There is a photomontage by the great British political artist Peter Kennard that cuts straight to the quick. It shows a skeleton standing to attention before a dark sea, its neck rising into a mushroom cloud. Pale vertebrae fuse with the stuttering nuclear uprush. The explosion seems to hold a face. Smoke drifts sideways like ghostly hair. There is much to say about the skill of it, but the point is to go beyond words. You cannot argue with this image.
Kennard, at 75, has long since mastered the art of the irrefutable. His montages are not just proverbial but classic. The globe as a gigantic gas mask, stuffed with warheads like sprat in a puffin’s beak. A pair of old hands trying to cut a grimy penny on a dinner plate. Constable’s Hay Wain piled high with cruise missiles, as if trundling through the English countryside to Greenham Common in the early 80s, when the work was made.
