American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis) is a work by American artist Emily Prince now showing at the Saatchi Gallery. Here's a review in the Times from last week:
Prince, who lives in San Francisco, said that she did not know anyone who had been killed. “That’s why I began the project, because I was disturbed by how easy it was to be disassociated from the war if you don’t know anyone in the military.
“The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, 14 there, one day after another. And then the growing figure was mounting to over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction.”
The work will remain unfinished until American forces withdraw from both conflict zones. The installation currently finishes with Jason McLeod, of Crystal Lake, Illinois, who was killed on November 23 last year, but Prince intends to add all the dead until December 1, when President Barack Obama announced a final push in Afghanistan.
She will continue to make portraits of the servicemen and women as their deaths are announced, but does not plan to add them to the exhibition. She estimates that she has spent 5,000 hours creating the portraits, which she copies from photographs posted by families to a memorial website. “For the first year it was all I did. I would work seven days a week. Now I have to set aside an evening or two a week. I guess it’s a lot of time [to spend on a single work] but I feel that I have to be humble about it. Anyone who is directly affected by it is stuck with that feeling their whole life. It’s much more fleeting for me.”
She said that families of the dead who have seen the work have responded positively, and in several cases have supplied photographs so she can fill in gaps in the mosaic. “As an investigation it is little, and it is incomplete. It addresses only the Americans who have died. Neither the Iraqis nor the Afghans are pictured. However, this does not symbolise any deliberate or meaningful exclusion. I feel deep sadness for the people of these nations.”
A difficult work to characterise, then, but above all a work of remembrance. Families of the dead, note, "have responded positively, and in several cases have supplied photographs so she can fill in gaps in the mosaic". But for a certain class of critic there can only be one interpretation of a work like this. Here's the unfailingly smug Waldemar Januszczak, who writes his review in today's Sunday Times:
If this grim memorial to wasted life does not move you, then you have no heart.
Wasted life? Wasted life? - just like that? Over 5,000 dead, commemorated here with drawings and details for each individual; people who went out and gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan to help build what they believed were better societies...God knows things haven't gone brilliantly in either case, but to dismiss the sacrifices made with that cheap "wasted" sneer - well...
The artist, Emily Prince, felt the need to be humble about her work, but humble was never a word you'd apply to Januszczak.
Here's how he finishes:
On the train home, I opened the newspaper to find a photograph of Tony Blair taking up a post as adviser to Louis Vuitton, makers of the poshest luggage. How dare he.
It's a perfect little encapsulation of the Blair hate-fest currently being stirred up the Chilcot Inquiry and the media - as though there could never be any kind of justification for deposing Saddam or kicking out the Taleban. As Nick Cohen says, on the whole Chilcot commentary:
The inability to accept that a policy they honestly opposed still had moral virtues is producing levels of dementia unusually high even by the standards of British public life.
Indeed.
[Incidentally, there's a nice exchange of comments to the first review I cited above:
Bob Bates wrote:A terrible death toll, but let's not confuse the attack on Iraq with The War on Terror, for it certainly wasn't.
It was a war to control oil and to reinforce Israeli hegemony in the Middle East as a result of the US Jewish Lobby.chris meredith wrote:Bob Bates, or can I call you master?
Presumably the war in Afghanistan is to allow the U.S. to control the opium trade, at the behest of the Elders of Zion? Get a grip.]
Comments