I can’t help but think that Yamamoto had some irony in mind when he chose the handsomely robust McQueen as his proxy for a statement on the politics of body size: after all, McQueen’s much-acclaimed debut feature, Hunger, is all about using the human body as a political weapon. Centering on the final weeks in the life of of imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands, McQueen’s film examines the passion and struggle that fueled the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. The film has been ruffling a few feathers in the UK over its seemingly sympathetic portrayal of Sands, but McQueen himself refuses to take sides. Confronted by a reporter who baits, “I would argue, [Sands] comes out looking heroic,” McQueen responds, “Not for me … If he’s in a movie, people walk around thinking he’s heroic. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing in the movie, he will be thought of as heroic. That’s the movies. You put anyone in a movie, and people think that person’s heroic.”

In fact, Steve McQueen has built a reputation for not taking a position on his own work. 1993’s Bear, the silent short film that put him on the map, depicts a naked wrestling match between two black men (one of whom is McQueen). “Narrative and visual contexts, however, are absent,” wrote David Frankel in ArtForum, “this nude wrestling match has neither origin nor outcome, and happens in seeming darkness. What remains is the play of the men’s feelings - there is smiling and laughter, but also challenge, caution, tension, alarm, and a certain erotic buzz as the sparring goes through its phases.” Pulling the viewer into the film’s all-around ambiguity by forcing them to watch it in a completely darkened gallery room, McQueen doesn’t clarify any of the questions he raises, leaving his audience to construct their own point of view.

McQueen’s unyielding distance from his own work has always stood in stark contrast to the indulgent autobiography of his “Young British Artist” contemporaries like Tracey Emin, who became a press darling when she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize with her hopelessly self-absorbed work “My Bed” in 1999, the year McQueen won. “His victory was greeted by the London Evening Standard with a cover photo of Tracey Emin ‘not winning the Turner Prize.’ McQueen was tucked away on page five,” wrote Iain Aitch on GettingIt.com.

McQueen finally found himself in the public spotlight in 2007 with a work which, like Hunger, raises questions about the problematic position of the human body in modern politics. Selected by the semi-governmental Imperial War Museum to act as the nation’s official “War Artist,” McQueen’s resulting piece, Queen and Country, is simply a series of postage stamps depicting 98 armed service members who have died in Iraq. In a time in which images of the war dead have been banned in the media, when governments choose to sweep the idea of these unwanted corpses from an unpopular war under the rug, the UK’s Royal Mail service has quietly refused to turn McQueen’s work into real commemorative stamps– even after an outpouring of public support for the project.

That McQueen has been able to cause such controversy by doing something so benign– something that isn’t explicitly pro-war or anti-war, and might actually honor these casualties– demonstrates the beauty of McQueen’s detached perspective. Placing himself in opposition to the self-centered delusion fostered by micro-blogging, reality television and tabloid minutiae, McQueen steps away from himself and acts as an apolitical provocateur, presenting uncomfortable questions and allowing the audience to take their own positions.