Now on show at Whitechapel Gallery, his work since the 1970s includes some of Britain’s most iconic images of resistance
~ Becky Haghpanah-Shirwan ~
Since the 1970s, Peter Kennard has produced some of Britain’s most iconic and influential images of resistance and dissent. These have spanned his support for the movements against the Vietnam War, Apartheid and nuclear weapons; the alter-global and anti-war campaigns in the 2000s; and his ongoing commitment to environmental activism and position on the present wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
His exhibition Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel Gallery, open until 19 January 2025, is repository of social and political history on its own. Showcasing five decades of his work, it also explores a way of making art that has continuously pushed against the status quo. In this interview, I talked to Peter about his uncompromising visual practise.
You started painting at an early age. Can you explain what drew you to art in the early days and then what galvanised you into producing art that was politically engaged?
I started painting when I was about thirteen. Coal was banned when smokeless fuel was introduced so the coal shed at the bottom of our flats was empty and I turned it into a studio. I painted on bits of wood, card, metal, anything I could find mainly from nearby bomb sites which were still there from the war. I painted and drew small mainly figurative work and rushed through influences, Bacon, Sutherland, Picasso, Kollwitz, Giacometti, Goya were all plundered for techniques, materials and subject matter. I left school at sixteen and got a scholarship to Byam Shaw School of Art, where I continued painting and in 1967 went on to the Slade School.
I became politically conscious through the anti-Vietnam War movement. A crucial event for me in terms of my work was what’s become known as the Battle of Grosvenor Square in March 1968, this big anti-war demo ended up in a violent confrontation with the police in front of the American Embassy. I’d never experienced the police including police horses seemingly on a rampage against demonstrators. I suddenly wanted to find a way to make work that could relate to the war, the protesters against war and to other struggles around the world, the Civil rights movement in the US, the Anti-Apartheid movement etc. That’s when I started using photography by ripping photographs from magazines and newspapers which I copied onto 5X4 negatives and then sandwiched the negatives to create composite images showing the wars, uprisings, protests, state violence, picket lines etc.
At the Slade the big thing at the time was colour-field painting so my degree show of work mainly showing violent protest and war was not appreciated by the powers that be and was placed in the basement next to the gents bog. Nor was my first street work much appreciated by the Slade. It was in 1970 consisting of large prints of one of the four students protesting the Vietnam War who were all shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. I fly posted big prints up around London with a group of fellow Slade students in solidarity with the US students. This image is the earliest placard in my new installation The People’s University of the East End on show at the Whitechapel gallery.
It is this authenticity, in process and spirit, that is central to your work, which presents a truth. How does the artist fight through the recent onslaught of deep fakes and fake news to maintain this and remain a witness?
I think art maintains its integrity if it comes from a passion deep inside the artist. Deep fakes, AI montages etc are more and more dangerous as they become more and more authentic. But don’t forget that a hundred years ago Stalin airbrushed Trotsky out of group photos of the Central Committee. The Stalin School of Falsification, as it’s become known, was a precursor of what’s happening now with AI. It’s always been possible for photos to be manipulated. It’s the basis of photomontage that photos can be joined up to get to the truth lurking behind the single image. But AI isn’t looking for a truth. You can cut a photo of the Pentagon and place it in a photo of a bomb crater in Gaza. AI can do that technically but the idea has to come from a human who is moved to create this as a symbol of the horrific reality pounding Gaza 24/24. In my own recent work ‘Boardroom’ I’ve tried to deconstruct the idea of photomontage by showing images of oil company logos or drones projected through glass onto human faces. This work is, in part, a response to our world of HD screens showing high-res images with everything smoothed out, and leaving us as passive consumers. In ‘Boardroom’ nothing is hidden, the means of image making is foregrounded to show the process which hopefully encourages critical thinking in the viewer.
In your new work, Double Exposure (2023) you integrated light via a Raspberry Pi computer to make your first dynamic work. Can you speak more about your move away from the ‘classic’ mode of photomontage in your later works? Evidently they are produced for a gallery setting instead of a media platform.
In my recent work in my Whitechapel exhibition, ‘Double Exposure’ and ‘Boardroom’ which were first supported in their making and shown at A/POLITICAL last year I’ve tried to make work that uses lights and three-dimensional structures to break down and expose the elements that were originally connected together in my photomontages. In ‘Double Exposure’ I’ve collaborated with the technologist Nigel Brown using Raspberry Pi computers to flash lights on and off behind the stocks and shares pages of the Financial Times. When a light flashes on the page of the FT it shows a montage of police violence, climate breakdown, war etc. It’s revealing what’s behind the serried ranks of numbers on the page, a conjunction of image and text that is never shown together in the press. It’s trying to create a form of photomontage in action, that connects obscene profit with its obscene result.
The other work ‘Boardroom’, mentioned previously, contains studding of different lengths screwed into salvaged wooden boards with images of oil company logos, drones, crosshairs etc. attached to glass so that they project onto faces that have no mouths. The structures are all exposed so that you see the image and its projection. It’s deconstructing montage so that nothing is hidden, all elements are up for grabs.
Both works are trying to go beyond the flat screen of computers that we all spend our days staring at to engage the viewer in a more physical way that changes perspective as you view it from different angles. In a sense both this work and ‘Double Exposure’ are attempts to make gallery-based work that can counteract our total reliance on the computer screen. They are both intentionally difficult to look at compared with the montages I’ve made in the past. By using crude metal supports that are not sleek and smooth I want people to engage with the work through its materiality and feel how the technology of war and the company logos of climate breakdown are projecting onto humanity.
