War artist: Steve McQueen and postproduction art.

INTRODUCTION

Since it opened in 1917, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London has been acquiring art in various ways. Most of the museum's art collection deals with the two world wars, and drawing and painting are the favored media. There is an emphasis on art as a document or record, although this does not preclude experimental work. Since 1972, the museum has specifically commissioned art related to contemporary conflict involving British forces. Currently the Art Commissions Committee of the Imperial War Museum has eight members and is chaired by sculptor Bill Woodrow. Gill Smith, the secretary of the committee, recently explained to me how artists are commissioned:

The process which the Committee adopts for selecting and commissioning

artists is that a short list of artists is drawn up. This will

comprise any artists who might have written in to express an interest

in a future commission as well as artists (not necessarily always

established) who the Museum would like to have represented in their

collection, or whom the Committee believes might present a good

approach to a particular subject. The list is narrowed down to some

6-8 artists.... Prior to [each] interview, the artists are sent a

short brief but the Committee does not at this point necessarily

expect an artist to know exactly what the result of a commission might

be. A period of research, which would normally involve a visit to the

"combat zone," is undertaken and a proposal submitted at a later date

to the Committee for their agreement before the final work is made.

The Committee very much realizes that commissions of this sort must,

to a certain extent, be artist-led in order to achieve the best

results. (1)

In recent years, commissioned artists have been sent to Northern Ireland (Ken Howard, 1973, 1977); the Falkland Islands (Linda Kitson, 1982); the Gulf (John Keane, 1991); Bosnia (Peter Howson, 1993) and Kosovo (Graham Fagen, 1999/2000); Afghanistan (Paul Seawright/Langlands & Bell, 2002); and most recently, Steve McQueen was sent to Iraq (2003). (2)

For McQueen to create significant work in response to the war in Iraq is easier said than done. In late 2003 he visited the war zone and spoke with British troops in and around Basra. However, plans to film in Baghdad were disrupted by the security situation. Such practical limitations were no doubt compounded by creative considerations. For what can an artist create that differs substantially from the work of Victorian artist-reporters, or contemporary media professionals like photojournalists or editorial cartoonists? And what can an artist learn about a complex war situation after a brief visit, under official supervision? Not a lot, feared Nico Israel, whose 2004 article for Artforum about artists in Iraq specifically mentions McQueen's lightning tour:

Given McQueen's filmic track record, he will almost surely produce

something provocative and weighty, but can McQueen really learn that

much more in seven days "on site," in the presence of Defence Ministry

representatives, than, say, George W. Bush can learn talking turkey

with US servicemen? (3)

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He concludes:

Is tourism-as-art ... part of the same set of forces as art-as-tourism

(biennials, fairs, etc.) with the same power structures undergirding

them? If so, the more difficult subsequent question--how and whether

it is possible to avoid being embedded, either as a tourist, artist,

or journalist (even art journalist)--remains to be answered. (4)

That McQueen managed to subsequently produce something "provocative and weighty," despite the multiple problems outlined above, is worth further examination and discussion.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY

After the short, abortive trip to Iraq, McQueen returned home to Amsterdam. There, he came up with a new idea that did not require extended time in the war zone: an installation based around commemorative stamps for British soldiers who had lost their lives in the conflict. Called "Queen and Country," the work was completed in 2006. It is neither journalism nor "tourism-as-art." Rather, it is challenging, contemporary art, informed by current debates, but by no means "difficult" for those who do not inhabit the art world.

With the aid of a researcher, McQueen contacted 115 bereaving families, explaining his project. Eventually, ninety-eight families supplied photographic portraits of their sons and daughters in uniform that were made into stamps, complete with the standard silhouette of the queen in the top right-hand corner. Digitally printed sheets of the perforated works were subsequently put into forty-nine vertical sliding drawers with each one containing two sheets. The ninety-eight sheets are presented chronologically and stored in an oak cabinet in a way that evokes the presentation of rare stamps in the British Museum. The project was initially shown in the impressive Great Hall in the Central Library in Manchester as part of the city's International Festival in 2007, followed by an exhibition at the IWM.

There have also been attempts to get the stamps accepted as designs for official postage stamps. So far there has been little success despite support from some Members of Parliament that gained press publicity. Yet precedents exist, like the set of six stamps brought out by the Royal Mail in 2004 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Crimean War (1854-56). The series is based on photographic portraits of war veterans, commissioned by Queen Victoria, and taken by Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett, mainly in Aldershot, England. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine McQueen's comparable series being taken on board by the Royal Mail, even in post-Blair Britain. The commemoratives for the Crimean War show aging survivors; McQueen's stamps show young people who were to become fatalities. The Crimean War is long over and the vocal public criticisms are long forgotten; the Iraq war is far from finished and continues to generate unprecedented scales of protest that began in earnest even before the war started. In short, while the Crimean commemoratives are a reminder of the distant past, "Queen and Country" references a tragedy that is still unfolding. McQueen knows very well that the Royal Mail only wants stamps that are courteous state ambassadors. He leaves it to the viewer to reflect on why "Queen and Country" does not follow suit.

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CONTEMPORARY ART (1)

In September 2007, McQueen begins shooting a film in Northern Ireland called Hunger. Commissioned by Channel 4, it deals with the final weeks of Bobby Sands (Republican hunger striker and elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone) who starved himself to death in Maze Prison near Belfast in 1981. Criminal or hero? As with the war in Iraq, the debate continues, and the choice of theme might be treated as further proof that McQueen specializes in emotively charged, explicitly political themes. (5)

"Political artist" is probably a label that McQueen would reject. Yet Sarah Whitfield's suggestions that McQueen manipulates the camera "to create a contemporary version of the history painting" or that his narratives "have always leaned towards the historical and political, and his targets are invariably carefully selected and subtly judged" (6) are quite compelling.

On the other hand, a critic like Joanna Lowry sees McQueen (and contemporaries like Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, and Gillian Wearing) as an emblematic artist specializing in film and video whose work involves "drawing our attention away from the content of the recording and requiring us to pay attention to the mechanics of the recording practice itself." (7) Through techniques like slowing down the footage, looping it, playing it backwards, redubbing it, and so on, Lowry suggests that McQueen and his contemporaries alert us to "the tension between the processes of technological reproduction and our experience of temporality." (8)

Lowry foregrounds the politics of form; Whitfield, the politics of subject matter; others insist that form and content cannot be divorced, like Charles Darwent, writing about Western Deep:

It struck me, seeing the movie, that McQueen's transfer of his work

from [8 mm] film to video offers a neat analogy for a shift in

history. Blown up for the screen, Western Deep has the graininess of

your dad's home movies: which is apt enough, since things at Tautona

are just as they were when your father wielded his old cine camera.

The gold mine is still owned by the company that owned it under

apartheid; the miners are black, the people who profit from them

predominantly white; the conditions are still hellish. Western Deep

isn't a journey to a physical extreme but to a moral one, a modern-day

heart of darkness. (9)

The different critical responses to McQueen's film and video works are relevant to an appreciation of "Queen and Country" whose message can be explored via its form or its explicit content. But this work also references other contemporary debates, such as the one around the ideas of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator-critic and former co-director of the new experimental arts center in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

CONTEMPORARY ART (2)