‘Visual attempts to dissect the newspeak that bombards us’
(Peter Kennard in an article about his photomontages)
Chances are you’ve seen one or more of Peter Kennard’s iconic photomontages, particularly during his heyday in the 1980s when the reign of Mrs Thatcher provided the perfect background for his brand of aggressively radical, satirical photomontages, published in a wide variety of left-leaning magazines and newspapers.
‘Protest and Survive’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist
Throughout Thatcher’s premiership, and fired by her close partnership with Rocking Ronnie Reagan, there was widespread paranoia on the Left that the world stood on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war and Kennard’s witty, bleak, mashed-up montages provided a perfect accompaniment to the mood of anxiety among concerned activists everywhere.
‘Haywain with Cruise Missiles’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist 2007 © Peter Kennard
Photomontage
Photomontage is the technique of cutting, arranging and gluing together photos (or parts of photos) to make a new image, sometimes with text similarly cut and pasted from newspapers or other sources. As a technique it’s always been associated with politics and satire, from its origins in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 30s and the great pioneer of political montages, John Heartfield.
‘The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts’ by John Heartfield, October 1932
As a student activist in the 196os, Kennard found theoretical underpinnings for photomontage in the critical writings of Marxist thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht who promoted photomontage and collage (among other strategies) as ways of puncturing, subverting and questioning the smooth lies of capitalist discourse and bourgeois culture. Indeed, one of newspapers on show here is a Guardian Arts supplement from the 1990s featuring a long essay about Benjamin by James Wood and illustrated by a photomontage of him (Benjamin) by Kennard.
‘Walter Benjamin’ by Peter Kennard (1990) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery
Kennard at the Whitechapel
This new exhibition of Kennard’s work includes lots of golden oldies from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, witty, savage, sometimes very bleak visual protests against a world run by rich Western corporations who, in what is probably his central theme, make obscene amounts of money by selling arms, weapons, bombs, guns to disgusting regimes which then use them to repress, murder, massacre their own and neighbouring populations. Champagne-swilling capitalists win – unarmed civilians, women and children lose.
‘Stop’ by Peter Kennard as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery
However, this exhibition is not by any means a retrospective or dwelling on the past. Two of the three rooms contain very up-to-date works, completed in 2023 or this year, which show Kennard expanding his range in new and interesting ways. Having pondered all this a bit, I think the best way to 1) indicate what the show actually contains and 2) to indicate how the new stuff differs and expands on the old, is simply to describe it room by room.
Room 1
Room 1 is named the Archive Room and contains four elements. First there’s a plain table on which are ten books, publications from Kennard’s career from coffee table blockbusters to smaller, postcard-sized works. You could grab a coffee from the cafe downstairs, sit and browse through these for an interesting half hour or so.
On a shelf round two walls are 17 copies of one of these books – @earth – open to 17 different images.
On another wall is a hinged rack (the kind you see in art gallery shops) of 42 posters of Kennard images ranging from 1979 to 2019, made from photolithography and silkscreen on card.
Lastly, there are piles and piles of newspapers – or at least that’s what I thought they were till I looked closely and realised they are specially printed broadsheet-sized, newspaper-style folded versions of his images, accompanied by smatterings of text, which are FREE and we are encouraged to take away with us.
Installation view of ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, showing the reading table, copies of @earth open on the shelf and piles and piles of free papers (photo by the author)
Room 2
Barely a room, really just an extension of the same space, the second gallery contains three elements. There is a display case which bears the title ‘Worktop, 1966–2024’ and is, as the name suggests, a junk shop-style collection of the kinds of materials that Kennard collects – magazines, books, photos – plus all manner of equipment used to make the works, such as a tape measure, rulers, paints, knives and tools and so on.
The artist’s bric-a-brac at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
Above the display case are four large framed works titled ‘Stocks’ from 1994. These are four copies of the Financial Times which have been subjected to a dramatic transformation, namely a gaunt, ravaged, black and white arm and hand tearing its way down through the neat columns of stock market prices, in a gesture which manages to convey terrible despair.
‘Stock’ by Peter Kennard (1994) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery
Opposite these a sort of alcove has been filled with 25 poster-sized blow-ups pf his images to create a little forest of placards, each attached to a wooden post themselves secured in red vices. This is his newest work, created specially for this exhibition, is titled ‘People’s University of the East End’, and there’s a story behind it.
