Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent
Whitechapel Gallery, London

SINCE the early 1970s, Peter Kennard’s art has not only documented the anti-war/ anti-capitalist movement but been an integral part of it; both as revelation and stimulus. 

Indeed, he reveals their links and stimulates the processes of resistance. He may be the only artist whose art — and it is art, not propaganda — has appeared on the streets and aloft at demonstrations as well as in newspapers and galleries. You could consider him the artist in residence of the human conscience. 

“My art,” he says, “erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society. Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on …” 

[[{"fid":"68570","view_mode":"inlinefull","fields":{"format":"inlinefull","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Peter Kennard, Values / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlinefull","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Peter Kennard, Values / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Peter Kennard, Values / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","class":"media-element file-inlinefull","data-delta":"1"}}]]

The successor of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch in Germany, Kennard’s form is often photomontage, merging or juxtaposing images to create stunning new ones revealing new truths. Of course we would never actually see a human skeleton reading a copy of that creepy, terrifying government booklet Protect and Survive; but note the business of the artist, the angle of that skull, the lay of the pages. Likewise we are unlikely to see elderly hands trying to cut a coin with a knife and fork on a plate. 

Kennard’s work has great aesthetic integrity and this, much like Picasso’s Guernica created in 1937, transmits the message like electricity. Just as Guernica was Picasso’s response to the German bombing of that town in the Basque country in Spain, Kennard’s globe with embedded eye sockets containing the British and American flags, and a mouth stuffed with cruise missiles hits the spot. That spot might be Suffolk of course, suggested by Haywain with Cruise Missiles, where the things are carried by John Constable’s hay cart.  

Kennard is now Emeritus Professor of political art at the Royal College of Art, and I ask him at what point in his art life did he decide to focus on the political world and its evils? What formed him as an artist?

“I first studied painting at art school,” he replies, “but around 1968, when I was at the Slade School of Art, I went on demonstrations in London against the Vietnam war. This was a political awakening in terms of understanding the brutality of American imperialism across the world and experiencing the often violent response of the Metropolitan Police to demonstrators. 

“So I wanted to develop a way through my art to picture the connections of military strength to peoples’ lives. That’s when I turned to photomontage as a way to make images that spoke directly about events as they happened. I found a way of sandwiching negatives together so I could superimpose images of the destruction being meted out to the Vietnamese with images of people in the west protesting (against) the war and other events that were happening at that time, like the civil rights marches in the US and the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. 

“In 1970 I made my first large poster for the street, which was based on a photo of one of the four students shot dead at Kent State University in Ohio, US. A group of fellow art students fly-posted them around London as an act of solidarity with the US  students.”

Hannah Woods’s curation is part of the experience of this archive.  

Beautifully set up on the upper level of the Whitechapel Gallery, in the space that used to be the University of the East End where the poor once came in to read books, newspapers and to get warm. There is homage to this with a large tabletop of books, magazines and newspapers — and piles of Kennard’s newsprint posters free to take away.   

Nearby there is a shallow vitrine about his processes through the decades — the scissors and the glue, the stuff of it. 

John Berger once asked: “What can a single man with a pile of photos, a pair of scissors, and paste do in the face of all this?” — all this being the state of the world. Berger appreciated Kennard, saying: “His images are impossible to convey with words because of their unmistakable visual texture, pure and dirty, suggesting a strange amalgam of X-ray, satellite image and slag.”  

There is also a large browsing rack of posters and works made when he was the Greater London Council’s artist in residence, imaging many of the GLC’s radical policies on race, employment and anti-war, with Ken Livingstone at the helm. Next to this is an installation of placards on sticks, old and new, not held by people but grounded by clumpy heavy vices.

Artists develop and Kennard at 75 is no exception. The new work uses contemporary technologies, sometimes to adapt old work and sometimes the new. A recent exhibition at a/political (Kennington) showed new collaborations in projection and 3D. Some of them are here in a darkened room, the temperature just right. Particularly powerful is the series of arms dealers’ business cards as a slick linear barrage, that morph through lenses and the marketing tools of armaments manufacture and are targeted, ultimately at a human face.  

[[{"fid":"68571","view_mode":"inlinefull","fields":{"format":"inlinefull","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Peter Kennard, Palestine / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlinefull","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Peter Kennard, Palestine / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Peter Kennard, Palestine / Credit: Courtesy of the artist","class":"media-element file-inlinefull","data-delta":"2"}}]]

And Palestine. His reworking of the Palestinian flag is deceptively simple — with that ooze of red blood dripping into the white space between the green and black. 

Kennard has earned his place in art history. Cezanne, some say is a better artist than Van Gogh because Cezanne shows you what the world is whereas Van Gogh shows you how he feels about it. I believe that true of Kennard — he shows you what it is. What we feel about it can be the spur towards activism. 

Although it is a much abused word, this art really deserves the label “iconic” as the establishment would like to be iconoclasts and tear it up.  

Many of the new government’s new people will be familiar with it — they should get down to this show and remind themselves.

Runs at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until January 19. Free admission. For more information see: whitechapelgallery.org