I’ve always thought in the past that galleries would rather turn a blind eye to political art which is why I’ve always made work that I feel can stand up to the scrutiny of the gallery setting and then fight to get it shown. In my current exhibition ‘Archive of Dissent’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, which is a remarkable gallery with a radical past and now a radical present, I’ve noticed a much more engaged response to my work than before. This is due to the times we live in, where the lies and power structures of the so-called land of the free are so blatantly obvious that they are in our minds all the time. We see everyday videos of some of the thousands of children dead under the rubble of Gaza and we know of the weekly arms shipments from the USA to Israel with the compliance of our Labour Party.
Could you speak more about your personal politics? Your practice has spanned over 50 years and so you have seen governments come and go. Seeing that a large part of your artwork was produced as a critique of Conservative politics, do you find art-making more challenging when you’re not the opposition?
I am a committed internationalist, concerned with inhumanity, poverty, racism and war wherever it is, so the fact we now have the Labour Party in power does not make a jot of difference to my art practise, I believe they will continue the Neo-Liberal onslaught on the poor. the working class and the climate protesters that the Tories brought in. That almost feels guaranteed with Starmer leading a party that will not call for a ceasefire in Gaza. I will just continue to express my outrage by all means possible. I produced some anti – nuclear weapons posters for the Labour Party for a short time in the early 1980’s when almost by mistake they were calling for unilateral disarmament, it didn’t last. I only ever joined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. Suddenly there was a chink of light in the Labour wall of false promises. I left the party when he was shat on, both by the Labour Party and the establishment press, in the end being thrown out of the party.
Being so outspoken regarding the dire reality of UK politics, you have managed to achieve what many politically engaged artists have not been able to – a voice on the streets and also institutional recognition. How do you think your work has been able to transgress the more traditional nature of these cultural venues? Have you ever come under any pressure to conform to external pressures?
I’ve always been concerned about getting my work out through as many channels as possible, be it postcards, badges, t-shirts, books, posters, newspapers, museums, art galleries. We’re living in times of great emergency, climate catastrophe, Gaza, Ukraine, the poverty created by neo-liberalism and on and on… For me that calls for an art that can communicate both inside and outside the structures created especially for showing art. The official art world has only recently opened up to showing artists of colour and women artists but if you cross an unspoken line there can be trouble. I’ve had work censored in the past for being too direct and that’s a good reason to try and show in art galleries, it pushes the institutions into stating their position on subjects they’d rather brush under the carpet, so they don’t offend their sponsors.
As state money for the arts has been reduced or in some cases has dried up all together sponsorship has become key to survival for a number of arts institutions, but it always comes with strings attached in the sense that the artist’s work should not name names. I’ve only found a few institutions that would support the making of my work. In the 1980s it was the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone who supported the production of my posters against nuclear weapons and were then sent around the country. The Imperial War Museum supported new work for my Retrospective Unofficial War Artist in 1995.
More recently, it is A/POLITICAL which is the first organisation I can think of in Britain that is actually committed to supporting and collecting work that is dissident to the status quo and is overtly political without being propagandist. It’s a vitally important organisation because it’s the only arts-based organisation where radical political ideas are central to its thinking and where artists and thinkers are encouraged to pursue projects that would be considered dangerous to the status quo of other arts institutions.
Having the accolade of being the first Professor of Political Art in the country, lecturing at the Royal College of Arts from 1995, you have maintained and nurtured the younger generation of engaged artists for nearly three decades. How did you reconcile your life-long solidarity with the working class, with your teaching at a University that is prohibitive for many?
I’ve considered teaching to have been an important part of my practise as an artworker. Teaching art is a complex business especially as the art schools have been and are being under severe attack from the state. When I first began teaching the students didn’t have large fees to pay and also got small grants. It meant poorer students could come on courses and the social and class mix which resulted created a thriving experimental environment where the students could really let rip and go down alleyways of thought and making. Now it’s more difficult for students to work so freely as modular systems and marking projects have been imported onto art courses and the organic nature of making art is poured into a structure that is inherently against the free space that an art school should inhabit.
Art schools are not just about nurturing the next generation of artists (as we know so much of the best rock music has come from ex-art students) they are places where young people who don’t feel they quite fit into the 9-5 job machine can find an alternative way of being in the world. That’s why the Tories have cut off so much funding to art from primary schools up to universities they’re shit scared of what they see as the incipient anarchy of art and artists that are not under their iron fisted control.
Do you think this environment is still a useful and effective space for protest, and for artists who want to produce art that’s against the grain?
While maintaining a half time job at the RCA I’ve always gone around the country giving talks and tutorials at all sorts of colleges and art schools. I still find that working class students are getting loans and becoming art students, often having to work evenings and weekends to keep going. It’s tough, but they are determined to find a voice through creating something, be it painting, sculpture, performance, music, writing etcetera, anything and everything that is against the grain of our corporate landscape.
I show my work to students but never foist on them the idea that their own work should be explicitly political. I introduce them to histories of political and social art that are not fashionable so often are not part of the curriculum but I’m totally against wanting to get students to make a certain kind of art. It’s more about them finding what it is they feel passionately about and then going for it. No-one gives a fuck about artists making work or not making work, it’s totally about the compulsion to do it and finding a way to continue after college. I always get shocked when people refer to my ‘career’, I’ve never thought of it as a career, it’s more a compulsion and teaching students is enriching when they themselves find ways to express their own compulsion.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent. Whitechapel Gallery. Closes 19 January 2025.
