Peter Kennard: Peace on Earth

The Guardian reports that Peter Kennard, the artist famous for his incendiary photomontages, is giving away a new image responding to the bombing of Syria and the refugee crisis. Kennard is Britain’s most important political artist whose imagery has become synonymous with the modern protest movement.

As a New Year gift, available to download for free in high quality, he and his collaborator, renowned graphic designer Neville Brody, have "produced a work called Peace on Earth featuring what appears to be the Virgin Mary praying – only her halo has been replaced by the CND symbol and her face with planet Earth."

“The idea is to give something back at this time of year, and as a designer,” he says. “I wanted to make an image that makes people think – and isn’t too horrific for them to put on their wall.”

“I use that image of our planet a lot – which is what we’re destroying,” he says. “The refugee crisis is so horrific, and the way human beings are talked about in terms of ‘how many can we take’ is so demeaning. It’s people’s responses that have been human, not the politicians, who are just thinking of their votes. I’m trying to show this enormous outpouring of feeling.”

In a conversation about Art, Design, Protest and Generosity on the RCA website he says:

"At the heart of mobilising positive, peaceful activism is a radical, subversive generosity on the part of artists and designers, which runs counter to any social structure that privileges the ‘I’ over the ‘we’, and refutes the unfestive – but nonetheless accurate – observation that we may no longer know how to give without counting the cost.

Giving breaks the cycle of greed, and encourages people to be generous, community-minded and constructive. It’s about doing something for the sake of change, for the common good – which is what the original peace symbol was about. There’s a refreshing positivity to giving freely, which runs counter to one’s normal transactions in the world.

Anyone who’s been involved in the best bits of peaceful activism knows that mobilising positive human energy is life affirming. Like singing in a Christmas choir, one of the reasons to go on a march is to be there in a group of people who believe the human race isn’t doomed after all.

As artist Jimmy Durham says, ‘Humanity is not a completed project,’ meaning both that we are still here and that we need to try harder. Artists and designers have a long tradition of bending the tools of their trade to that cause, beating swords into aesthetic ploughshares.

The role of art may be to expose the underbelly of society, and the role of design may be to communicate ideas, but add in generosity and you arrive at the joining of makers' hands, the giving of gifts and the will for collective change.

In the festive spirit of munificence, Peter Kennard and Neville Brody have collaborated to produce a new work for our troubled times: Peace on Earth. Download it, print it, share it. We wish you a peaceful new year."

Download Peace on Earth here.

The first major retrospective of Kennard's work is at the Imperial War Museum London until 30 May 2016 and demonstrates how Kennard has consistently confronted issues in world politics and British governmental policy both at home and abroad, inspiring many of today’s politically-aware artists from Mark Wallinger to Banksy.

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Steve Mason - Oh, My Lord.

Exhibitions update

Hide and Seek, coincides with the publication of a monograph celebrating Eileen Cooper’s career, and presents drawings spanning almost 40 years. Cooper creates work that possesses a strongly poetic and distinctive vision, and the artist has been described as a ‘magical realist’. An accomplished painter and printmaker, Cooper’s practice has always been underpinned by drawing. This remarkable body of work illustrates how her distinctive imagery has developed through making drawings that explore such subjects as sexuality, birth, family, fecundity and creativity.

Cross-sensory perception quickens and multiplies in Smell of First Snow, Shirazeh Houshiary’s eighth exhibition at Lisson Gallery. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, Houshiary approaches the intangible and evanescent, articulating a metaphysical reality that lies beyond mere form and surface.

Peter Kennard is Britain’s most important political artist whose imagery has become synonymous with the modern protest movement. The first major retrospective of his work at the Imperial War Museum demonstrates how Kennard has consistently confronted issues in world politics and British governmental policy both at home and abroad, inspiring many of today’s politically-aware artists from Mark Wallinger to Banksy.

Marking thirty years since his first solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery, former official British War Artist John Keane presents a new series of paintings on the themes of power and conflict - Speaking Truth to Power at 21 Cork Street. Keane’s work has been engaged in a dialogue with unfolding news stories since the 1980s, travelling overseas to witness conflicts first hand. His work challenges received wisdom and explores alternative narratives to those exerted by the press - from his representation of the atrocities of war, to his portraits of the people made powerful by their place in and behind the media spotlight. The Wisdom of Hindsight is a retrospective of Keane's work at 82 Kingsland Road.

