Fiona Banner

You can see why fighter jets might interest an artist. They combine high-tech sophistication with primitive violence. They simultaneously evoke humanity's flair for construction with its penchant for destruction. They're also objects of fantasy and fascination - already so aestheticised, with their sleek designs and gadgetry and insignia - yet it's perhaps this last point that goes furthest in explaining why 'Harrier and Jaguar', Fiona Banner's commission for the Duveen Galleries, ultimately fails as a work of art. Visitors may gawp and coo at the two jets she's installed, yet you get the impression that they're more excited at seeing such iconic objects up close, rather than being interested in anything Banner is trying to say - almost as if they were at an airshow of some sort.

Banner has done her utmost to give the airplanes a sense of strangeness and incongruity. A Sea Harrier is suspended vertically from the ceiling, its nose to the floor, like a bird that's plummeting or perhaps trussed up, its bodywork painted with a feathers-and-beak pattern - but it just ends up feeling both grandiose and gimmicky at the same time. The Sepecat Jaguar, lying languorously on its back, is slightly more interesting, its paint stripped away so that the shiny metal mirrors its surroundings, like a kind of camouflage, and making the object easier to regard in terms of its formal, abstract qualities.

Yet neither installation is a patch on previous pieces by Banner - her newspaper archives, maquettes, and transcriptions of action movies - where war and fighter planes were dealt with at the level of representation: as images, icons, potent symbols. By comparison, displaying the actual planes themselves makes them seem rather clunking and obvious.