It turns out that the three ‘galleries’ in which the show is held were once part of the former Whitechapel Library (1892 to 2005). At the turn of the twentieth century this was a free resource to the poor inhabitants of the area who would have read books, magazines and newspapers here. Back then it was nicknamed the ‘People’s University of the East End’, hence the title of this installation which, as the curators put it, ‘reflects on the capacity for learning, community and activism in public spaces.’
The exhibition, we learn, was conceived to echo and reflect on this idea of a library, a place where ideas are made available, promoted and circulate. Hence the inclusion of the word Archive in the title of the show, for it brings together not just the images themselves, but includes actual copies of the original newspapers and magazines and posters, as well as the more recent books, in which his images were first published and continue to circulate.
Installation view of ‘People’s University of the East End’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
This little copse of placards is quite a neat idea, and contains up-to-date works such as the barbed-wire tree from the civil war in Syria (centre right) and the image of Julian Assange intercut with the American and British flags at the bottom right, but it didn’t pull my daisy, I’m not sure why. In the same way, the notion of the Archive certainly explains the bringing together of all these formats – posters, newspapers, and the vitrine showing his bric-a-brac – but doesn’t really come off, as an idea.
The best bit, I thought, were the shiny red vices supporting the posts, like a little army of red crabs. ‘Red vices’, hmm, that could have been a witty alternative title for the exhibition and the right-on causes Kennard has spent a lifetime supporting…
Anyway, themes from these first two spaces are picked up in the third, biggest and best room of the show.
Room 3: the installations
The first wall of the third and final room displays no fewer than 40 of his classic photomontages, ranging from a piece commenting on British Army brutality in Northern Ireland in 1973 to the Free Julian Assange piece I mentioned above, made in 2023, via one of my favourites, the very funny Maggie Regina from 1983.
Maggie Regina by Peter Kennard (1983) in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
It’s an impressive selection from fifty years of mostly stark and upsetting imagery designed to provoke the viewer into thinking again about the forces of violence and exploitation which underlie our shiny Western world.
But the big thing here is the installations which I think are brilliant. There are four of them and, remember the copies of the Financial Times with the gaunt arm tearing through it in the previous room? – they all rely on newspapers as their central material.
1. Reading Room
The simplest is ‘Reading Room’. Picking up on the Whitechapel Library motif, these are four old two-sided wooden lecterns, the kind that turn-of-the-century readers would have read their newspapers on. Each of them hosts an original edition of a newspaper or magazine where a Kennard work originally appeared. Most of the 8 newspapers in question were copies of the Guardian, the exceptions being two copies of The Workers Press and a vintage copy of the New Musical Express.
Installation view of ‘Reading Room, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
The classic black-and-white photomontages address these issues:
- 1973 scientists involved in torture (The Workers Press)
- 1974 British investment in apartheid South Africa (The Workers Press)
- 1981 nuclear weapons, a skeleton morphing into an atom bomb (New Musical Express)
- 1989 reunification of East and West Germany (Guardian)
- 1990 the Whites Only policy of South African apartheid (Guardian)
- 1990 profile of Walter Benjamin (Guardian)
- 1991 Gulf War, the attempt to stop Saddam Hussein (Guardian)
- 1991 a centrefold collection of photomontages (Guardian)
2. World Markets (1997 to 2024)
‘World Markets’ is a set of 16 broadsheet newspaper double-spreads, most if not all from Kennard’s favourite target, the Financial Times, on which he has projected faces intended, presumably, to represent The Poor and Exploited. The aim is to remind us that behind the wall of numbers which is the faster-then-ever, digitally automated stock market, are the lives of the poor and downtrodden who suffer from the ravages of global capitalism.
Installation view of ‘World Markets, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
Both these are straightforward in manner and material. The last two installations represent something completely new because they use electric lights and projections.
3. Double Exposure, 2023
‘Double Exposure’ covers a whole wall. It consists of three rows of 12 Financial Times pages with lights projecting images of war and conflict and poverty onto them. It was made in collaboration with Nigel Brown and is large and imposing. Part of the overall visual impact comes from the complicated spaghetti of electric cabling hanging from each projection and spooling along the floor.
Installation view of ‘Double Exposure’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
The dynamic nature of this installation i.e. the lights continually changing, is appealing. And the notion of this magic lantern show revealing the ‘truth’ behind the blank walls of stocks and shares prices on the FT pages is also sort of interesting.
