacted in Victoria during the early 1970s. It also involved her production of the Banana Rag, a newspaper described by Jacques as a “platform for announcing her various activities.” Fittingly, it was also the vehicle that connected Anna Banana with Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov’s Image Bank in Vancouver, and then with the international mail art network, to which she has been committed for some 45 years.

As many have observed, the global reach of mail art in the 1960s and ’70s anticipated digital social networks of the present day, and seems to have been created for the pure delight of the making and the joy of exchanging—although a counterculture critique of capitalism is certainly inherent in its practice.

After a year as Town Fool in Victoria, Anna Banana left that conservative little city (“I was tired of trying to explain myself and my activities to people whose idea of art was limited to objects hung on walls or sitting on plinths,” she told Jacques.) She landed briefly in Vancouver before moving to San Francisco where she found a sympathetic community through mail art friends and colleagues. In that determinedly counterculture and Dada-friendly environment, she began to fully realize the zany, parodic and participatory nature of her practice. This was especially evident in her parade art and her far-reaching and successful organization of the 1975 Banana Olympics, which took place in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza and which espoused a decidedly silly version of playfulness, promoted inclusiveness and critiqued the growing commercialization of the official Olympic Games. (A second Banana Olympics was staged in Surrey, BC in 1980.) “I focus not on making things, but on making things happen,” she wrote.

Actually, there was a degree of making things in the amazing, banana-themed costumes and props the artist created for her public events and interventions. In them, as recorded in the photographs and videos of the exhibition and book, you can see evidence of her early grounding in fabric art. Although it would have been fun to encounter the actual physical costumes, such material evidence of Anna Banana’s art practice would be essentially paradoxical, given the intentionally fleeting and unmarketable condition of performances, parades, games and other social events. On the other hand, there is something deeply unsatisfying about recreating the sense of what she did (and still does in her “social scientist” persona of Doktor Anna Freud Banana) through the inadequate evidence of still photographs and a few grainy videos. But this is the inevitable challenge of creating a substantial exhibition and publication out of a largely ephemeral practice, which also included late ’70s and early ’80s local, national and international performances of Dadaist and Futurist theatre and sound poetry. (From a few black and white photographs taken in Italy and Sweden during their European Futurist Sound performance tour in 1978, it appears that Anna Banana and her then partner, Bill Gaglione, were having a merrily absurdist time of it.) Still, the exhibition did present physical evidence of Anna Banana’s career in the form of the magazines, books and stamps she produced, whether in San Francisco or on Canada’s West Coast, to which she returned in 1981. In these displays resides another paradox: the presentation of books and magazines in vitrines and of prints, posters and stamps in frames and behind glass represents exactly the kind of institutional practice that Anna Banana’s early art “strategically bypassed.”

Most consonant with the artist’s commitment to social interaction were her mail-art workshops at the AGGV and her month-long residency at Open Space. Essential to the dynamic of the Open Space residency was a “Survey of Banana Culture in Greater Victoria,” which she undertook with visitors to the gallery, and the staging of a protracted gift-exchange project. The exchange—actually, a regifting work—was based on the 1200 banana-themed objects that the artist had been sent, unsolicited, over four decades by her many correspondents in the international mail art network. Initially arranged on tables and platforms throughout the gallery were banana-themed everything—from coasters, earrings, playing cards, lunch boxes and table lamps to cigarette papers, bubble bath, antibacterial soap, candies and toothpaste. There were also many, many plastic bananas, large and small. Visitors were invited to choose and take home with them up to three items each—with the stipulation that they had to complete a museum-style cataloguing form for each piece they were removing from the exhibition.

Filling out these forms consolidated the exchange while functioning as a gentle parody of bureaucratic aspects of museum practice. It also invited participants to consider individual and social compulsions to acquire, collect and display. Most importantly, it reiterated the true nature of Anna Banana’s mail art practice—the free exchange of images, objects and ideas in fundamental opposition to the market economy. ❚

“Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana” was exhibited at Open Space, Victoria, from September 19 to October 24, 2015 and at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from September 19, 2015 to January 3, 2016. The book of the same title, edited by Michelle Jacques, is co-published by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Figure 1 Publishing, 2015, 176 pages, $40.00.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and Contributing Editor to Border Crossings.