Even as he hangs work for a retrospective at one of his childhood haunts, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Peter Kennard seems beset by misgivings. Archive of Dissent is a celebration of 50 years of work by the UK’s foremost political artist, yet he admits to a “ sense of failure of making work like this”. He rallies despite himself, saying “but that is also the impetus to go on making it”.
Kennard is responsible for some of the past half-century’s most potent images of protest, resistance and dissent. Radicalised as a student by the events of 1968 and the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, he began making photomontages in the early 70s, going on to produce graphic, insurgent work for a range of left-wing causes and organisations, human rights groups, and environmental concerns, including CND, Amnesty International, the Stop the War coalition and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Naomi Klein said his work “perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age”. John Berger described him as a “master of the medium of photomontage” whose art cannot be ignored. “Kennard,” wrote Harold Pinter, “sees the skull beneath the skin alright.” And John Pilger believed that his art “ranks among the most important of the late twentieth century”.
Given the quality and prominence of his work and the recognition he has received, it is not immediately clear why Kennard should experience a sense of failure. But he explains that though he was proud of his work for CND, for example, the ultimate goals had not all been achieved. “There’s the other side of it, which is depressing: all these things are still there, or more of them.”
And despite his best efforts campaigning against Trident, “we are now spending £125bn on reconditioning it. So there’s that sense, I think, that the world as it is, it’s only madder, isn’t it?”
“Art doesn’t save the world,” he adds, “but a lot of work I’ve done has been for groups like CND or Amnesty, and I think in that sense it can have an effect because it’s allied to a group of people that are actually trying to do something.”
To see the homespun qualities of the often diminutive original artworks is to be reminded that many of them belong to a different era – before deep fakes, AI, Photoshop and digitisation.
He smiles as he recalls visiting Hamleys’ “toy missile department” to buy the plastic prop that he later smashed and impaled on a cardboard CND logo for Broken Missile. “It’s very crude, you know, which I actually quite like because I think that encourages people to make their own.”
The missiles he added to Constable’s Haywain – conceived, he says, as a riposte to an idyllic watercolour in a Ministry of Defence pamphlet promoting the deployment of US nuclear weapons in East Anglia – were cut out with scissors and pasted in place with glue. For Protest and Survive, in which a skeleton reads a copy of a government leaflet offering guidelines of how to act after a nuclear attack, he had to paint out the hands of the students who held the bones in place. “Skeletons don’t usually read,” he adds drily.
Kennard had originally studied as a painter, inspired by the likes of Francis Bacon, Walter Sickert and David Bomberg – artists who, as he once put it, used paint “as coloured shit”. “I started off as a painter, and I started going on demonstrations against the Vietnam war in the late 60s. And then through doing that, that was my political awakening. And so I wanted to make images that used what was happening in Vietnam and in the streets of London on the demos.”
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Syria, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York
In the charged politics of the time he found himself drawn to the disruptive energies of photomontage, especially as exemplified by radical German forebears “where art and politics just naturally come together”.
“It just felt like it wasn’t a decision, it just felt like quite natural to start making work that way. When I found out about Hannah Höch and the dadaists and then, of course, John Heartfield, I saw the sort of power of what you could do with montage and collage.”
For Kennard, the promise of photomontage was that it could surpass a world of surface appearances to suggest deeper meanings.
“If you put two photos together you create another meaning of what’s underneath. I suppose all the things I do are about what’s on the surface and what’s underneath. What’s underneath is not coming through loudly enough, so I’m using those photographs to tell it. I suppose I’m breaking into the smoothness of an image with something that’s hidden.”
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Examples of Kennard’s work used as the basis of designs by the disarmament movement. Clockwise from top left: CND march, London 1982. CND demonstration, London 1980. CND demonstration, London 1982. Anti nuclear protester, London 2018
His purpose was always to arrest viewers and encourage active engagement rather than passive consumption.
“We’re bombarded by verbal opinions 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 then think about it.”
“I have been accused, you know, people say I was just propaganda, but I’m not telling people what to do in the work. I’m not saying do this and vote Labour or something, just trying to present things that will get people to think critically. In magazines you get an advert for a car and then you get a documentary picture, and if you can put those two together, it switches a light on in people’s heads.”
It is a measure of the quality of his iconography of protest that it has been readily and endlessly adopted, modified and reproduced, whether on the printed page, banners, placards, posters, T-shirts, badges or gallery walls. “I don’t mind if you put them on T-shirts, I just think it’s important to get the work out. Putting it out in the world is as important as making the work,” he maintains.
Recalling his Crushed Missile montage, he adds: “It was exciting to know that I’ve done something that then can go out. And especially like that one. People have done versions of it in papier-mache. So it’s got through. One of the things with montage is to do something simple enough that people can get quickly because in the street it’s a shock to see a poster that’s not selling you some garbage you don’t need, but is actually saying, stop nuclear weapons or climate disaster.”
Alongside photomontages produced for the widest possible distribution, since the late 1980s Kennard has worked on unique installations designed for gallery spaces. At a time when digitisation and lossless reproducibility gained traction, it seems he moved in the opposite direction. “I’m the awkward squad,” he concedes ruefully. At the Whitechapel he is fretting over the lighting on a wall displaying Double Exposure, an installation in which his montages, intermittently backlit, appear through pages of Financial Times market data.
“These are almost like deconstructing montage, so it shows the workings of it, which I suppose goes back to Brecht’s ideas of revealing the making of a play. I didn’t want to cover anything. I suppose if you show the process, then you’re not just showing a product. And again, it hopefully invites more people to think about it and also it does encourage people to make their own.”
While the installations might represent a contradiction with aspects of the earlier photomontages, in terms of their quality Kennard sees only a continuity. “I’ve always thought that the work should be as strong as I can make it; it should be strong enough to go into a gallery and to go out in newspapers and magazines”
On the facing 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 serried ranks of stocks and shares, there’s humanity, which is poverty-stricken, a lot of humanity,” he says.
Kennard wonders about a common theme to his output. “That’s always been the theme: inhumanity and trying to represent it in a way to make people think about it; the brutality that goes on in the world in terms of people’s lives; the power relations that affect people; and the madness of the profits made from, especially, arms sales.”
“I suppose that’s the common theme: the waste of capitalism, the human waste and the financial waste. But obviously I can’t put it in words. That’s why I do it.”
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at the Whitechapel gallery until January 2025