Kennard’s dualistic worldview
‘Double Exposure’ really just brings out the fundamental concept which underlies all Kennard’s work which is that there are two levels of reality – the smooth, plausible, ‘common sense’ world we inhabit, defined and described and promoted in the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberal consumer capitalism, the world of perfect people smiling down at us from advertising hoardings in the streets, on the sides of buses, on the Tube, on TV on our social media, the world of newspapers and TV assuring us that our values and our way of life, our pensions and investments in mega-corporations, are the only rational, practical ways to run the world – and the other world, the Dark Side, where the huge profits which keep the corporations afloat which our pensions and savings are invested in, the world of ‘shiny happy people’ is sustained by the ruthless exploitation of the poor and powerless, of indigenous peoples around the world, of peasants and workers forced to sweat in terrible conditions in Indonesian sweatshops or be psychologically destroyed in China’s suicide factories, and where, above all, the West maintains its hegemonic control of the world’s economic and financial systems through the ruthless elimination of anyone who stands in its way via wars of conquest dressed up as ‘liberation’ or ‘freedom’ – as in the deep need to control the world’s oil supplies which underlay the West’s adventures in the Gulf War and then the Iraq War.
Kennard’s works represent this Two World Hypothesis, this duality, via works which are themselves dualistic or dichotomous, in which (in his classic works) images from two different value systems are made to crash into each other, the startlingness of the disjunction intended to wake us from our complacent slumber.
‘Thatcher Unmasked’ by Peter Kennard (1986) A/POLITICAL
You can see how this duality underlies all his work, from duality of ‘The Haywain with Cruise missiles’ (where the self-deceiving bourgeois dream of some Old Englande is punctured by the modern reality of England being a lunch pad for American nukes) through to the dual image of copies of the Financial Times which have been ripped by the gaunt arm of the global poor (‘Stocks’) or have projected onto them the faces of the global poor (‘World Markets’ and ‘Double Exposure’).
There are, of course, a number of problems with this approach and with the whole radical worldview which underlies it, of which three spring straight to mind.
1. What’s the alternative?
One is, What else do you suggest? Forty years ago I read Class War and Socialist Worker and the kind of publications Kennard’s works appeared in and fondly imagined that the (Western) world could be subjected to a socialist transformation, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and of all the regimes around the world which it supported took all the steam out of those (wildly impractical) hopes and into the vacuum rushed the two flavours of neoliberalism which have ruled the West ever since, the Hard Neoliberalism of the Conservatives and Republicans, of Reagan and Thatcher, or the Soft Neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which promised a fairer world and a middle way but still deregulated the financial sector leading to the 2008 crash and enthusiastically promoted the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, trashing Blair’s reputation forever.
Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps
Right up to the present day, activists on the Left are still trying to devise a new economic and social theory on which to base their policies, an ideological vacuum you can clearly see in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which is just the British wing of the general bemusement of left-of-centre parties across the West.
Which explains why the Left has so enthusiastically embraced identity politics – it’s an excuse, it’s a fig leaf, it covers for their lack of an economic theory. Certainly feminism and black rights and refugees and Palestine are worthy causes, but in all the Western nations the Left and progressives and activists have clustered round these causes because they don’t know what to do about the economy any more – should we nationalise all the utilities, should the government create an industrial strategy and support native industries?
The Right has won everywhere because it has a clear strategy – reduce the state, privatise everything, neuter trade unions, leave all economic decisions to the market, cut taxes on the rich – which it implements everywhere with total consistency, and has ideological allies in all the media owned by the rich who stand to directly benefit from these policies.
I take the pint that Kennard’s work is satirical commentary and like satire through the ages is under no obligation to propose its own alternative agenda, and yet at some point, during this review of 50 years of political engagement, surely every visitor is going to ask, ‘OK – you hate this universe of exploitation and warmongering – what’s your alternative?’
2. The post-Cold War multipolar world
The second objection to Kennard’s worldview is that it is too western and too parochial. If Reagan and Thatcher deserved mocking in the 1980s how much more so did the totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Communist China?
In this century 9/11 crystallised the threat from radical Islam, a completely new force which entered the world with the 1979 Iranian revolution but none of us were really aware of in the 1980s and 90s (except for those plucky mujahideen Sandy Gall was always reporting on for ITN) and despite the mounting rhythm of Islamic terror attacks.
The point is that the radical or Marxist critique of the West which Kennard’s works seem to embody – his relentless criticism of the British state and army, from Ulster to Basra, and British arms and weapons suppliers making fortunes from murder – has been trumped or eclipsed by forces which are demonstrably more evil and wicked – ISIS in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan – and the great arc of instability across North Africa, through the Middle East, Iran-Iraq, up into Syria, countries which were destabilised by the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the chaos, civil wars (Libya, Yemen, Syria) or renewed repression (Egypt) they left in their wake. And of course the horrific Hamas raid on Israel followed by the brutal war on Gaza, with the constant threat of a second front opening against Hizbollah in the Lebanon.
