Irak 182

'Artist's War Depiction Has Many Faces, Rough Edges
by Kim Murphy

LONDON — Suppose you are chosen from among your fellow citizens to tell the story of the Iraq war in a single image. One image, to represent the thousands that have flickered like tattered phantoms through the history of the last four years.

In every war that Britain fights, the Imperial War Museum selects an artist to render that one image. Steve McQueen was chosen for the task at the start of the Iraq war, and he struggled for months to come up with it. Then he realized that it didn't have to be just one image. It already was many.
He imagined the faces of Britain's war dead printed in the serrated frames of postage stamps. Peering out from under a stack of bills. Stuck on the envelopes of birthday cards. Lying silently in sheets in desk drawers.
But the artistic rendering of the war still painfully underway for 7,100 British troops in southern Iraq has proved as controversial as the conflict itself.
McQueen, 37, winner of Britain's prestigious Turner Prize for visual artists in 1999, went to the Ministry of Defense in 2005 for help in obtaining photographs of the dead. The ministry refused to provide the addresses of families of the 115 soldiers who had died by that time, forcing him to go on without its official sanction.
'Landscapes?'
"One of the junior ministers said to me, 'Why don't you do landscapes?' " McQueen recalled this week as an exhibition of his sad stamp collection, "Queen and Country," opened in Manchester with an emotional visit by families of the dead.
"I said, 'What do you mean, landscapes?' I said, 'Are you ashamed of these people?' "
Ministry officials say that's not the point.
"We always try to commemorate the bravery and sacrifice of people who give their lives in combat, but we tend to balance that against overly personalizing the loss of one person, or a couple of people, and the kind of distress that causes families in general, across the services," ministry spokeswoman Tricia Croasdell said Thursday.
"We don't want to give the impression that any one person's sacrifice is greater than another," she said.
The Imperial War Museum, which is independent from the Defense Ministry, maintains collections of tens of thousands of paintings and millions of photographs of Britain at war.
But only a few are the works of officially commissioned contemporary war artists like McQueen.
The museum's collections have rendered the most painful of war's images on canvas, in photographs and in the searing voices of veterans recalling the sound of gunfire and of their fallen friend's last breath.
There are snippets of music: A "Marche Grotesque" set to the sound of rolling tanks; old oil canvases swirling with the mist of cannon smoke as it settles over corpses; a photograph of a gear-laden paratrooper setting off resolutely from a Falkland Islands beach.
It is perhaps a testament to the raw wound that the Iraq war represents in today's Britain that McQueen's snapshots of the dead, captured smiling in the full bloom of life, have proved so disturbing, too distressingly individual.'

Lees verder: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0302-04.htm