We appear to be living through a golden age of political protest in art. OK, perhaps “golden age” is pushing it. But it’s definitely a fine time for artistic moaning.
Pretty much every day on what was Twitter and now is X, the energetic agitator Cold War Steve (the pen name of Christopher Spencer) is laying into Farage, Trump, Putin and God’s newest gift to political satire JD Vance with relentless pictorial comedy. The graffiti artist Banksy found a new way to annoy the captain of the village bowls team by launching a boatload of inflatable refugees across the sea of spectators at Glastonbury. And now the Whitechapel Art Gallery has given a retrospective to Peter Kennard — the king of doomy photomontage.
Some will find it annoying that these creative subversives keep popping into their eyeline to opine on matters outside their artistic lane. But not me. Artistic protest is a sign of healthy national aesthetics, and has been since the days of Hogarth and Goya. Give me an artist taking pops at the establishment any day rather than cowardly narcissists spraying pictures in museums or fouling historic monuments. Use art, don’t abuse it.
I was walking round Notre-Dame last week, not the famous cathedral in Paris but the less famous gothic masterpiece in Dijon, when I came face to face with the leftovers of the iconoclasm of a previous era, above the entrance porch to the church. Once, there was a classic Last Judgment there, weighty and emotional, a gothic assessment of human worth, with good people, bad people, saints, angels and Jesus. After the French revolutionaries had finished attacking it in 1794 all that remained was a sea of broken stones with jagged edges. Everything recognisable had been hammered off.
So I remembered the oil protesters dousing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with tomato soup and smearing Stonehenge with orange slop. I remembered the Taliban in Afghanistan blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas. I remembered Mary Richardson, the suffragette with a meat cleaver who attacked Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and went on to head the women’s section of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. What is it about art that triggers the destructive instincts of iconoclastic vigilantes?
The question stayed on repeat as I made my way round the grumpy and brooding Kennard display at the Whitechapel where it constitutes some sort of reverse summer treat. Why dream of sunshine and piña coladas when you can be reminded at every step of man’s inhumanity to man, the horrors of war, the greed of big business, the despoliation of the land by the energy giants? They are all classic Kennard subjects. And every time he airs them he emphasises what a powerful weapon art can be when you seek to employ it rather than destroy it.
Born in 1949, Kennard has plenty to remember. His chief weapon, photomontage, was invented early in the 20th century when photography and printed images became widely available. By clipping out pictures from magazines and newspapers, and rearranging them — the original cut-and-paste job — artists could send the familiar world in unfamiliar directions.
Photomontage was first employed by the dadaists during the First World War to point out the absurdity of global conflict and quickly became the preferred medium of the artistic complainer. In Germany it was taken up brilliantly by John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and George Grosz to bash the Nazis. In Bolshevik Russia it became the signature style of poster makers and propagandists. A good piece of photomontage arrows into you and makes its point instinctively; stirring optics delivering an explosive message.
Kennard’s most famous work, a rethink of Constable’s The Hay Wain in which the wooden cart is ferrying cruise missiles across the pond, was made in the 1980s as a response to American bases storing nuclear weapons in East Anglia — Constable country. At CND marches and the rousing Greenham Common protests of the Thatcher era, his punchy photomontages dominated the placards.
Why is photomontage so effective? I think it’s something to do with its relationship to the everyday. In a photomontage you are moving around the furniture rather than replacing it; tinkering with familiar realities rather than inventing new ones. If, like Kennard, you are old-fashioned enough to favour black-and-white imagery as your source, then your work also has a spectral quality to it; something ghostly and profound.
A gas mask with missiles emerging from its mouth; nuclear silos growing on a glowing Earth — the Earth as seen from the first moon landing; a giant hand brandishing a giant bomb; a skeleton taking off its Margaret Thatcher mask. Every picture in the Whitechapel show is intent on proving it is worth a thousand words, but the blackness and whiteness gives them a nostalgic air as well: a distant whiff of Michael Foot.
It’s an atmosphere you don’t get with Cold War Steve, whose daily attacks on Farage in Clacton or Trump golfing with Putin have something of the naughty seaside postcard about them. They lack the gravitas of Kennard’s dark art; the biblical air.
One of the points made by this doomy Whitechapel event, arranged as an archive spanning Kennard’s career, is that the artist has had to flit around to get his accusations aired. Once his work appeared in newspapers and on the covers of political magazines. Not any more. There’s a sense here of an age that has passed. Cold War Steve and the internet go together in ways that Peter Kennard and the internet never will.
Dammit. Even political nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, to January 19, 2025
