The UK’s foremost political artist talks through half a century of his work, on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London
ven as he hangs work for a retrospective at one of his childhood haunts, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Peter Kennard seems beset by misgivings.is a celebration of 50 years of work by the UK’s foremost political artist, yet he admits to a “ sense of failure of making work like this”. He rallies despite himself, saying “but that is also the impetus to go on making it”.Kennard is responsible for some of the past half-century’s most potent images of protest, resistance and dissent.
He smiles as he recalls visiting Hamleys’ “toy missile department” to buy the plastic prop that he later smashed and impaled on a cardboard CND logo for Broken Missile. “It’s very crude, you know, which I actually quite like because I think that encourages people to make their own.” “It just felt like it wasn’t a decision, it just felt like quite natural to start making work that way. When I found out about Hannah Höch and the dadaists and then, of course, John Heartfield, I saw the sort of power of what you could do with montage and collage.”For Kennard, the promise of photomontage was that it could surpass a world of surface appearances to suggest deeper meanings.
“We’re bombarded by verbal opinions all the time. We need images to get through to people, I think, especially through to young people who aren’t going to sit down and read Chomsky or whatever. But they might see an image and then think about it.” Recalling his Crushed Missile montage, he adds: “It was exciting to know that I’ve done something that then can go out. And especially like that one. People have done versions of it in papier-mache. So it’s got through. One of the things with montage is to do something simple enough that people can get quickly because in the street it’s a shock to see a poster that’s not selling you some garbage you don’t need, but is actually saying, stop nuclear weapons or climate disaster.
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