ART-PREVIEW:Peter Kennard-The Concept of History
Peter Kennard is a London-born and based photomontage artist and Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art. Seeking to reflect his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he turned from painting to photomontage to better address his political views. He is best known for the images he created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s–80s including a détournement of John Constable’s The Hay Wain called “Haywain with Cruise Missiles”. Because many of the left-wing organisations and publications he used to work with have disappeared, Kennard has turned to using exhibitions, books and the internet for his work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Richard Saltoun Gallery Archive
Hannah Arendt was a humanist thinker who thought boldly and provocatively about our shared political and ethical world. Inspired by philosophy, she warned against the political dangers of philosophy to abstract and obfuscate the plurality and reality of our shared world. She fiercely defended the importance of the public sphere, but she was also intensely private and defended the importance of privacy and solitude as prerequisites for a life in public. Embraced by liberals and conservatives, she also enraged and engaged interlocutors from all political persuasions. Peter Kennard’s solo exhibition “The Concept of History” is the second of Richard Saltoun Gallery’s year-long programme “On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for Exhibition” looks to one of the most important thinkers of the post-war generation to confront some of the most pressing socio-political issues of our time. The exhibition highlights Kennard’s extraordinary contribution to politically-informed art over the past 50 years. “The Concept of History” demonstrates Kennard’s engagement with the course of history and key moments over the past five decades through three distinct bodies of work: his little-known “STOP” paintings from the 1960-70s informed by events such as the Paris student riots, The Prague Spring and Vietnam War protests; his series of Pallets from the 1990s, with traces of human images and figures barely visible on battered wooden pallets; and a new series of works on paper “Untitled” (2020). “The Concept of History” draws on the second essay in Arendt’s 1968 publication “Between Past and Future” around which all exhibitions in the programme are based.
Since the late 1960s, Peter Kennard has made powerfully political work that is a visual manifestation of resistance against economic inequality, war, climate change and injustices, both local and global. Initially trained as a painter and fuelled by his activism against the Vietnam War, Kennard turned to photomontage in the 1970s and the legacy of John Heartfield to deconstruct the imagery and language of the mass media in order to break-up the monopoly they persistently hold on ‘truth’. Internationally renowned for the photomontages he constructed in support of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) across the ’70s and ’80s, Kennard has produced iconic images for left publications and social protests that are firmly lodged in the collective consciousness and still potent and as powerful today. A prime example is his détournement of John Constable’s The Hay Wain, which he reworked as Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980), in support of the women who were occupying Greenham Common. Embracing a fierce materiality, Kennard often incorporates materials into his work, partly as a response to the dominance of screen-based imagery in our lives and then also the smooth image world produced by advertising. His work asserts those messages and meanings barred from official politics and the discourse of its actors and elites and is always positioned as a force for social change.
Photo: Peter Kennard, Mandela, 1990, Photomontage – Gelatin silver prints and wood on card, 43 x 55 cm, © Peter Kennard, Courtesy the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery
Info: Richard Saltoun Gallery, 41 Dover Street, London, Duration: 8/3-10/4/2021, Days & Hours: contact info@richardsaltoun.com for opening hours, www.richardsaltoun.com
