While in her final year at UC Berkeley, curator Robert Storr selected a work by American artist Emily Prince for the 52nd Venice Biennale. In Venice, critic Michael Kimmelman called her piece ‘remarkable’ in an overall show of quiet art with strong convictions (a compliment). And it was in Venice that Charles Saatchi spotted her piece, for which he paid a quiet, six-figure sum.

Now, three years later, Prince’s work visits the Saatchi Gallery’s Project Room. An archive of fallen U.S. soldiers since 2004, it is remarkably easy to describe. From photographs, Prince draws a portrait of each war casualty on a small index card, the color of which is also a racial index (brown for brown-skinned soldiers, beige for beige-skinned, etc.). Originally, she organised the cards into a map of the United States, with each soldier located approximately near his or her hometown. But the sheer numbers of dead made this sort of info-graphic impossible to maintain, such that the Saatchi installation orders them chronologically. The show opened in January with 5,158 drawings, although 169 more solders have since died.

But perhaps it is not necessary to describe this extensive project, which invests greater sympathy in the hand-drawn than the photographically-captured, which Prince deems personally significant (because no relative of hers is involved in military conflict), and which has its own web archive if you haven’t got time to see it in person. Unnecessary to describe because the title of Prince’s exercise already says it all - leaving the viewer little other response than liberal guilt. The full title, American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis) is an explicit premise realized in three dimensions, involving something political, and equally, ‘politically correct’. To be critical, one might ask: is the practice of portraying martyrs truly exceptional? And in the context of a Left-leaning art world, could it even be considered exploitative to cash in on such work?

Until May 7

KARI RITTENBACH