Evans is a place on Earth: A Change Is Gonna Come:Peter Kennard @ the Whitechapel Gallery.

"My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society. Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate change catastrophe and on and on ... my aim is to unmask the connection" - Peter Kennard

"What I hate most about you is your textbook liberal agenda How we should legalise pot, man, how big business is crushing the underclass, how homelessness is the biggest tragedy in America" - Glenn Quagmire, to Brian

Defended to Death (1983)

Like Brian (the dog) in The Family Guy, I too have something of a 'textbook liberal agenda'. I'm a vegetarian, I'm an anti-capitalist, I'd get rid of the royal family, I celebrate immigrants, I don't like racists, I don't like homophobes, and I don't like sexists. It's been difficult lately to have that 'textbook liberal agenda' as I've watched people, people who form what Marina Hyde brilliantly calls "the hyper-engaged left", on the far end of leftist politics (and to talk about left and right really isn't a good fit for what's going on these days) make a horseshoe manoeuvre so that they're now closer to what we might term the far right than they are with the centre.

Those who hate Starmer and love Corbyn are far more likely to complain about Tony Blair than they are Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, those who understandably want to stop the bloodshed and murder in Gaza are happy to support the equally bloodthirsty and equally murderous Hamas regime even as they execute homosexuals and subjugate women. Take a walk down Whitechapel High Street and count the number of Palestinian flags and imagine what it might feel like to be Jewish there. The local synagogue was converted into a mosque in 2015.

None of which is to defend Netanyahu who is a murderous bastard who should be brought down and who should have his day in The Hague. Maybe now Hamas are finally releasing some of the hostages and now that the IDF have finally agreed to stop bombing Gaza into ever smaller pieces of rubble something will happen but with the Middle East, history suggests it won't be that straightforward.

And that's the problem with arch-polemicists like Peter Kennard whose free Archive of Dissent exhibition I went to see at Whitechapel Art Gallery this afternoon. Everything seems black and white. There is good and there is bad and there is rarely anything in between. I see shades of grey almost everywhere (so I'd be terrible at Kennard's job) even while there are some indubitably bad things and some bad people out there. One of those people will be sworn in as the President of the United States of America within the next 24 hours.

World Markets (1997-2004)

None of which is intended to throw shade on Kennard's work. He has been, for the most part, fighting the good fight for nearly as long as I've been alive - and I'm not young. Born in Maida Vale in 1949 he has, since the 1970s, created some very powerful and influential images of resistance and protest. Some of which you can see in my last blog about him - back in 2016.

Because the show is a retrospective there is more Thatcher than there is Trump, more about Greenham Common than there is about the threat of the tech bro oligarchy in Silicon Valley, and more about the threat of nuclear war than there is about the rise of AI. That's fair enough.

It's also a nice touch that the show is being hosted in what was, from 1892 until 2005, the Whitechapel Library, a place where local working class people - a very diverse group - could gather for warmth, company, and to read newspapers which were presented on lecterns - something you still see in some countries. People's Univeristy of the East End, the colloquial name for the former library, responds directly to that history and is a rare contemporary piece in the show. You can tell that by the inclusion of the now de rigueur Palestinian flag - complete with blood dripping down it.

People's University of the East End (2024)

Because of Kennard's political affiliations it's safe to assume that the blood has been spilt by the IDF though it's equally feasible that the bloodshed could have been caused by Hamas who are happy to use their own people as human shields and carried out the 7th October killings in the full knowledge, hope even, that Israel would respond with extreme and lethal prejudice. Not that I'll win many friends by saying that.

The curators of the show talk about how Kennard rips through something they call "the mask" by cutting, tearing, montaging, and juxtaposing the imagery that we are bombarded with daily, by what some on the far left (and the far right) would call the "mainstream media". Of course it's important to deconstruct the media and the message but it would be well worth remembering that two can play at that game.

When the Corbynistas started singing the name of their leader, calling him by his first name, and blaming everything on 'the media' they set a template that the likes of Trump and Farage found very easy to adapt to their own ends. When hi-falutin' post-structuralist French philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard claimed there was no such thing as objective truth and that truth was subjective, the likes of Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin were taking notes.

Nothing in Kennard's work touches on, or even mentions, these complex interweaving threads or the compromised nature of protest. I feel compromised personally at the moment as I have enjoyed, for many years, using Facebook and have been very very critical of those who remain on Twitter/X since Elon Musk bought, and broke, it. "Why remain on a fascist website?" I asked friends and enemies alike only to see Mark Zuckerberg kneel down and suck MAGA dick after being threatened by Trump that he would spend the rest of his life in prison otherwise. I'm not taking a holier-than-thou position. I'm just acknowledging that taking such a position can leave one compromised.

