Art review: Queen and Country: A Project by Steve McQueen

Published on Thursday 15 January 2009 18:34

QUEEN AND COUNTRY: A PROJECT BY STEVE McQUEEN SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

THERE have been portraits of rulers on coins as long as there has been coinage. Nor were these ever just ciphers. Take just one example. When Mary Queen of Scots was still only a girl and living in France, her government in Scotland needed to issue new coinage and so they sent the master of the Royal Mint, the Queen's sinkar, John Achesoun, from Edinburgh to Paris to take her portrait. No coinage for her reign could be issued without it and clearly it had to be authentic.

Achesoun was also given access to the French royal mint to make the dies for the new coins so that they could be checked against their royal original and nothing lost in the journey home of the portrait's immediacy and authenticity. Clearly there is powerful magic in a portrait on a coin.

Curiously, the magic evidently did not extend to paper money. Perhaps because it had no intrinsic value, early paper money did not carry this authenticating image. When the first postage stamps were issued, however, they were evidently seen as equivalent coinage. The same magic was deployed, and the first stamps carried the portrait of Queen Victoria. Other nations that followed this example soon realised that postage stamps were little pictures that were not bound by the formal conventions of coinage. They could be flights of any sort of fancy.

Although it has been for long accepted that commemorative stamps are appropriate – and profitable – British stamps still carry the royal portrait alongside whatever other image they may bear. The Royal Mail has also always been very conservative in what it will agree to commemorate, and extremely jealous of its privilege of choosing it.

Artist Steve McQueen has now issued a direct challenge to the Royal Mail's monopoly on the choice of the images stamps can carry. McQueen, who won the Turner Prize in 1999, was sent to Iraq as a war artist by the Imperial War Museum in 2003. He was greatly impressed by the spirit of the British troops he met in Basra and subsequently he proposed a new kind of war memorial to commemorate those of their number who have been killed in Iraq. His idea was to design a set of postage stamps with each stamp carrying a portrait of a serviceman or woman who has lost their life there. He approached their families for permission and also for a suitable portrait photograph. Most have agreed and have provided pictures of those they have lost.

The artist has turned each of these into a design for a proposed stamp. (The Queen's head is also included in a small silhouette.) He sees the project as a collaboration between himself and the families of the soldiers and has called it Queen and Country. The designs for the individual stamps are presented in sheets and these are displayed in a version of the kind of wood and glass philatelic cabinets, with sliding screens, that are used for the stamp collections in the British Museum. There are 120 sheets in the cabinet, each with a single portrait repeated in 168 stamps. The individuals are not identified on the stamps, which have no text on them at all, but they are named on the edges of the sheets. This lack of commentary or explanation makes the images on the stamps more immediate and more telling. Some of the pictures are of soldiers proud in their uniforms, but many are casual snapshots. Most are smiling. All are young, the vast majority in their twenties, some in their teens. Most are men, but there are women among them, too.

The work cannot be complete until the soldiers are finally brought home and a line is drawn under this tragic roll-call. McQueen also insists it will not be complete till the Royal Mail has accepted his proposal and issued the portraits as a set of actual stamps, and he has mounted a campaign to persuade them to do this. He has attracted wide popular support. The Art Fund has also taken on his cause. It has gifted Queen and Country to the Imperial War Museum and has launched an online appeal to have the stamps adopted by the Royal Mail. Queen and Country itself has also been touring round the country gathering support for the idea. It is currently on view at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

If, in spite of the campaign, the Royal Mail is still dragging its feet, you don't need to sympathise to understand why. The brief introduction I gave above suggests how portraits on stamps and coins are heir to a very powerful idea. The Iraq war was certainly a mistake, probably illegal and possibly criminal. It did more than any other event in recent history to discredit politics and politicians in the eyes of the public. To point out so forcibly that the price for this piece of political arrogance and folly has been counted out in so many individual human lives would take courage, but the Royal Mail is running scared. Its future lies in the hands of those same politicians.

Steve McQueen is right at another, deeper level too, however. You cannot generalise casualties in war with empty phrases like the "glorious dead". Each one is an individual tragic loss. The great strength of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, erected by public subscription after the First World War, is that it never loses sight of that fact. At its heart are the individual names of those killed or missing; it is a record of all those innumerable, separate bereavements, all those episodes of private pain. These things can never be smoothed over and bound up into any bland generalisation. Loss is personal. Portraits tell us that, but stamps tell it with especial force because they circulate and, as they do, invoke the whole history of the coin/stamp portrait as authenticator, as guarantor of value; and the values that shine so transparently out of these fresh and friendly young faces are very different indeed from those displayed by the politicians who sent them to their deaths.

Each family was consulted about the online appeal to turn McQueen's designs into real stamps and Mrs Julie Maddison, the mother of Christopher Maddison of the Royal Marines who died on 30 March 2003, is one bereaved mother who is backing the campaign. She puts it all very simply: "Our soldiers had no choice but to go where they were sent but saw their job through bravely and with dignity. Please acknowledge this stamp as you will be acknowledging the ultimate sacrifice my beloved son gave for his country. Refusal to issue this stamp is tantamount to pretending this war and its deaths never happened. There are people who will feel extremely uncomfortable with the issue of these stamps but the outcome of decisions made has to be faced."

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