Writer, critic and renowned 20th century intellectual Susan Sontag said: “The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.” For many artists working today, and throughout history, their work has been a way of showing solidarity with their communities and foreground social and political issues. Peter Kennard (b.1949) has been creating images that seek to speak truth to power, and encourage viewers to think critically about world events, for more than 50 years. From the Vietnam war and invasion of Iraq to current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, Kennard has addressed many of the defining events of recent British history. Much of his work has been given to charities, campaign groups and NGOs like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Amnesty and Stop the War, demonstrating his unflinching belief that art, when used correctly, has the power to drive forward change. Now, Whitechapel Gallery presents one of the most extensive displays of his work, specially conceived for the space. Archive of Dissent brings together pieces from across the Kennard’s prolific and influential five-decade career, offering a repository of social history while illuminating a practice that has countered and protested the status quo. We spoke to Peter about his career, how our current world is shaping the next generation of artists and how he views the role of art in activism.
A: You turned to photomontage from painting to better reflect your opinions on the Vietnam War – what is it about photomontage as a medium that is so effective at communicating political and social ideas?
PK: Painting is very much gallery based, and after attending my first political demonstrations, I needed to find a medium that was reproducible and could reach beyond the art audience. That’s when I started using photography. At that time there were a lot of different outlets in terms of left-wing publications and underground magazines, so there was a whole nexus of people that I could share my work with. Sometimes it was commissioned work, sometimes I just made something and took it along to these places, the way that I operated was quite informal. When I started working with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I had to push for using tougher images than perhaps they were used to and photomontage was a way use those more challenging images in things like posters and campaigns. I’ve never believed that tough images put people off, it’s what people want to see. They want to see what’s going on in the world in a way that opens up a reality different from the one that we get in the mainstream press.
A: You’ve been creating these works for fifty years now, and in that time, we’ve seen the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and now the invasion of Ukraine and war in Gaza. Has the way that people respond to your work changed over this time?
PK: In terms of the the work I’ve produced recently, I’ve had a stronger response than I have probably had in years. I think people want to see a physical representation of what they’re feeling. We’re all feeling very complex emotions, we can go on the Internet and see children being killed in Gaza, and we can see hundreds of people being attacked in Ukraine, so people are aware that these things are going on and it’s affecting everybody. Viewers seem to respond to political work like mine because it’s a piece of art that expresses what they’re feeling. I think the desire for this is stronger than it’s been for a long time.
A: Whether you’re commenting on climate change or Gaza, the pervading sense in your work is outrage – is this the main feeling that drives your process?
PK: I think it is about outrage and anger at the fact that we’re dominated by politicians that don’t have any idea about people’s lives and are totally arrogant and self-seeking in their leadership, and that’s become more and more apparent in recent years. The awareness of this is making people look for other ways to behave. One of the things about art – and I feel that there are more people creating art today than ever before – is that people need to express something that goes against the grain. Art can do that. I have always felt that if art is tied in with groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or Amnesty, it has more impact. I often make an image and then give it to an NGO so that they can use it and sell it, they’re completely self-funded so this means that I’m supporting them and there’s a circularity to it.
In the art world, we hear about the big major galleries and blue-chip artists, but most artists are struggling to pay for their studios and be able to make work. I think the times that we are in mean that artists are becoming more collective again, as we were many years ago, because we know that we’re all in the same boat. State money is being cut like mad to the arts, from primary schools right through to colleges, so there’s more discussion and debate about art’s place in society because of that.
I’ve always tried to make work that speaks to the masses, you don’t need an arts degree to understand it. It’s more important now than ever to create art that can reach a wide audience. It’s really easy online to talk into a ‘bubble’ and only engage with a select few from your community, which is why it’s vital we create work that can communicate directly. It’s the same as having posters placed on the street to advocate for a cause or demonstration, rather than sharing it online where it’ll only get to the ‘bubble’, seeing it person can make people stop and think. Art has to become part of the social fabric again.
A: You’ve collaborated with journalists and writers like John Pilger throughout your career – and your work and the work of journalists have a lot of crossover in terms of a desire to speak truth to power and bring national attention to important topics. How did these collaborations come about and why was this important to have in your art?
PK: Collaboration is very much at the heart of my work. It’s a way of arguing out concepts, especially because I make political art, and I get ideas from writers and writers will sometimes get ideas from the images. I’ve often worked with journalists and other sorts of creatives, like the poet Peter Reading, and that collaboration has always been really important. In the last few years, I’ve worked with an artist called Cat Phillips and we made work about the invasion of Iraq, so I try and cooperate with others as much as possible. People often try and portray art as a solitary thing, and it’s not the case. The Whitechapel Gallery show is a collaborative effort, the curator and technical staff have been a huge influence on the final exhibition. I tend to want to pile everything I’ve ever made into a show, so working with others means we can refine it into something that will have the most impact. On every level, it’s a collaboration and that’s important to emphasise. I’m not an artist who likes to create a personal image of sitting solitarily in a studio waiting for divine inspiration, work comes about communally, through discussion and debate.
A: You taught at the Royal College of Art for many years. Have you found that this sense of wanting to tap into social issue pervasive in the people you teach?