And if you throw in the very real threat to Eastern Europe presented by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and the ever-present anxiety about China’s threats to Taiwan, then get a world in which even the most radical Left are hard put to argue that it’s the West who are the biggest threat to peace or the most violent culture or the most repressive regimes.
It’s quite clear to everyone that, even if you want to excoriate Western arms companies and rapacious corporations who are, for example, continuing to supply arms for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, the overall values of the West need supporting against the very real enemies threatening it from all sides (including, of course, from within – Trump, Reform and the maniac right of the Conservative Party). As in France, the Left needs to present a united front against the Right which, as I mentioned above, succeeds time and time again because it knows what it wants, in a way the fractured Left all-too-often doesn’t.
In summary, mocking the American and British state, big corporations and warmongering leaders made a lot of sense in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and again in the light of the Bush-Blair Iraq War of 2003 – but now, in 2024, doesn’t feel like an adequate response to a far more complicated, and threatening, world. The iniquity of British arms manufacturers continuing to supply Israel or the Syrian government, profiting from conflict in Yemen or Sudan, remains deplorable.
Union Mask by Peter Kennard (2007) Courtesy the artist
3. How ‘radical’ can any contemporary artist be?
The third objection would be the familiar one levelled at all artists no matter how ‘radical’ or ‘subversive’, which is that their works, across all channels and media, fit smoothly inside the capitalist consumer culture they claim to critique, so smoothly as to have, in practice, zero effect.
The Whitechapel Gallery has a shop which, as always, devotes a section to merchandise from the exhibitions of the moment, in this case books and posters and postcards by Peter Kennard all available at very competitive prices. All artists are as tightly enmeshed in the system they wish to undermine as the richest stockbroker or wickedest arms dealer.
You know the old Leftie joke, ‘If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it’ – same here: Kennard, Banksy, any other political artist you care to mention, don’t change anything at all, so much as provide a kind of backdrop for certain kinds of lives, images certain kinds of student zealots and ageing activists identify with and enjoy looking at.
The richest man I know loves all kinds of art, including ‘radical’ stuff like Kennard, loved political photos in the Elton John photo exhibition, coos as Yoni Shinkobare CBE’s deconstruction of imperial statues and why shouldn’t he? None of them threaten him or his ample investments in the slightest. They’re lifestyle accessories, they’re one more set of consumer items to be flicked through while waiting for a plane or by the pool or in a pokey room in Whitechapel.
The man who made them, Kennard, has to believe in The Cause and is as fiercely committed to making works skewering the evil arms trade as he was 50 years ago, and his consistency and commitment is admirable. But strolling round this exhibition inevitably raises the question whether work like this changes anything at all, even in the minds of visitors who, half an hour later, are browsing in the shop or wedged onto a busy tube train.
4. Boardroom (2023)
The last of the installations in the third room is ‘Boardroom’ which dates from last year. I really liked these works because they use rough, industrial, derelict materials, the kind of thing which always lights my candle. On three big salvaged boards are suspended sheets of (as usual) newsprint. Onto these have been printed anonymous portraits of everyday people, The People, the masses. And onto these are projected the logos of oil and arms companies, of Shell and BP, BAE Systems and many others of the same ilk, the point being, of course, that it’s ordinary people, especially in developing countries, who pay the price for the rapacious exploitation of oil (in the Middle East or Nigeria) and the disgustingly indiscriminate use of weaponry (Syria, Ukraine, Gaza).
Installation view of ‘Boardroom’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
Arms and the artist
On reflection, maybe it’s his hatred of state violence which is Kennard’s most consistent subject, from the US bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnam, the British Army’s use of rubber bullets in Northern Ireland in the early 70s, the threat of nuclear apocalypse during the 1980s, the West’s use of devastating firepower against Iraq in 1991 and then again in 2003, and western arms companies continuing to profit from conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.
Maybe, rather than critiquing capitalism per se, it would be more accurate to say that Kennard has spent a lifetime excoriating the ruinous products of Western arms companies and the bellicose leaders who support and encourage the militaristic worldview.
‘Sub-Trump’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York
As an intellectual position, this hatred of companies who profit from selling instruments of death and destruction is more viable than thoughts about overthrowing the entire capitalist system. Who doesn’t agree that we should be feeding starving children rather than building nukes and subs and drones? Except that we live in a world with a Russia in it, where even if Vladimir Putin miraculously dies of a heart attack, chances are he would only be replaced by an even more aggressive Russian nationalist – and a world which also has an increasingly nationalist China in it – not to mention a belligerent Iran which was the main beneficiary of the foolish war in Iraq.
