At first glance the work that lines most of the walls in the Saatchi Gallerys Project Room recalls a scientific diagram. It could almost be a depiction of a genome, with tiny flecks of colour representing genes strung out on lines reaching from ceiling to floor. But Emily Prince's installation does not depict a key to life: it is a representation of death. Those patches of colour are small portrait drawings of the American servicemen and women who have been killed on duty in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004. There were 5, 213 when the project reached London: the artist carries on adding portraits and will continue to do so until American involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts ends.
Miss Prince bases her drawings on the reports of casualties published on the website www.militarytimes. com. She copies a portrait if one is shown; if there is none, she leaves a blank space. Many of the drawings are annotated with comments on the dead that have appeared on the website. The drawings are on vellum, coloured to suggest the skin colour of the person portrayed. This element probably made more sense when the installation was in its original form, hung in the shape of a map of the USA, with the portraits pinned to the location of the dead man or woman's home. However, as installed at the Saatchi Gallery, with the portraits mounted in chronological order of death in the form of a grid, the vari-coloured portraits look like a patchwork quilt, recalling the quilts stitched in the 1980s and 1990s as memorials to people who died of MDS.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In the UK the project has been compared with Steve McQueen's For Queen and Country, a result of his visit to Basra in 2003 as part of the Imperial War Museum's official war artists' programme. It is a large oak cabinet with 120 drawers containing facsimile stamps depicting UK servicemen and women killed in the war in Iraq. The project is, however, incomplete: Mr McQueen wants the designs to be issued as real stamps. For more information--and to sign the Art Fund's online petition urging the Post Office to accept the idea--go to www.artfund.org/queenandcountry
Mr McQueen says of Queen and Country that 'Once you put a human face on a situation, it makes it more real.' That touches on a deep issue concerning war memorials. Once comprehensive commemorations of war dead became widespread as a result of the unparalleled scale of the slaughter in World War I they were shaped by a strong belief that the dead should be treated identically, and, essentially, impersonally. Think, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of identical headstones in the war cemeteries.
The mere sight of those headstones - like the vast lists of names on such monuments as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC,--is affecting, but does their impersonality, as Mr McQueen implies, make the tragedy they represent less real--and, does that perhaps help to make war more acceptable?
The way we commemorate the war dead is being personalised by the internet. There are of course commemorative websites, but, more tellingly, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has an important web presence--thewall-usa.com--with information about the people whose names appear on the granite walls. Both Miss Prince and Mr McQueen seem to me to have used that need for personal commemoration to reinvigorate the concept of a war memorial. It is not only that both include portraits of the dead. They present those portraits in significant ways--Miss Prince in delicate drawings, informal and feminine in feel; Mr McQueen by using a type of image that is part of daily life. Although so different, both projects are very powerful, not least by leaving us to make up our own minds about the wars that they commemorate.
American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis) (detail) by Emily Prince (b. 1981), 2004 to present. Pencil on colour-coated vellum. Each image: 10.1 x 7.6 cm. Courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London, Emily Prince, 2010. The work will be on show at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 7 May
Michael Hall
EMILY PRINCE'S PROJECT CURRENTLY ON SHOW AT THE SAATCHI GALLERY, LONDON, HAS FOUND A WAY TO REINVIGORATE A CHALLENGING GENRE: THE WAR MEMORIAL.