All of which is, of course, to do Kennard a disservice. He is simply hoping to promote positivity by bringing people together to put a stop to entirely negative things like racism, nuclear bombs, and the belief that profit is more important than people. I believe in his message. We just live in different times now.

Stocks (1994)

Worktop (1966-2024)

Kennard's work comes from the pre-Berliner days of The Guardian when everything was different and, as if to underline this, there's some of the work he did for The Guardian on show in one of the rooms of this exhibition - as well as a 1981 copy of the NME in which there's a great review of an Echo And The Bunnymen gig and a terrible one of a Cure gig in which the writer suggests the band are on their last legs. FORTY-FOUR years ago! Robert Smith's aged better than that review.

Goth and post-punk legends aside, it's a world of mushroom clouds, skulls, and swastikas (so not so far from the goth/punk scenes after all) and you can relive the fall of Saddam Hussein who, surely - if the logic of those who now support Hamas is to go by was an anti-imperialist hero all along, as well as consider how well Denis Healey's Penguin publishing deal panned out. These aren't bad photomontages as it happens and, as with political cartoonists, having to respond to news as and when it happens can also leave one at the mercy of being overtaken by events. In all cases here, Kennard seems to have been on the ball.

Reading Room (1997-2024)

Double Exposure (2022)

A series of Kennard's posters, hung on one of those racks you flick through like you used to get in Athena, have also aged a lot better than that unfortunately short-sighted Cure live review. There's Rupert Murdoch and the egregious strangehold over power he once had (he still has some but it's being diminished, replaced by the even more dangerous likes of Musk and PayPal's Peter Thiel), there's a CND gig featuring The Specials, The Pop Group, Mikey Dread, and Peggy Seeger (that looks like a bloody ace day out), there's an advert for an Auschwitz exhibition (less fun than a Specials gig, to be fair), and a call for public service to be prioritised over private profit.

A call that we all know was lost. Have a look at how much your bills cost, have a look at how much it costs to catch a train anywhere and then look at if the service has got better or worse and if you're still paying subsidies to fund it - but instead of being used to improve the services they are now going into the packet of fatcat corporates - and ask yourself if Kennard was not right on this one. He was and most people I know knew he was all along.

Posters (1979-2019)

But once a battle has been lost it's hard to turn back the clock. It's easy for those with vested interests in upholding the now status quo to paint anyone advocating for that as regressive. Allowing the state to become secondary to capital has been the great failing of society in my lifetime. A neoliberal tragedy in which the only answer at the moment seems to be to move towards forms of autocractic nationalism, ethnofascism, Christofascism, and technofascism as promoted by the likes of Elon Musk.

This being a retrospective, we don't get to find out Kennard's thoughts on X, Meta, PayPal, or Amazon but a series of works, Boardroom, from just two years ago makes it clear he's not a fan of big poweful businesses having dominion over our lives. A series of anonymous human faces are reproduced on newsprint and are then blurred, all but obscured, by the logos of companies like Shell and BAE Systems. It's not subtle and it doesn't need to be. The message is simple. We are, as a society - as a planet, doing more to help capitalism than we are to help actual real people.

Boardroom (2023)

Nobody could ever accuse Peter Kennard of subtlety and so it proves in the fairly comprehensive photomontage section of the show which includes a montage of Trump with his head merging into some kind of nuclear submarine. We are under strict instruction that when it comes to this image of Trump that NO PHOTOGRAPHY is allowed. Wonder why that one? Of all the works? The day before his inauguration?

I'm being flippant. There could be perfectly good reasons. Maybe it'll crop up in The Guardian tomorrow or something and they've insisted on it (even though it dates from 2018). Who knows? I'd have included it in this account of the show if I could but there's enough other good stuff in there so no worries.

Admitting inspiration from the likes of John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, we can see how over the last few decades Kennard has made powerful and poignant points about Apartheid, about the nuclear arms race, and about Thatcherism. All things I imagine I'd agree entirely with him on.

But we live in a new world now and that world will become even more dangerous from tomorrow as Trump and the likes of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy start to redesign it in their own image, ably (or chaotically, it doesn't matter) assisted by many others across the globe. We will need to find a whole new language of protest to deal with these new threats to all that is right and good. Peter Kennard has spent decades at the coalface of international protestation. Younger people need to step up now and they need to step up with new ideas and not cling to old leftist/rightist absolutes. It won't be easy but this show reminds us that we defeated Apartheid, we defeated Thatcherism, and we defeated the Nazis. The bad guys always lose in the end.