I wrote this piece for a site a couple of weeks ago and it got killed, so I thought I'd put it up here where at least someone might read it!
Official war artist and Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen was commissioned by the Imperial War museum to create what would turn out to be his polemical piece, Queen and Country. Together with the families of those who have been lost to the Iraq war, McQueen has created a cabinet containing a series of sheets of postage stamps, each depicting an image of a dead soldier which has been donated by their family. Queen and Country has been exhibited all over the UK, however until the images are turned into real stamps, the work remains incomplete.
McQueen gave an interview to the Guardian’s art critic, Adrian Searle, at the National Portrait Gallery where Queen and Country is currently being exhibited. Searle began by asking about the Royal Mail’s reluctance to agree to make the images into actual postage stamps.
“No one is more deserving of being on a stamp than people who have died for Queen and country”, says McQueen. “If you really think I’m wrong in thinking that then convince me and I’ll step back. I don’t know why Royal Mail are so resistant to the idea, they could do with the good PR and the money.”
Apparently the Royal Mail’s objection is based on their assertion that the stamps would be defaced by the post mark and that that would somehow undermine the subjects of the portraits, but as McQueen points out, “The queen gets defaced thousands of times a day”.
Could it be more to do with the fact that they’re just a bit squeamish about war and death? Perhaps, but the public response to McQueen’s work has been overwhelmingly positive, making the Royal Mail’s reluctance seem even more unnecessary. Queen and Country manages to bypass all the usual media sensationalism and politicking associated with images of war and present an intimate and moving commemoration of the individuals who have died fighting for Britain. It sounds jingoistic but in fact the work is far from it; Searle describes Queen and Country as anti-monumental and McQueen agrees.
“Stamps have a certain value because they’re so small and you have to handle them carefully, it makes them all the more precious. Also the small portrait requires extra attention and therefore makes it more poignant.”
That’s why it’s so important to McQueen that the images are made into real, postable stamps, “because then they would be in circulation among the population so anyone can access and participate in the art.”
Presumably contributions from the revenue from special edition commemorative stamps bearing a Turner Prize winning artist’s work would be welcomed by veteran’s charities all over the country. Seems like Royal Mail are missing a trick. Whatever. But their loss is still our loss, and especially the families’ losses.
“When I first started out with this I didn’t expect to get any response from the families and feared I’d failed before I had begun”, says McQueen.
“But slowly the images started to trickle in accompanied by hand written letters thanking me. To hold those images in my hands and sense that you could almost smell the houses that they had come from, I could empathise and get an inkling of what that loss must have been like for them. I tell you, had to have a couple of drinks after that.”
Whether you agree with the war or not is not the point. Regardless, thousands of young men and women have died fighting it and Queen and Country is an individual, intimate tribute to them that, in the words of the National Portrait Gallery’s Director, Sandy Nairn, “forces us to contemplate in a different way”. Work such as McQueen’s, that can contribute in an empirical way to the wider conversation without an agenda, is about as honest an example of public art as you can get.
Queen and Country is exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery until the 18th July. Go see it, and while you’re there buy the book because some of the proceeds are donated to veteran’s charities.
