list.co.uk/festival Protest Art | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
kennardphillipps, Here Comes Everybody, [Study#1Paper money] (2015)
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THE ART OF PROTEST
Neil Cooper speaks to art-activists kennardphillipps and Carol Naughton about their Festival shows, and how they capture
and inspire the spirit of dissent
B omb Culture was the name of poet and painter Jeff Nuttall’s personal analysis of the 1960s counter-culture from a frontline which, in 1968, when his book was published, was still very much in place. Its title referred to how the threat of nuclear war had inl uenced a post-Hiroshima generation who embraced anti-nuclear sentiments through the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1957 with a unilateral opposition to what would now be termed Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Much of that spirit of dissent can be found in Here Comes Everybody and Pop and Boom: 70 Years of Nuclear Culture, two exhibitions which combine activism and art in a way where protest and people power becomes both mass spectacle and a work of art in itself. Where Here
Comes Everybody shows off a series of photomontages and digital prints by kennardphillipps, the collaborative duo of Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, Pop and Boom is a compendium of pop cultural artefacts inspired by the nuclear threat, and pulled together by Greenham Common veteran Carol Naughton to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. ‘If you just show images of the disaster itself,’ Naughton explains, ‘there’s a horror to it and people switch off, so I wanted to commemorate it in a way that felt real for people, and show how nuclear weapons have inl uenced popular culture. In the i rst years it was purely reactive, then in the 80s the whole thing took off as protest rose, and the two together were very powerful. Nowadays nuclear weapons in books and i lms are incidental, and people don’t realise what nuclear weapons are, so part of the exhibition is to remind people of their signii cance.’
It was Kennard’s images in the 1980s for CND, Stop the War and other campaign groups that provided a visual identity for a youth-driven protest movement that was immediate and subversive in a way that chimed with the post-punk era’s alternative DIY cut-and-paste aesthetic. ‘At that time it seemed like EP Thompson, the veteran CND activist, would be in the NME every week,’ Kennard observes. ‘It was cruise missiles that brought people together, but today they’re seen as acceptable
6–13 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 97