PK: I’ve just retired after 35 years of teaching. If we go back to the 1990s, we had groups like the the Young British Artists and people tended to think that they had to leave college and go on to get big shows immediately. Now, I think people are a lot more realistic about how they’re going to go on and make more work. They look at operating collectively to get a studio together to be able to keep making work. Students are much more concerned with how to represent their personal feelings towards these existential issues like climate change. It’s very tough in a lot of cases and I was lucky that I received grants and support when I was young. My generation has left the current generation with a very difficult path in terms of supporting themselves. I’ve tried to use this privilege to make art about what’s going on in the world. I’ve done a lot of workshops and it’s amazing that when people start cutting up images from old magazines and newspapers. Say they take an old car advert and put it next to an image from their own life, they’re creating a narrative and it has an effect in terms of them thinking socially because they’re involved in making something out of things they’re just usually passively looking at.
A: Could you talk me through how you create a work – from when an event sparks an idea to the finished product?
PK: In my work, making it is half of the business, the other half is getting it out into the world. It’s not like if you do a painting and showing it is not the vital thing, the most important thing is the creation. I’ve made a lot of stuff about Ukraine and I did a set of prints that raised funds for the Red Cross there. That doesn’t happen if it’s not put out into the world, getting it to people means that it becomes socially useful. My work on Gaza has been used by ‘Stop The War’ as a poster to organize demonstrations, so the creation process is never really over, it continues in a new form once it’s being used in these spaces.
A: Who inspires your work? Is it other artists? Activists? Journalists?
PK: It’s a mixture. It goes back to artists like Hannah Höch and in a different way, very importantly, Käthe Kollwitz. This whole period of German artists who were fighting fascism through their work, and writers of the time like Walter Benjamin, are really important to me. In the present, I worked with Harold Pinter who is a very political voice, as well as John Pilger. There’s also so much being produced now that I really respond to. There are a lot of black artists who have made exceptional work but it’s never been shown, and the good thing about the art world today is that the representation of women and black artists is not just token, it’s deeper than that. There are artists like John Akomfrah, whose work was shown at Venice Biennale this year, who I think is just incredible. I know some of these artists and there’s a sense of having fought to make political work about things like colonialism and it’s taken a long time to push through the art world and get it out there. That’s being fought off now, because of what’s going on in the world with things like the MeToo movement, so art will hopefully continue to move in that direction.
A: The show is staged in the Old Whitechapel Library, where locals came for warmth, newspapers and books. How did this inform the process of putting the exhibition together?
PK: It was a huge influence on how we created the show. I knew it when it was a library, and Whitechapel was one of the very first galleries I ever went to. I investigated the history of the building and it’s amazing, a whole generation of Jewish writers and radicals used it, and then it was used by the Bangladeshi community. Different people have used that library as a space to learn about what’s going on in the world. Most of these people were living in poverty, so they could stay warm all day there. Just after we’d put the show on, I met a woman who worked there for ten years and she said it was an incredible part of the local community. I really wanted to make it a part of the exhibition, so I’ve tried to incorporate newspapers as much as I can. I display them on pedestals and I’ve got a lot of work that’s about newspapers that’s included. I also displayed all the papers and materials and scalpels that I use, which is about the making of ideas. I made a free newspaper which has ten big prints of images in it that is being given away to visitors. Other images I’ve printed onto placards and I’ve called that series The People’s University of the East End, which is what the building was known as. In that sense, it’s very much a space which shows an image multiple times, in a book, on a newspaper, on a placard, so that people can see the process and understand how these works become involved in political movements.
A: We’re living through a time of division and emergency. What would you want people to take away from this exhibition?
PK: I want people to be thinking about the world as a place that you can be active. There are ways to do that and art is a way of showing how you can represent what’s going on in the world beyond conventional media. You can use materials in different ways. I’d hope that people are thinking about the world in a different way because of the imagery. The feeling of solidarity is also important. If people are thinking about war in Ukraine, for example, and then they see work about it, it strengthens their feelings. I’ve had a lot of moving responses from Ukrainians about the work, to see what they experience represented is important. I hear a lot of talk about works converting people to ideas, it’s not about converting people, it’s a matter of supporting people and encouraging them to be active.
A: You’ve created some iconic images that encapsulate a moment in time in British culture and politics, if you could only choose one image to show people from your career, what would it be?
PK: To go back a long way, the peace symbol with the broken missile is an important one for me. The sign was created by Gerald Holtom in the 1950s, and it needed to be turned into an active image by CND. The broken missile has been used on badges, posters, murals, all sorts really. It’s simple enough that people can take it up and make their own versions of. It’s great to have been able to do that, and it’s an image of solidarity in that sense. More recently, I’ve created an image which is the Palestinian flag, but the red triangle is bleeding. I’d been making a lot of work on Palestine and putting it online but nothing was really sticking, but then this image took off. The process of creating these works is a lot about having materials in front of you and moving it around, seeing what works. And that seemed to express something important about the topic very simply.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at Whitechapel Gallery until 19 January: whitechapelgallery.org
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
Peter Kennard, Protest and Survive, 1980. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, ink and watercolour on card370 x 265 mm Tate: Purchased from the artist 2007.
Peter Kennard, Thatcher Unmasked 1986. Photomontage–Gelatin silver prints with ink on card A/POLITICAL.
Peter Kennard, The Gamble 1986. Photomontage, gelatin silver prints and ink on card83 x 53 x 5.8 cm A/POLITICAL.
Peter Kennard, Union Mask 2007. Screen print in colours with varnish on300gsm Somerset Satin white paper83 × 66.5 cm Courtesy the artist.
Peter Kennard, Syria 2018. Photomontage–Pigment print, graphite, pastel and gouache on card55 × 39.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York.
