Heartfelt military tribute, or anti-war political statement?
5,158 U.S. dead - and she draws (almost) every one
LONDON – At first glance, it looks like the partial remains of an ancient mosaic or the garble of an out-of-order digital billboard. Then the scale of the work grabs your attention: It sprawls across three walls of a gallery in London’s trendy Chelsea district, stretching more than 40 yards.
Like many works of art, the totality of "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis),"is revealed by standing back. But in Emily Prince’s installation each tiny piece of the mosaic is an artwork in itself – 5,158 portraits that chronicle the men and women of the American armed forces who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
The art installation at the Saatchi Gallery. Each portrait, on a piece of card four inches by three inches, has been rendered by Prince from photographs used in on-line obituaries. Where no portrait was available, a blank white card with a name is used instead. The portraits are pencil sketches, with the cards themselves color-coded to depict the racial diversity of the fallen: light brown, dark brown, yellow, off-white. Some of the cards contain brief biographical details of the subject, others just carry their name, hometown, age and the date they died.
When it was first assembled, the portraits were displayed in a grid indicating the hometown of each of the subjects, outlined by the shape of the United States. In its latest incarnation, at the Saatchi Gallery on London's Kings Road, the artwork is in chronological order, with a ten-foot high column marking a week of conflict. The first few columns contain a few scattered portraits, but after three yards the columns get crowded, each containing up to 27 sketches. The first flood of drawings marks March 2003, the start of the Iraq invasion.
Two of the pencil portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the left, Charles A. Hanson Jr., Panacea Florida, 22, Nov. 28 2004. On the right, Salamo J. Tuialuuluu, Pago Pago American Samoa, Dec. 4 2004. Prince said the decision to display the portraits in chronological order makes the piece open to a wider interpretation than the "literal and didactic" depiction in a geographic shape. There are practical advantages, she adds: In the map-like installation the top-most portraits were 35 feet from the floor, making them impossible to view in detail. Now, she says, each portrait is elevated no more than ten feet.
Speaking from her home in San Francisco, Calif., Prince, 28, said that her initial intention had been to transform the abstract numbers of the rising death tolls into something more meaningful. She says she started to sketch the portraits in 2004 without knowing if they would ever leave her studio, working seven days a week for more than a year. At first she depicted soldiers killed in Iraq but then expanded her project to include those lost in the Afghan campaign. Although she says she has strong political views, she wants the work to be politically ambiguous: "So that people can have their own experience whatever their political view."
Waldemar Januszczak, art critic at London’s Sunday Times newspaper, described the installation as a "powerful ... and grim memorial to wasted life."
More portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during March, 2008.
Prince agreed with that description, but hopes her work provides multiple meanings to those who see it. "It is a memorial, but its other things, too," she said. "I wouldn’t want a memorial to be monumental, it should be made with humble materials like paper and pencil." As for Iraqis and Afghans lost in the conflicts, Prince describes the work as unresolved and imperfect. But, she added, "There is negative space in the installation that operates as a gesture towards the unseen victims, with a pressing and poignant absence."
There is another poignant space in the current installation. Four feet of the third wall remains prepared but empty, an area that no doubt will contain more portraits.
"American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)" is on display at London's Saatchi Gallery until May 7, 2010.