With the result that we live in a world where the defence ministers of every country in NATO are calling for more to be spent on defence budgets in readiness for a war with Russia. Is that wrong? Is Kennard saying European nations should be winding down their defence budgets and sending a signal of passivity to Putin?
You look at Kennard’s powerful images and installations, you are touched by the images of starving children and with one part of your mind you strongly sympathise with criticism of arms companies (and the entire ‘system’) which profits from making and selling weapons of death… and yet… another part of your mind wonders – ‘OK, I get it, arms companies are immoral and wicked… but what would your policy be towards Ukraine and Russia? What would you be advising NATO leaders? Do you think this is the moment to reduce our military capability even further?’
The moral outrage of the works excoriating the killing of the innocent and profiteering from death… clash with a realistic assessment of the warlike world we live in… and so left me, literally, in two minds about all of these works.
New media
Putting their subject matter to one side for a moment, Kennard was keen to emphasise that these latter works – the ones using lights and projections, ‘Double Exposure’ and ‘Boardroom’ – are an interesting new strategy of his, an attempt to deconstruct the whole process of photomontage, the artistic practice which made his name.
I think I understand what he thinks he’s getting at but I’m not sure it’s really true. If you use a narrow definition of photomontage i.e. juxtaposing photographs from different sources on a flat surface to make a new photo image, then yes. But if you use the broader definition I attempted above, of juxtaposing objects from two different value systems (faces of people from the developing world with the sleek markets pages of the Financial Times) then this is fundamentally the same approach, the same way to get an effect.
Putting the idea of ‘deconstruction’ to one side, I still liked these works the best: 1) because I like the industrial paraphernalia of salvaged wood, clips and metal brackets and cabling which they involve, and 2) because they are fresh and new, in technique and aim, when set beside the yellowing montages from the 1970s and ’80s. I found them the most interesting as overall objects or sculptures in the same way that I liked the red vices (novel) more than the protest placards (familiar).
Summary
As you can tell, I’m conflicted. I really liked the photomontages because, in their deliberately scrappy mashed-up appearance, they actually display great visual taste. They’re like classic punk visuals and are almost all impactful and effective images, cousins of the political cartoons from the period, distant relations, maybe, of the savage satire of Gerald Scarfe. Despite being made out of other people’s material, their harsh juxtapositions have an immediately recognisable visual identity, much as you can instantly recognise a Banksy work of graffiti.
And I liked the four installations, and the efforts he’s been making with wood and placards and lights etc to broaden out his practice.
And yet I couldn’t help feeling that, at some level, it all comes from a bygone age. Even his response to the most recent events like the terrible civil war in Syria or the jokey photomontages featuring Donald Trump… they’re good but they signify a style and approach which comes from another era and doesn’t (as I’ve tried to explain) really reflect the complexity of our time, the troubled 2020s.
‘Syria’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York
Or am I being too harsh? Is this a man who has been impressively true to his radical beliefs through half a century of political turmoil and social change, an unflinching critic of corporate greed and political mendacity? As he himself puts it:
‘My art 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…’Archive of Dissent’ brings together fifty years of work that all attempt to express that anger by ripping through the mask by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask: the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying ‘no’ to corporate and state power. It rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies.’
Is it a good thing that he’s still making images which highlight the violent exploitation lying behind the sleek corporate reports, the environmental destruction which pays for BP bonuses, the murderous blowing up of innocent bodies which underlies the profits of the arms manufacturers named in ‘Boardroom’?
Or is it both at the same time? I was conflicted.
Recommendation
It’s not a big exhibition, it’s not a major exhibition. The first two rooms are small, the second one little more than an alcove. If you’re already a fan you should go in order to see the installations and new pieces, but if you’re not, I’d hesitate to recommend it. You don’t get a lot more of a visual hit than you do from surfing the images on his website.
On balance, I think the wall of images of poor people and babies’ faces projected onto copies of the FT which makes up ‘World Markets’ is worth seeing in the flesh, but as to the rest…well, I’ve given a detailed description of what you see, so you can make your own mind up.
The good old days: a copy of the New Musical Express from 1981 featuring a page-size photomontage by Kennard on the left and reviews of recent gigs by Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure on the right, on show at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)
Related links
- Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent continues at the Whitechapel Gallery until 19 January 2025
- Peter Kennard’s website
- Guardian review
Books & Boots 