Getting protest down to a fine art
Artist whose images attempt to make people think about nuclear disarmament exhibits in Yorkshire
IN AN era when commercial imagery is everywhere, the socalled protest artwork created by Peter Kennard is designed to cut through a noisy world and stimulate critical thinking.
Bold photo-montages depicting the politics that drive the modern way of life and society’s potential for selfdestruction may be unnerving, but that is the point.
Mr Kennard refuses to flinch from confronting his perceptions of an unstable world in order to evoke a response.
The 69-year-old, who lives in Hackney in London, is a professor of political art at the Royal College of Art.
He is one of Britain’s leading political artists and is internationally renowned for creating striking symbols that “define modern protest”, according to the host of his latest exhibition, Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust.
More than 100 of his original works, created over the past 50 years, are now on display at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery.
The exhibition marks the 60th anniversary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), a movement which began in 1958 as a reaction to the detonation of Britain’s first hydrogen bomb and the Government’s sanctioning of American nuclear weapons being housed on British soil.
Mr Kennard, previously a conventional painter, switched to photo-montage protest art in 1968 because he was horrified by the Vietnam War.
In the decades that followed, he created some of CND’s most potent images, such as The
Broken Missiles of 1980. It shows CND’s peace symbol breaking a missile in half to symbolise that, in his own words, “it is a protest by the people that can break the missiles of destruction”.
It is one of several of his celebrated works, including his 1981 reworking of Constable’s The Hay Wain, Haywain with Cruise
Missiles and Nuclear Clock (20052017), on display in Sheffield. Speaking to The Yorkshire
Post as his art went on show in Yorkshire for what he believes is the first time in 30 years, he said his old works are maybe even more relevant today.
“Horrifically enough, if not more so with the presence of a rogue (US) president and talk about the possibility of nuclear war with smaller bunker weapons. “So it’s even more important to get people to see protest art and to get them to think,” he said. Mr Kennard does not consider his work to be propaganda, but “critical images that cut through some of the commercial advertising we are surrounded by”. He said he also believes that people have become desensitised to images of war and suffering due to social media and 24-hour news.
He said such images “disappear” as soon as the next big story comes along.
“One of the things art can do is keep these images and issues alive in people’s minds. Public galleries are really important places now.”
Sheffield, he said, is a perfect place to display his art as it is a city “where protest against the horrors of war and dissent against inequality have been integral to its people”. ■ Art Against War: Peter Kennard and the CND Movement runs at Millennium Gallery until October 7.
It’s even more important to get people to see protest art. Acclaimed photomontage artist Peter Kennard.