The Brooklyn Rail

The last in a lineage of artists that stretches from Bertolt Brecht and John Heartfield to the French Situationists, Peter Kennard (b. 1949) has spent his fifty-year career exposing the workings of power and the pervasive action of capital by means of estrangement and détournement. His photomontages have come to symbolize some of the most important social movements and struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the fight against apartheid, disseminated as they were in so many pamphlets, posters, T-shirts, and placards shown at protests and marches.

However, what at first sight might seem to be a simple outpouring of political outrage—the most direct cri de coeur against the horrors and injustices of the twentieth century—was in fact the expression of a coherent aesthetics within which maximum visual impact and the jarring juxtaposition of disturbing imagery were part and parcel of getting a political message across.

In the afterword to his 1990 book Images for the End of the Century, Kennard notes that our contemporary world is premised on a series of “terrible equations”: untenable trade-offs whose only justification is the continuing existence of capitalist accumulation and corporate greed. On the one hand are obscene military expenditures and an endless arms race, on the other harrowing images of starving children and the other consequences of famine, war, and climate change. The two things are obviously connected (if only because the billions deployed to fund the former could be used to assuage the latter). However, straight photography, or any other medium that deploys a rhetoric of objectivity to “reflect” reality, will struggle to draw the connection explicitly. Photomontage, by contrast, uses reality as an archive that can be cut, torn, and juxtaposed at will—as, say, when a tank turns into a tractor “like a socialized transformer toy”—and so is able to illustrate these “terrible equations” and “rip apart the smooth, apparently seamless surface of official deceit to expose the conflict underneath.”

Archive of Dissent, Kennard’s retrospective now on view at Whitechapel Gallery, is at once an overview of the artist’s career, a sneak peek into his process, and an homage to the tradition of activism and dissidence his work was born out of.

The first room takes up the space which once was the Whitechapel Library—an East End institution that between 1892 and 2005 provided “sanctuary from poverty” as well as “a place to develop dissident ideas about art, philosophy, literature and politics,” as the artist’s statement tells us. The installations on view then pay tribute to this history by tapping into its ethos of democratic forum and learning community.

On the left, the viewer can leaf through a series of movable display cases showcasing dozens of Kennard’s works. Some of these are iconic, such as Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980), in which the quiet idyll of Constable’s original landscape is brutally interrupted by the alien presence of nukes, or Margaret Thatcher (‘Maggie Regina (1983), in which the face of Margaret Thatcher is superimposed on an official photograph of Queen Victoria. Others are slightly less well known, but no less impactful. I personally was struck by a couple which illustrate the “tanks into tractors” motif, giving life and thrust to what otherwise might sound like an empty cliché. Nearby, the viewer can help themselves to piles of the same prints stacked up neatly as newspapers or leaf through some of the artist’s publications.

The history of Whitechapel Library is also touched on by People’s University of the East End (2024), an installation just off to the right which references the nickname the library was given by East Enders back in the day. Here, Kennard’s photomontages are reproduced in the form of placards mounted on posts. However, the viewer’s eye is more emphatically caught by Worktop (1966–2024), a reproduction of the artist’s table, full of cut-outs, stencils, stained work utensils such as rulers or measuring tapes, and Kennard’s ever-present gas mask, a motif that appears throughout his work.

The same mix of old and new continues in the exhibition’s main room. The center of the gallery is occupied by lecterns showing vintage editions of the Guardian and New Statesman in which Kennard’s photomontages illustrate articles about apartheid in South Africa and the Gulf War, as well as a reappraisal of Walter Benjamin’s legacy by literary critic James Wood. Just opposite, right by the entrance, a whole wall welcomes a series of “originals” which still bear the marks of Kennard’s cutting and gluing. For their uniqueness, these works bear a trace of what Benjamin called “aura” even if their real artistic and political import resides in their mechanical reproduction. The other walls showcase more recent installations belonging to different series, but all made according to the same “algorithm.” (Financial Times pages reporting the stock performances of major arms dealers are superimposed with images of various kinds which lay bare the brutal reality suppressed by antiseptic listings of numbers and dividends.)

Motifs and images repeat across rooms and installations, but easy equivalence and obsessive repetition are precisely the point. Kennard’s photomontages belonged to an era dominated by a fairly monolithic mass media and official ideology—in a way, the target was clear. But what happens when ideological messaging gets more diffused and politics itself becomes a meme, transforming into a “montage of attractions” without much rhyme or reason, a desensitizing twenty-four-hour livestream juxtaposing horror and idiocy? (A trip to Elon Musk’s or Donald Trump’s Twitter [now X] accounts, or any engagement with the legion of bots and trolls operating in their name, is a good illustration of this new brand of “fascist Dadaism.”) How can political art cut through such noise? By casting a retrospective glance at an age that, although bygone, was plagued by indignities resembling our own all too closely, Archive of Dissent leaves the viewer pining for an art able to hit as hard as Kennard’s pastiches of outrage and mischief.