War is an infernal engine of art. In the 20th century, it caused artists to lose all faith in form, beauty – those old civilised lies that sent young men to die. In 1916 in Zurich, as a generation went to its slaughter, the Cabaret Voltaire was founded and Dada began – a furious attack on meaning and coherence. In Berlin at the end of the first world war, this movement gave rise to shocking cut-up images of faces, bodies and society blown into fragments. The collages of George Grosz, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield are the counterblast to all the patriotic posters of the great war – and to 21st-century attempts to sentimentalise its memory.
Peter Kennard is a living hero of pacifist photomontage. Not only has Kennard been denouncing war for more than four decades, but he does it using a style of photomontage directly descended from Höch’s Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany and Heartfield’s Adolf, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Crap.
The Imperial War Museum, in London, has done a brave thing in putting on an exhibition of pacifist art just as we mark another reverent anniversary of the 20th-century wars this museum so vividly documents. Kennard has been protesting since the era of the Vietnam war, and he’s still at it. His Photoshopped image of Tony Blair taking an Iraq war selfie – created in collaboration with Cat Phillipps – is not in this exhibition, but his poster for Stop the War is. It is a gas-masked globe with a mouth full of missiles – a jagged, violent photomontage typical of Kennard’s direct and dirty political cut-ups.
In the 1980s, every radical student – including me – owned a postcard of Kennard’s Greenham Common artwork that wittily restages John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain. In Kennard’s version of this supreme image of British rural calm, the wain crossing the gentle mill stream is loaded with cruise missiles. (John Heartfield would have loved that one, just as he would have admired Kennard’s skeleton with a mushroom cloud for a head.)
In the 80s, Kennard’s photomontages were regularly published in the Guardian. It seems unlikely such politicised, anti-realist images could be used in the same way now, because Photoshop has caused new anxieties about truth in photography. Photoshopped montages look too real – they would pollute news pages with visual fiction. The beauty of traditional scissors-and-glue photomontage as practised by Kennard is precisely that it does not look real – it looks like art. This Brechtian quality of alienation makes it immediately recognisable as a satirical comment or dark fantasy, rather than reportage. This richly subjective quality makes him a fascinating and important artist.
Kennard may not have stopped any wars, but he brings a blast of protest to the Imperial War Museum, where real weapons loom in the main hall like a grotesque montage of the nightmares of modern times. In the age of war, the artist has a duty to show the truth behind the bright shining lie. Kennard has done Dada proud.
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