Imperial War Museum,London[br]A gas-masked globe, a skeleton with a mushroom-cloud head … this new exhibition of Kennard’s violent political cut-ups is brave, and brazen – and shows the truth behind the lustrous shining lies of warWar is an infernal engine of art. In the 20th century,it caused artists to lose all faith in form, beauty – those venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) civilised lies that sent young men to die. In 1916 in Zurich, and 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 stop of the first world war, this movement gave rise to shocking cut-up images of faces, or 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 final Weimar Beer-stomach Cultural Epoch of Germany and Heartfield’s Adolf, and the Superman,Swallows Gold and Spouts Crap.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com