Post War: Martin Herbert on Steve McQueen's Queen and Country

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FOR THE PAST thirty-five years, the Art Commissions Committee of London's Imperial War Museum has invited artists to make work responding to the activities of British and Commonwealth troops, whether they be engaged in combat or in peacekeeping missions. This privately run successor to the country's official war artists' program (which was created in 1916, partly for propaganda purposes, and dismantled in 1972) has thrown up the occasional attention-grabbing artwork--notably, Langlands & Bell's interactive digital animation. The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2003, a detailed re-creation of the terrorist's last known address. Most of the results, however, have been in the relatively uncontroversial vein of Linda Kitson's pallid conte sketches, from 1982, of soldiers training for engagement in the Falklands, and Peter Howson's muscular but conventional 1994 paintings of exhausted Muslim refugees and Red Cross convoys in Bosnia. Certainly, none of it has caused anything like the kind of ruckus sparked in recent months by the latest invitee, Steve McQueen, the thirty-seven-year-old Turner Prizewinning artist who was asked to make work connected to the war in Iraq.

When McQueen's invitation was first announced in the summer of 2003, the Art Commissions Committee stated that the artist had "an open brief." Surely, they assumed he would make a film, since, with a few sculptural and photographic exceptions, McQueen has been known for laconic but gut-pummeling shorts since the early 1990s. And indeed, he was planning to make a film, until he went to Basra for six days--and found …