Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent
by Peter Kennard
(Pluto Press, £19.99)

“IT IS not surprising that photomontage is associated particularly with the political left, because it is ideally suited to the expression of the Marxist dialectic.”

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The continuities between Kennard's work and that of the German John Heartfield — the communist creator of political photomontage — demonstrates the power of the technique and how it is so effective in disrupting the dominant ideology.

Peter Kennard’s book Visual Dissent, a comprehensive survey of his work from the late 1960s to the present, shows him as a consummate artist with a sharp eye for the hypocrisies and conceits of the bourgeoisie, coupled with a growing mastery of the medium.

Anti-apartheid struggles, the Grunwick dispute, the police killing of anti-fascist teacher Blair Peach, the 1980s campaign against US missile deployment in Europe, the deadly nexus of nuclear weapons and the nuclear industry, Chernobyl, Palestine, austerity, the Iraq war, the capitalist crash — from Thatcher to Trump, from Seattle to the G8, Kennard brings artistry and insight, a technique unrivalled in the contemporary world and combative spirit to a myriad of issues in which militarism, exploitation and oppression are exposed as symptomatic of the capitalist system.

He has been engaged with almost every political issue that has animated the left over the last four decades and this book shows him at his artistic and agitational best. Yet it also illustrates, by the nature of the contrast with his talent, the inadequacies of his political approach.

Kennard is the most accomplished political artist of his time and of great utility in our collective struggles. Life presents critical artists with tough questions and by and large Kennard comes up trumps.

His work is constantly stimulating and accessible and his work achieved its greatest effect at the height of the crisis created by the deployment of US missiles in Europe. These are incontestable truths and by his willing engagement in politics he deserves to be judged not only for his art but on the political ground on which he stands.

The working-class and socialist alternative to the world he depicts finds little expression in his work, even though he came to maturity as an artist during a period when the synthesis of socialist construction, national liberation and proletarian struggle was shaking capitalism to its core.

But his engagement with the real world of socialist construction centres only on its crises and not on its solidarity or successes and is almost entirely critical to the point of being dismissive.

During the global missile crisis, the World Peace Council organised an international peace conference and a cultural festival in Prague at a time when a real fear suffused humanity that a nuclear exchange would have destroyed millions.

A host of cultural and political figures, headed by Yasser Arafat, willingly gave their solidarity to the most representative and culturally distinguished gathering of peace activists since the British government tried to ban Picasso from attending the first World Peace Council festival.

But Kennard refused to join in or to exhibit on the grounds that he disapproved of the government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. In sustaining the US-organised boycott, Kennard made a political error in cutting himself off from an important socialist and Third World audience for whom the danger of war was no less real than it was to us.

He stands with the miners during the 1984-85 strike but lapses into liberal sentiment and there’s a mannered agnosticism when depicting the Maastricht Treaty which presages today’s liberal ambiguity about the bosses’ EU.

His depiction of John Major — who signed us into the Maastricht age of austerity — is unchallenging, anodyne and lacks partisanship.

Even so, it is always a mistake to judge contemporary artists by the aesthetic and ideological standards set by a Bertholt Brecht or John Heartfield. Steeled in the life-and-death fight against fascism, they created a critical art which directly served the cause of working-class power and actively joined in the construction of socialism in the first anti-fascist state on German soil.

For critical and politically engaged artists in our times it is not enough to continue the aesthetic tradition they established. It is necessary to be as partisan as they were.

Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent is published by Pluto Press, £19.99.