Mike Wayne reviews what he calls a must see exhibition from a standout political artist  

The Peter Kennard exhibition, Archive of Dissent, runs until January 19^th at the Whitechapel Gallery. If you have yet to visit it, you really should try. The gallery is a former library colloquially known as the ‘The People’s University of the East End’ and so it is entirely fitting, if a reminder of a lost age, that the exhibition is free. Kennard is an artist working with photographs in the tradition of photomontage and he is Britain’s longest running and most outstanding practitioner of a revolutionary tradition that can be traced back to the political modernism that exploded across Europe after the 1917 Russian revolution. Like many artists of the 20th century, Kennard trained in a pre-industrial art, in his case, painting, before moving into film or photography in order to reach mass audiences with a medium more saturated in the dynamics of modern forces and social relations.  

As a ‘productive force’ the photograph is the outcome of a camera technology able to capture the light impressions of real material objects that stockpile the collective imagination as signs of our own material, active life and history. But the very immediacy of the photographic image which is part of its power and impact is also a problem in the context of culture industries that use gargantuan volumes of images to sell, to seduce, to propagandise and to normalise. As a relation of production then the photographic image is always a politics of choices, unconscious and conscious, individual and institutional.  

To keep his individual agency intact Kennard has always worked outside of the culture industries but not captured in the alternative spaces of the art world and the gallery, controlled by the likes of millionaire impresarios such as Charles Saatchi, one half of the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency indelibly associated with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party election campaigns in the 1980s. Their most famous poster was the one from the 1979 election that showed a queue of people snaking out from the unemployment office, captioned: ‘Labour isn’t working, Britain’s better off with the Tories’. I’ve always thought the perfect riposte to that poster ought to have been the same one captioned: ‘Capitalism isn’t working, we’re better off with socialism’. Unfortunately, such messages do not routinely circulate in what Guy Debord dubbed the ‘society of the spectacle’, capitalism in an advanced stage of image overload.  

Iconic images  

Kennard’s images then have entered the bloodstream of this cultural system from the outside, a disruptive, dissenting and angry force expanding the visual literacy of the left, in its papers, books, and posters, working for campaigns against imperialism (from Northern Ireland to Palestine) nuclear armaments, as well as domestic politics (Thatcher was a particularly detested figure naturally).  His images have become iconic and from the earliest to the latest work, they retain a cognitive and emotional power. Their principle of construction is that of montage, the same principle that Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov used to revolutionise the still young medium of film and which fascinated the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin and his German friend Bertolt Brecht.  

John Heartfield, the anglicised name of the German born Helmut Herzfeld, was the pioneer of this tradition in still photography in the 1920s and 30s. The principle in still photography brings disparate images together into a single optic in order to utilise the immediacy of the still image as a connector to our object world, while breaking out of the singular image’s limited capacity to speak to the political nature of social relationships.  

The political nature of photomontage, as practiced by Heartfield and Kennard, should not cancel our appreciation of the artistic precision and endeavour that goes into the making of these images. They are highly skilled and labour-intensive productions, something underscored at the exhibition by a display of the materials and tools Kennard uses to produce his work. Kennard draws on different genres of visual images to work with, reportage, consumer images, paintings. He uses the artist’s skills in visual grammar to brilliant effect. 

The circular form of pictures of planet earth is used in a variety of montages, wrapped in a gas mask or merged with factories belching out pollutants to protest, respectively, against nuclear war and environmental destruction. Montage plays with impossible juxtapositions of scale (a hand crushing a cruise missile). It typically, although not always, crushes perspective into a flat two-dimensional plane where often some act of violence plays over a victim. Rubber Bullet features a solder loading a large gun with a rubber bullet on the left side of the image juxtaposed with the image of an open-mouthed man partly scratched out against a black background on the right.  

Montage plays with visualisations of figures of speech such as the montage  The Gambling where elites play cards with missiles as the stakes. In this image, Kennard brilliantly uses a sense of three-dimensional depth in a play of light and dark to convey the sinister recklessness of the tuxedo and bow-tie wearing ruling class. Kennard also uses montage to depict transformations in objects from one thing to another (missiles dropped from a bomber turn into food sacks), a transformation that reveals both alternative possibilities as well as the priorities of the world we are currently stuck with. 

Kennard’s work is displayed in the many different forms it has been distributed in, as books, posters and newspapers, but also utilising the art gallery space, which Kennard does not reject. Here he extends the concept of montage as a form of what Walter Benjamin called ‘illuminations’, like lightning strikes in which a whole repressed landscape of disguised violence and corporate power suddenly flashes up. 

Displays rigged to dozens of light bulbs that click on and off behind the images reveal what the mainstream media conceal. Elsewhere, etched in charcoal, the anguished faces of the typically invisible victims of capitalism are drawn on the pages of the financial press. This is an archive of left history over the last 50 years, the battles fought, the battles lost, the causes vindicated in time. A must see archive from Britain’s stand-out political artist.  

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX. It runs until 19 Jan 2025. Free