Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent and youthful montage adventures

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery is a retrospective of 50 years of radical image making. 

'attempt to express that outrage by ripping through the mask, by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery we are bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask' the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying no to corporate and state power'

His work was very much the most striking visual imagery of the radical left in Britain when I was first getting involved in politics as a teenager in the 1980s, including designing posters for some of the first big demonstrations I went on for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (such as the 1980 protest and survive demo)

If much of the exhibition content was familiar to me, seeing it in a new context made me look at it afresh. For instance some works were projected onto pages of the Financial Times.

'blast open the continuum of history] - illustration for Guardian article on Walter Benjamin, 1990

Radical Photomontage

I've no doubt that it was through discussion of Kennard's work in the left press at this period that I first came across John Heartfield who of course was a big influence on him.

The juxtaposition of images and newspaper clippings was also a feature of punk/post punk sleeve design, such as The Pop Group's 'How much longer do we tolerate mass murder?' (1980)

Possibly my first print political intervention at this time (1980) was sticking up crude photocopied montages around my school (Luton Sixth Form) - 'The Propaganda of Real Life' - with me and my friend Robert F. Not sure how many people read them, but it acted like putting a spell out in the world to find like minded people. Off the back of this somebody invited us to a meeting in Sundon Park where a group of us teenagers set up Luton Peace Campaign, soon to become the Luton branch of the reborn CND. 

I am sure many other people were similarly inspired by Kennard, Heartfield and the DIY possibilities of photomontage at this time. Hopefully the Whitechapel exhibition will inspire some even now to pick up scissors and glue.

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery, 23 July 2024- 19 January 2025 (admission free)

Thank God for Immigrants - Wham

Charity fundraising t-shirt from Jeremy Deller, featuring Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, of Greek Cypriot descent and Andrew Ridgeley,  son of Alberto Mario Zacharia (1933–2015), 'of Jewish, Italian, Yemeni and Egyptian descent... expelled from Egypt as a result of the Suez Crisis'. T-shirt available from  Jeremy Deller — fire-sale.store

 

Martin Simpson - Palaces of Gold, an old song for Grenfell

posters in Shoreditch, 2024

When I saw the great folk singer/guitarist Martin Simpson playing earlier in the summer (at the Goose is Out folk club, the Ivy House by Peckham Rye) he played a song which he said he had pledged to sing at every gig until there was justice for the Grenfell fire dead and their families. The song was  'Palaces of Gold', written by Leon Rosselson and which Simpson has been singing for many years. Rosselson originally wrote it in response to the Aberfan disaster of 1966 when a coal tip slid down to bury a school in Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Although about a specific tragedy there is, as Simpson recognised, a universal aspect to the song. Namely that some lives are deemed to matter more than others, and that disasters like Aberfan and Grenfell wouldn't be allowed to happen to the families of the rich:

'If the sons of company directors,

And judges’ private daughters,

Had to got to school in a slum school,

Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley,

Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry,

With a view onto slagheaps and stagnant pools,

Had to file through corridors grey with age,

And play in a crackpot concrete cage.

Buttons would be pressed,

Rules would be broken.

Strings would be pulled

And magic words spoken.

Invisible fingers would mould

Palaces of gold'.