Zi Ling is a visual artist currently based in Beijing and London, working in watercolour, etching, short film and installation, who has work in the Society of Women Artists 154th Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries. Following this show will be the New English Art Club Annual Open Art Exhibition 2015 which showcases the work of some of the finest figurative painters at work today, members’ paintings, drawings and original prints are shown alongside work selected from the open submission.

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Lenny Kravitz - Let Love Rule.

Is There a Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art?

As well as significant series of posts on the engagement between Christianity and the Arts (see Airbrushed from Art History and Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage), this blog has tried to highlight places where discussion about faith and art has been occurring (see, for example, here, here, here, here and here).

A 2013 ArtMag article, as well as featuring some positive views, highlights some of the mindsets in the mainstream art world which continue to limit the engagement of faiths and arts:

Anselm Franke writes: 'There is an important movement of engaging with religious topics, but there is not a wave of religious or sacral art in contemporary art. That is an important difference ... The historical break with religion continues. We would not think of hanging something that someone prays to in a museum ... Faith is incompatible with art end even destroys the sovereignty of art and the kinds of experiences we are looking for when we frequent art spaces.'

Silvia Henke argues that 'Religious art is taboo! Religious art exists in churches, in historical museums, at most in museums for non-European art, or in the vicinity of mentally confused artists, but not in the white cubes of major art temples.'

While Beat Wyss suggests that 'artistic activity depends on the achievements of society, which I term the “four virtues of the art system”: 1) respect for the individual; 2) a valuing of work within society; 3) open practices in relation to exchange and trade; and 4) freedom of speech in the public realm.
If only one of these aspects is missing, then art is endangered or even rendered completely impossible. These societal achievements have evolved over centuries as the philosophy of Humanism developed into bourgeois economic ethics, the politics of legally constituted forms of democracy and onwards to colonial liberation movements.'

On this basis, modernism requires a complete break with religion because it is only humanism that can guarantee the freedom which art needs in order to genuinely be itself as opposed to dogmatic religiosity. 

Silvia Henke is constructive when she suggests that 'contemporary art to accept the long-standing diagnosis of Western society put forth by philosophers and sociologists of religion, namely: That it finds itself in a “post-secular” phase, a term which allows for critical self-reflection through religious thought, while considering the ubiquity of the religious in its various manifestations within the secularization process, through secular thought (Jürgen Habermas).'

She notes that in this context: 'Artistic works which precisely deal with religious form and meaning have the ability to mediate between blind faith and rational knowledge; they belong neither to a dogmatic religiosity that confuses belief with conviction, nor to a totally individualized “who cares how or what” religiousness, in which faith is an utterly private thing. When artistic works successfully translate sacred symbols into the language of secular art (masterfully done by Mark Wallinger), it happens not as blasphemy or a deconstruction of the religious but rather, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense, as “redeeming deconstruction.”'

All this means that research, such as that being undertaken or initiated by Ben Quash and Angus Pryor, is of real significance in understanding the complexities of the current relationship between faith and art.

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Oh My Lord.

Labyrinth - Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger has created a major new artwork for London Underground to celebrate its 150th anniversary. The result, entitled Labyrinth and commissioned by Art on the Underground, is a multi-part work on a huge scale that has been installed in every one of the Tube’s 270 stations. Wallinger sees the commission as a unique opportunity to explore the potential of the Underground as a whole. Wishing to forge a poetic link with the Tube’s rich history of graphic language, he has made a work that sits comfortably alongside the two of its major design icons, the roundel and Harry Beck’s Tube map, and yet stands out as a new symbol marking the Tube’s 150th year.

Above is a photo of the labyrinth (No. 151) installed at our local tube station, Newbury Park.

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David Bowie - As The World Falls Down.

Exhibiting spirituality

It has been interesting to see the number of exhibitions recently which have explored some aspect of spirituality. Both the numbers and differing styles of exhibition would seem to indicate a renewed engagement within the art world with the force and mystery of spirituality.

Blood Tears Faith Doubt was an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery curated by students which "confronted historic Christian art with contemporary art that continues to address the same visual tradition." The contemporary works selected allude to or depict religious imagery or practices but are ambiguous or ironic in their response therefore providing a strong contrast with works of devotion from a earlier age.

