Artist's war depiction has many faces, rough edges(UK artists places all 98 dead on stamps)

[maddezmom]

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.

more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-artist2mar02,1,6852940.story?track=rss

'It's not antiwar, it's not pro-war. It is what it is. It's a reflection on our participation in the war in Iraq.'
— Steve McQueen, Creator of the “Queen and Country” exhibit