Even as he hangs work for a retrospective at one of his childhood haunts, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Peter Kennard seems plagued by reservations. Archive of Dissent is a celebration of 50 years of work by the UK’s most important political artist, but he admits to a “sense of failure in making work like this.” He rebels in spite of himself, saying, “but that’s also what drives me to keep making it.”
Kennard is responsible for some of the most powerful images of protest, resistance and dissent of the past half century. Radicalised as a student by the events of 1968 and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, he began making photomontages in the early 1970s, going on to produce graphic, insurgent work for a range of left-wing causes and organisations, human rights groups and environmental organisations, 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 time.” 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.” And John Pilger believed 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 obvious why Kennard should feel a sense of failure. But he explains that while he was proud of his work for CND, for example, its ultimate goals were not all achieved. “There is also another side, which is depressing: all these things are still there, or more of them.”
And despite his best efforts to campaign against Trident, “we’re now spending £125 billion on fixing it up. So there’s that sense, I think, that the world as it is just got crazier, isn’t there?”
“Art doesn’t save the world,” he adds, “but a lot of the work I’ve done has been for groups like CND or Amnesty, and I think in that sense it can have an impact, because it’s connected to a group of people who are actually trying to do something.”
Seeing the simple qualities of the often small original artworks, you are reminded that many of them come from a different era – before the days of deep fakes, AI, Photoshop and digitalization.
He smiles as he recalls visiting Hamleys’ “toy rocket department” to buy the plastic prop that he later smashed and impaled on a cardboard CND logo for Broken Missile. “It’s quite crude, you know, which I actually like because I think it encourages people to make their own.”
The missiles he added to Constable’s Haywain – conceived, he says, as a response 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 glued into place. For Protest and Survive, in which a skeleton reads a copy of a government leaflet giving guidance on how to respond to a nuclear attack, he had to paint the hands of the students holding the bones in place. “Skeletons don’t usually read,” he adds dryly.
Kennard had originally trained as a painter, inspired by the likes of Francis Bacon, Walter Sickert and David Bomberg – artists who, as he once put it, used paint “like coloured shit”. “I started out as a painter and I started doing anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the late 1960s. And doing that really woke me up politically. And so I wanted to make images that used what was happening in Vietnam and on the streets of London during the demonstrations.”
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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 was drawn to the disruptive energies of photomontage, especially as exemplified by radical German forebears, ‘where art and politics naturally converge’.
“It just felt like it wasn’t a decision, it just felt very natural to start making work that way. When I heard about Hannah Höch and the Dadaists and then of course John Heartfield, I saw the power of what you can do with montage and collage.”
For Kennard, the promise of photomontage was that it could transcend the world of superficial appearances and suggest deeper meanings.
“When you put two pictures together, you create a different meaning of what’s underneath. I think everything I do is about what’s underneath and what’s beneath. What’s underneath doesn’t come out loud enough, so I use those pictures to tell it. I think I’m breaking up the smoothness of an image with something that’s hidden.”
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Examples of Kennard’s work used as the basis for 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 goal was always to capture the attention of viewers and encourage them to actively engage rather than passively consume.
“We are bombarded with verbal opinions all the time. I think we need images to reach people, especially young people who are not going to sit down and read Chomsky or something like that. But they might see an image and think about it.”
“I’ve been accused of, you know, people saying I was just propaganda, but I don’t tell people what to do in the job. I don’t say do this and vote Labour or anything, I just try to present things that make people think. In magazines you get an advert for a car and then you get a documentary picture, and if you can put the two together, it lights up people’s minds.”
It is a measure of the quality of his protest iconography that it has been easily and endlessly adopted, adapted 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 just think it’s important to get the work out there. Getting it out there is just as important as getting the work out there,” he asserts.
Reflecting on his Crushed Missile montage, he adds: “It was exciting to know that I’ve done something that can then go out there. And especially something like that. People have made papier-mâché versions of it. So it’s caught on. One of the things about montage is to do something that’s simple enough that people can pick up quickly, because on the street it’s a shock to see a poster that’s not selling you crap that you don’t need, but is actually saying, stop nuclear weapons or climate disaster.”
In addition to photomontages produced for the widest possible distribution, Kennard has been working since the late 1980s on unique installations designed for gallery spaces. At a time when digitalization and lossless reproducibility are gaining traction, he seems to have gone the other way. “I’m the awkward crew,” he admits ruefully. At the Whitechapel, he worries about the lighting on a wall displaying Double Exposure, an installation in which his montages, occasionally backlit, appear through pages of Financial Times market data.
“This is almost like a deconstruction of montage, so it shows the workings of it, which I think goes back to Brecht’s idea of revealing the making of a play. I didn’t want to cover anything up. I think when you show the process, you’re not just showing a product. And again, it hopefully invites more people to think about it and also encourages people to make their own work.”
Although the installations may contrast with aspects of the earlier photomontages, Kennard sees only a continuity in terms of their quality. “I’ve always thought the work has to be as strong as I can make it; it has to be strong enough to go into a gallery and to appear in newspapers and magazines.”
On the opposite wall, a grid of 24 images from his World Markets series shows faces drawn in graphite and charcoal across the financial pages of newspapers around the world. “Outside the unbroken rows of stocks and bonds, there is humanity, which is poor, a lot of humanity,” he says.
Kennard wonders if there is a common theme in his output. “That’s always been the theme: inhumanity and trying to portray it in a way that makes people think about it; the cruelty that happens in the world in terms of human lives; the power dynamics that affect people; and the insanity of the profits that are made from, particularly, arms sales.”
“I think that’s the common theme: the waste of capitalism, the human waste, 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 on view at the Whitechapel Gallery until January 2025