At the pivotal moment of a good joke, the familiar takes an unexpected turn and the world appears tilted on its axis. It is a stretch to describe Peter Kennard’s dark-as-hell photo collages as jokes, but there is certainly shared methodology. Kennard weirds the familiar, creating jarring juxtapositions, and delivering electrifying visual shocks by way of punchline.
Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel Gallery covers over 50 years of Kennard’s work. His golden period arrived in the late 1970s and 1980s – the era of Thatcher, the GLC under Ken Livingstone and the protest camps at Greenham Common and Faslane. The political foes were iconic, the protests popular, and a flourishing print culture offered rich material to work from.
In Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980) the wooden cart in John Constable’s beloved painting appears laden with American bombs. Kennard’s work was made the year RAF Greenham Common – in rural Berkshire, 89km west of London – was selected to be used as a nuclear missile bases by the US air force. In Thatcher Unmasked (1986) the former prime minister is seen removing her own face to reveal a death’s head lurking within.
He has quite the eye for a striking image. In a recent poster the Palestinian flag appears turned on end with the red trickling out of its triangle like a stream of blood or sand from an hourglass. A group of new works use the global market pages of the Financial Times. Some show furious hands ripping through the paper as though trapped within. In World Markets (2023) they carry charcoal portraits of people whose lives (we might infer) are being depleted in the interests of profit. Lights flick on and off behind the pink pages of Double Exposure (2023) showing familiar images from Kennard’s archive apparently woven into the paper itself, driving home the interrelation of commerce and geopolitics.
Kennard’s natural habitats include placards, public walls, pamphlets, flyers and newspaper – including this one. His striking photomontages appeared in the Guardian at key moments in the late 20th century: after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the beginning of negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in 1990, and on the eve of the first Gulf war in 1991. An informal exhibition design reflects his preference for public sphere over gallery. Dozens of posters are shown in wall-mounted display racks available to flip through; 15,000 free “newspapers” are folded up on the floor of the gallery, there for the taking.
Kennard also honours the radical history of Whitechapel Gallery itself, and the former library building it occupies. Twenty-seven of his designs are presented on placards, each of their sticks weighted to the floor by a red industrial vice. He has titled the display People’s University of the East End – a reference, apparently, to a local nickname for the old library’s reading room, a space open to all to read newspapers, books, magazines and political pamphlets. Original newspapers carrying Kennard’s illustrations are displayed on old wooden lecterns in the adjacent gallery.
Might there be a spoonful of nostalgia stirred into all this? I think so. Although Kennard continues to make work in response to current events – Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, the war in Ukraine, the climate emergency – there is a self-conscious clunky DIY sensibility to the whole display that harks to a different era. The installation Boardroom (2023) projects the logos and mottoes of companies that profit from conflict (among them BAE Systems) on to an anonymous face printed on to a sheet of newsprint. The board behind is splintered and scuffed, and the clamps and rods used to hold everything in place are stubbornly visible. Perhaps Kennard feels it behoves him to expose the structures within his work, just as he exposes the structural links between conflict and corporate profit.
A cluttered vitrine of printed matter and art materials represents Kennard’s work environment and broadcasts his commitment to scalpel, gluepot and inks. The physicality of the original collages is striking – an image of Nelson Mandela’s face emerging between two broken pieces of a sign reading Whites Only/Net Blankes was constructed using an actual wooden sign, presumably obtained from South Africa.
What medium would a Kennard leaving art school now turn to? Would he be spray-painting walls? Would he make memes? Would he even have gone to art school? Kennard is Britain’s first (and only) professor of political art – the appointment of such a role today seems unthinkable. This exhibition opens in the month five Just Stop Oil campaigners received the longest ever sentences for non-violent protest in the UK, and amid mass redundancies at universities, with arts and humanities courses a particular target. I think a spoonful of nostalgia can be forgiven.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 19 January 2025
