by At the crucial moment of good news, the familiar takes an unexpected turn and the world seems to be tilted on its axis. It’s a stretch to describe Peter Kennard’s dark-from-hell photo collages as jokes, but there’s definitely a shared methodology. Kennard informs the strange, creating sharp juxtapositions, and delivering electrifying visual shocks through a punchline.
Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel Gallery covers over 50 years of Kennard’s work. Its golden period came in the late 1970s and 1980s – the Thatcher era, the GLC under Ken Livingstone and the protest camps at Greenham Common and Faslane. Political enemies were iconic, protests were popular, and a burgeoning print culture was rich with content.
In Haywain by Cruise Missiles (1980) the wooden cart in John Constable’s beloved painting appears to be loaded with American bombs. Kennard’s work was carried out the year RAF Greenham Common – in the Berkshire countryside, 89km west of London – was selected for use as a nuclear missile base by the US air force. In Thatcher Unmasked (1986) the former prime minister is seen removing her own face to reveal a death’s skull inside.
He has an eye for a striking image. In a recent poster the Palestinian flag appears to have finally flipped and the red is trickling out of its triangle like a stream of blood or sand from an hourglass. A new working group uses the global market pages of the Financial Times. Some show frantic hands ripping through the paper as if trapped inside. In World Markets (2023) they carry charcoal portraits of people whose lives (we might infer) are being consumed for profit. Lights flicker on and off the back of the pink pages of Double Exposure (2023) showing familiar images from Kennard’s archive seemingly embedded in the paper itself, driving home the interrelationship between commerce and geopolitics.
Kennard’s natural habitats include placards, public walls, pamphlets, leaflets and newspapers – including this one. His striking photomontages appeared in the Guardian at key moments in the late 20th century: after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the start of negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in 1990, and on the eve of the first Gulf war in 1991. Informal exhibition design reflects his preference for a public sphere rather than a gallery. Dozens of posters are displayed in flip-through wall display racks; There are 15,000 free “newspapers” folded on the gallery floor, for the taking.
Kennard also pays homage to the radical history of the Whitechapel Gallery itself, and the former library building in which it is housed. Twenty-seven of his designs are presented on placards, each of his sticks weighted to the floor by a red industrial vice. The display is titled People’s University of the East End – apparently a reference to a local nickname for the old library’s reading room, a space open to all to read newspapers, books, magazines and political pamphlets. Original newspapers with Kennard’s illustrations are displayed on old wooden lecterns in the adjacent gallery.
Could a spoonful of nostalgia have been stirred into all this? I think. While Kennard continues to make work in response to current events — Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, the war in Ukraine, the climate emergency — the self-consciously clunky DIY sensibility of the whole display harks back to another era. In the installation Boardroom (2023) the logos and slogans of companies profiting from conflict (including BAE Systems) are projected onto an anonymous face printed on a sheet of newspaper. The board at the back is splintered and scuffed, and the clamps and rods used to hold everything in place are stubbornly visible. Perhaps Kennard feels it is necessary for him to reveal the structures within his work, just as he reveals the structural links between conflict and corporate profit.
A cluttered vitrine of printed matter and art materials represents Kennard’s working environment and broadcasts his dedication to scalpel, glue pot and ink. The physicality of the original collages is remarkable – an image of Nelson Mandela’s face emerging between two broken pieces of a sign reading Whites Only/Net Blanks was taken with an actual wooden sign, probably sourced from South Africa.
What medium would Kennard give who would be leaving art school now? Would it spray walls? Would it make memes? Would he even go to art school? Kennard is the first (and only) professor in Britain of political art – such a role seems unthinkable today. This exhibition opens in the month that five Just Stop Oil campaigners received the longest sentences ever in the UK for non-violent protest, and amid mass redundancies in universities, with a particular target in relation to arts and humanities. I think a spoonful of nostalgia can be forgiven.
