Six months after the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, and just before it was shrouded in cladding, Steve McQueen went and created a portrait of the building. The Oscar- and Turner Prize-winning artist took to the skies above West London in a helicopter and circled Grenfell Tower over and over. The resulting film is violently, dizzyingly affecting.
It begins with a slow trip over green and pleasant southern England, all verdant fields and barren early winter trees just west of London. As it starts to turn towards the city – with its glass and metal spires, its thick blanket of smog – you realise what’s coming, and it’s horrifying. Because just past Wembley’s arch, and just over the Westway, there it is, the gutted, burned husk of Grenfell. Your stomach clenches, your heart sinks.
The sound goes silent and the camera starts spiralling endlessly around the tower. The angles tighten, he crops in ultra-close. Now you can see into the ruined kitchens and bedrooms of the people who lived there, the charred walls, the piles of rubble. It’s brutal, harrowing, awful, like being forced to stare at a corpse.
It’s not just an incredibly powerful work of art, it’s a weapon
It’s also deeply intrusive. But that’s part of McQueen’s intention. He wants to confront you with what happened, force it permanently into your memory. The thing is, for Londoners, it’s already in our memories. When you’re dealing with a major moment in recent history, your work as an artist has to compete against the endless proliferation of images of that actual event in the internet age. The burning tower was plastered across every website, every 24 hour news channel, every social media feed in the country. The vision of it is already imprinted in the collective consciousness, interviews with distraught survivors still ring in our ears. What story is McQueen telling that isn’t told better by the original images?
I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, or that it’s bad, at all. But as a way to remember the event, which is what he says he’s trying to do, it doesn’t really work. The way it does work – and brilliantly – is as a shocking, uncomfortable symbol of grief, and more importantly, as a vehicle for McQueen’s anger. Because in the process, it becomes a symbol of our grief and vehicle for our collective anger too.
It’s not just an incredibly powerful work of art, it’s a weapon. McQueen is forcing you to open your eyes to the reality of this tragedy. Most viewers don’t need to be confronted with that: it’s too much, too intrusive, too personal. But the vile, avaricious, greedy councillors, politicians and developers who allowed this to happen need to face justice, and should be forced to watch this every day for the rest of their lives.