The Culture Blog
The art of war
Laura Freeman is moved by two micro-memorials to British and American Servicemen and Servicewomen who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
McQueen with his work at the National Portrait Gallery
Last night, Sky News screened the second of the Prime Ministerial debates. The subject was global affairs, with talk of the EU, the IMF, Trident, and China. There were difficult questions about Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British and American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last seven years has inspired a battalion of Hollywood films, but few memorable or moving tributes by artists.
On display in London for the next few months are two small-scale but deeply affecting and effective memorials to American and British soldiers who have died in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first, Queen and Country, by former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen is at the National Portrait Gallery, traditionally the repository for our Nelsons and Wellingtons. The second is Emily Prince’s installation entitled American Service Men and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis) at the Saatchi Gallery.
The Prince portraits are installed on all four sides of a room at the top of the Saatchi’s Duke of York’s Square headquarters. 5,213 drawings of servicemen have been pinned up on all four walls. Each drawn portrait is no more than thumbnail size and is framed on an index card, about two thirds of the size of a postcard. Each portrait is accompanied by the serviceman’s name, age, home town and date of death. Prince’s drawings were based on photographs sent to her by grieving families. They are simply and beautifully drawn. She has a firm, rather striated hand, and adopts certain conventions for the droop of a military beret or a marine’s square jaw. Most of her subjects are drawn after their official photos. You can tell a soldiers rank from his hat and badge.
The odd soldier appears in their civvies – a roll-neck jumper or loose hair gives them away – suggesting that some families wanted them to be remembered as a daughter or wife first, and a soldier second. Some cards are inscribed with brief testimonials by their families. ‘He was active in his church youth going and he excelled in math and physic. I foresaw a bright future for him perhaps as an engineer’ reads the card of Steven J Walberg who died on April, 15th, 2007, at the age of eighteen.
Each miniaturised memorial is pinned chronologically in long thin columns, one column per day. Long stretches of wall will go by with only a couple of portraits here, a couple there, but in other places there will be ranks and ranks of paper tombstones, stretching from floor to ceiling, several columns deep. You can pinpoint sustained campaigns by these sudden accumulations of cards.
It is a moving and ongoing project and it does more to commemorate the individual than any slab of marble in Washington ever will.
Steve McQueen’s project is a British artist’s tribute to British soldiers who have died in Iraq. McQueen has taken photo portraits of British soldiers and has turned them into sheet of postage stamps, each individual stamp imprinted with the traditional profile of the Queen. Again, most of the soldiers are in uniform, but there is the odd photograph where you can see the shoulder of a woman in a wedding dress or the edges of mates in a pub, cropped to leave only the fallen soldier. The sheets are assembled in the sort of sliding screens beloved by stamp-collectors and it takes time and care to pull each row out.
McQueen has been campaigning to have his facsimiles turned into usable stamps as a national and international, tribute to the 160 soldiers commemorated here. The Royal Mail has consistently blocked his scheme. You can sign the Art Fund’s petition at the link below. There are 22, 411 signatures so far.
The soldiers memorialised by McQueen died defending their country against a distant threat. McQueen considers his work unfinished until our country pays fitting tribute to these fallen soldiers by instating them as emissaries of Britain on letters sent at home and abroad.
The Art Fund Petition can be signed here.
Topics: Art, Elections, Politics
-Speaking of war movies–
—anyone else noticing that, while Hollywood
makes BILLIONS upon BILLIONS catering to the
franchise slum denial needs of history’s –MOST–
awesomely genocidal regime -bar none! —ACROSS
the Pacific —and while we get yet more done-to-death
PC WWII ‘revisionism’ —the 60th Anniversary of the
staggeringly relevant, STILL unfolding KOREAN WAR
is, once again —’mysteriously overlooked’?
ESP. galling as people continue to suffer and die
by—the—million -and just last month a South Korean
ship was wilfully torpedoed killing 46 (the story
quickly sidelined and buried)…
NOT LOOKING GOOD —-INDEED.