by Even as he hangs a work for a retrospective at one of his childhood charities, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Peter Kennard seems beset by doubt. Archive of Dissent celebrates 50 years of the work of the UK’s leading political artist, but admits that “a work like this has failed”. He turns in spite of himself, saying “but that’s also the motivation to keep going”.
Kennard is responsible for some of the most powerful images of protest, resistance and dissent of the last half century. Radicalized as a student at the 1968 anti-war demonstrations in Vietnam, he began making photomontages in the early 70s, going on to produce graphic, rebellious work for a range of left-wing, right-wing causes and organisations. human, and environmental concerns, including CND, Amnesty International, the Stop the War Coalition and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Naomi Klein said her work “perfectly depicts the brutal asymmetries of our time”. John Berger described him as “a master of the medium of photomontage” whose art cannot be ignored. “Kennard,” wrote Harold Pinter, “the skull sees all right under the skin.” And John Pilger believed that his art is “one of the most important of the twentieth century”.
Given the quality and prominence of his work and the recognition he has received, it is not immediately clear why Kennard should feel a sense of failure. But he explains that, although he was proud of his work for CND, for example, not all the final goals were achieved. “There is the other side of it, which is depressing: all these things are still there, or more of them.”
And despite his best efforts in campaigning against Trident, “we are now spending £125bn on reforming it. So there’s that sense, I think, that the world is what it is, that it’s just madder, isn’t it?”
“Art doesn’t save the world,” he says, “but I’ve done a lot of work for groups like CND or Amnesty, and I think in that sense it can have an impact because it’s combined with a group of them. people who really want to do something.”
It must be remembered that many of them belong to another era – before deep fake, AI, Photoshop and digitization, seeing the domestic qualities of the original works of art is not insignificant.
He smiles as he recalls a visit to Hamleys’ “toy missile department” to buy the plastic gear he later took out and hung on a cardboard CND logo for Broken Missile. “It’s very raw, you know, which I really like because I think it encourages people to do their own thing.”
The missiles he added to the Constable’s Haywain – designed, he says, as a riposte to an idealized watercolor in a Ministry of Defense pamphlet promoting the deployment of US nuclear weapons in East Anglia – were cut out with scissors and glued in place with glue For Protest and Survival, in which a skeleton reads a copy of a government leaflet offering guidelines on how to act after a nuclear attack, he had to paint out the hands of the students holding the bones in place. “Skeletons don’t usually read,” he says drily.
Kennard had originally studied as a painter, inspired by the likes of Francis Bacon, Walter Sickert and David Bomberg – artists who used paint “like colored shit” as he once said. “I started as a painter, and I started doing exhibitions against the Vietnam war in the late 60s. And then by doing that, that was my political awakening. And so I wanted to make images that used what was happening in Vietnam and on the streets of London in the demonstrations.”
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Syria, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York
In the careful politics of the time he was drawn to the disturbing energy of photomontage, especially as shown by the German radical ancestors “where art and politics meet naturally”.
“It felt like it wasn’t a decision, it felt quite natural to start working that way. When I found out about Hannah Höch and the fathers and then, of course, John Heartfield, I saw the kind of power you could do with montage and collage.”
For Kennard, the promise of photomontage was that it could transcend the world of surface appearances to suggest deeper meanings.
“If you put two photos together you create a different meaning for what’s underneath. I guess all the things I do are about what’s on the surface and what’s underneath. What’s below isn’t coming through high enough, so I’m using those photos to tell the story. I’m probably breaking into a smooth image with something that’s hidden.”
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Examples of Kennard’s work that used the disarmament movement as a basis for designs. Clockwise from top left: CND march, London 1982. CND demonstration, London 1980. CND demonstration, London 1982. Anti-nuclear protester, London 2018
His objective has always been to capture an audience and encourage active participation rather than passive consumption.
“We are bombarded with verbal comments all the time. We need images to get through to people, I think, especially through to young people who aren’t going to sit down and read Chomsky or whatever. But they might see an image and think about it.”
“I was accused, you know, people say I was just a propagandist, but I’m not telling people what to do at work. I’m not saying do this and vote Labor or something, just trying to present things that will make people think critically. In magazines you get an ad for a car and then you get an info picture, and if you can put those two together, it lights up people’s heads.”
It is a measure of the quality of his protest iconography that it was readily and endlessly adopted, modified and reproduced, whether on the printed page, banners, placards, posters, T-shirts, badges or gallery walls. “I don’t care if you put them on T-shirts, I think it’s important to get the work done. It’s so important to get it out into the world and do the work,” he says.
Remembering his Crushed Missiles montage, he said: “It was exciting to know that I’ve made something that can get out there. And especially so only. People have made versions of it in papier-mache. So it has gone through. One of the things about montage is to do something simple enough that people can get it quickly because it’s a shock to see a poster on the street that you’re not selling some junk you don’t need, but which is really saying, stop nuclear or climate weapons. Disaster.”
Alongside photomontages produced for the widest possible distribution, since the late 1980s Kennard has been working on unique installations designed for gallery spaces. At a time when digitization and lossless reproduction gained traction, it seems to have moved in the opposite direction. “I’m the awkward squad,” he sheepishly admits. At the Whitechapel he is fretting over the lighting on a wall showing Double Exposure, an installation in which his montages, occasionally backlit, appear through pages of Financial Times market data.
“These are almost like deconstructive montages, so it shows how they work, which I think goes back to Brecht’s ideas about revealing the creation of a play. I didn’t want to cover anything. Probably if you show the process, then you are not just showing a product. And again, hopefully it will invite more people to think about it and encourage people to do their own thing.”
Although the installations may contradict aspects of the earlier photomontages, in terms of their quality Kennard sees only continuity. “I always thought that the work should be as strong as I can do; it should be strong enough to go into a gallery and get out in newspapers and magazines.”
On the front wall a grid of 24 images from his World Markets series shows faces drawn in graphite and charcoal over financial pages from newspapers around the world. “Beyond the stocks and shares, there is humanity, poverty-stricken, a lot of humanity,” he says.
Kennard wondered about a common theme in his output. “That’s always been the theme: inhumanity and trying to portray it in a way that would make people think about it; the brutality that goes on around the world in terms of people’s lives; the power relations that affect people; and the profit made from, in particular, arms sales.”
“That’s probably the common theme: the waste of capitalism, the human waste and the financial waste. But of course I can’t put it into words. That’s why I do it.”
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at the Whitechapel gallery until January 2025
