Art

‘Uncertified Documents’ is clever nomenclature for Peter Kennard’s show of political dissemblage. His collaged photos of hated world leaders – scalpelled into pigs or forced to clutch WMDs – have been dismissed as propaganda for the agencies such as Greenpeace or CND that commissioned him to produce the grotesqueries in the first instance. Many of his cut-and-paste policemen and politicians of the ’70s and ’80s were likewise illustrations assigned to articles in newspapers from the Workers Press to The Sunday Times, long before being considered for display in a gallery. If all this makes him sound like a mercenary gun for hire, that’s unintentional. It’s simply that Kennard’s tenuous position is neither as activist nor as artist with capital ‘A’, hence the uncertifiability of his work.

Unfortunately the resulting imagery isn’t as beguiling as it could be because Kennard knows how to sledgehammer but not how to insinuate. There’s lots of spewing: Ted Heath heaves up prices, Thatcher pukes death and misery, oil rigs billow clouds of burning cash. Such bluntly bashing visual language hasn’t come far since World War II’s great photomontagists (Heartfield, Grosz et al) and can come across as little more than sticking two fingers up at
The Man. However, Kennard transcends ‘Spitting Image’ simplicity when not just caricaturing power, greed, money and fascism. His version of Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain with Cruise Missile’ is smart juxtaposition before its time (witness Banksy’s similar landscapes with crime boards and shopping trolleys) and suggests more than it shouts.