A similar questioning of received traditions can be found in Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery and particularly in the stunning work of Ged Quinn. Quinn reproduces with great technical virtuosity works from the golden ages of classical, romantic and genre paintings but inserts within these compositions jarring contemporary images which undercut the arcadian images. Cake in the Wilderness depicts a cherry cake cut into a crucifix which is also the shape of the infamous Spandau prison while True Peace Will Prevail Under The Rule juxtaposes Claude Lorrain's depiction of Jacob, Rachel and Leah at the well with Mount Carmel, home of David Koresh's dissident religious community. By these means Quinn questions idealist images of faith and tradition in a way that challenges the honesty and veracity of religious image making.

Mark Wallinger's recent show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery also questioned the substance of religion with the second of two sculptures meditating on the nature of selfhood. Richard Dorment described I Am Innocent as consisting:

"of two bigger-than-life-size reproductions of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X shown back-to-back and revolving slowly from a cable attached to a motor in the ceiling. On one side, we see the portrait as Velázquez painted it, with the Pope on the left hand side; on the other, the portrait is reversed, so that he sits on the right."

Here we see, Dorment suggests, "a human being whose “I” is subsumed in the trappings of power."

However, despite the prevalence of ironic juxtaposition in a exhibition such as Newspeak, there have also been more positive responses to spirituality on show. The photographs of Leah Gordon at Riflemaker have much in common with those of Markéta Luskačová in Blood Tears Faith Doubt, in that both depict the poignant integrity with which those they photograph practice their faith and, through this, capture a sense of the sacred in the everyday.

Gordon writes that: "Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography with it's indelible relationship to the material could only serve to disprove the divine. Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process." The work of both suggests that such attitudes should change.

Gordon's exhibition is called The Invisibles, a title which tallies with several of the abstract works on show in this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition such as The Unseen by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings. In the same room is Jane Harris’s Divine which combines a golden comb-like oval framing a white void. The still harmonious parallels of this composition hide an infinite variety of brushstrokes when seen close-up; suggestive of the permanence and change contained within the divine.

Finally, the Summer Exhibition includes a commemorative display by the late Craigie Aitchison including several of his luminous Crucifixions while the Kings Place Gallery has a wonderful selection of landscape and religious works by the late Norman Adams (see above). With this latter exhibition, for once, a gallery's exhibition description seems entirely accurate:

"When Norman Adams died in March 2005, Britain lost one of the most significant artists to have emerged over the last half century. Spanning a career of almost sixty years, Adams’ art was essentially ecstatic and life affirming in its approach to nature and man’s place within it.
Drawn from the artist’s estate, the paintings and watercolours in this exhibition explore five decades of prolific output during the course of which Adams evolved an intensely original and personal style in which the poetical and Romantic landscape traditions of Blake and Turner are infused with the broader currents of European Modernism – Van Gogh and Ensor, Nolde and Picasso among others - to create one of the most deeply felt and emotionally intense expressions of the Northern Expressionist sensibility in late 20th Century British art."

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King Crimson - Starless And Bible Black.

YBAs & Christianity

Another brief thought that occurs in reflecting on last night's presentations and discussion concerns the use of Christian imagery and narrative by conceptual artists such as the YBAs, Damien Hirst, Mark Wallinger, Chris Ofili and Sam Taylor-Wood. I said about this that we have moved from the illustration of Christian doctrine and story (from the Early Church onward) to its use as a critique of contemporary life including politics and culture.

This I think is what such artists are generally doing with Christian imagery and narrative. But the interesting aspect is the extent to which they understand the imagery, narratives and doctrines correctly and then use this understanding in their critique of different aspects of human being and doing.

For me, this is an encouragement. We tend to think that, although Christian doctrine, imagery and narratives have permeated Western culture in the past, that permeation is now being irretrievably lost. Here are artists, however, who are not creating from the perspective of Christian belief but who, nevertheless, understand Christian doctrines, images and narratives and work with those 'Christian' understandings in the way they use these doctrines, images and narratives to critique contemporary life. Maybe our culture actually retains more of its Christian heritage than we tend to give it credit for?

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The Velvet Underground & Nico - I'll Be Your Mirror.