Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent [Illustrated] 0745339875, 9780745339870

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Peter Kennard:

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Visual Dissent Text and images: Peter Kennard Design: Peter Brawne

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Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent First published 2019 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Supported by

All images copyright © Peter Kennard 2019 Text copyright © Peter Kennard 2019 The right of Peter Kennard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved: no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photocopy, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3987 0 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0495 2 PDF eBook Designed, typeset and made into pages in Adobe InDesign by Peter Brawne, Matter, London Printed in the United Kingdom Acknowledgements Big thanks to my sons, Dan and Matt, who’ve worked with me from the book’s inception to its completion and without whom it would never have been made. They’ve been amazing. Also, big thanks to Peter Brawne for his great design and total involvement in every aspect of the book and to Jenny Matthews for her invaluable work both in the making and photographing of a number of the photomontages in the book.

‘The present not only has its roots in the past, it coexists with it everyday. Here.

Now.

Always.’ – Agnieska Holland

‘Walls turned sideways are bridges.’ – Angela Davis

Thanks also to Judy Barker, Anne Beech, Rich Hobbs and Richard Slocombe for their vital input and to Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Royal College of Art Research & Innovation and Pluto Press for their support and encouragement. If any readers want to view originals of the work in this book, many are available in London for free public viewing in the collections of Tate, Imperial War Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Science Museum, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, as well as within the a/political collection. – PK

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1969: Kissinger 20 January: Henry Kissinger is appointed as national security advisor in the new Nixon administration, becoming the president’s most influential foreign policy adviser. He takes over the running of the brutal Vietnam War, which left a million Vietnamese dead, but as estimates vary it could be many more. Kissinger expands the war to include saturation bombing campaigns of neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, countries with whom the US is not officially at war. One Finnish government study estimates that half a million people died in the first phase of the illegal and secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger goes on to serve as secretary of state in the Gerald Ford administration, giving the green light to Indonesian dictator, General Suharto, to commit genocide in East Timor. Kissinger is also one of the masterminds behind the overthrow of the democratically elected and constitutional government of Chile, and the subsequent installation of a 17-year-long fascist dictatorship. So how to picture Kissinger? At first, I made a rough, in which hands with magnifying glasses over Kissinger’s face contain photos of bombing and the victims of his policies as secretary of state (left). Then, to make the image more direct, I tried to make his portrait actually embody these elements so that they didn’t come from outside, but were integral to his image. In the darkroom, I printed a B52 bomber, as used by the US in Vietnam and Cambodia, onto his forehead. I then filled the frame of his glasses with the US flag and a severely wounded child, a victim of US bombing in Vietnam. Windows, glasses and magnifying glasses are all ‘given frames’ that can be filled with the results of oppression through the use of photomontage. The causes and results of war are brought together into a single image.

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1970: Kent State 4 May: Four students are shot dead by National Guardsmen while peacefully protesting against the Vietnam War on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, USA.

In reaction to this, I made my first image, intended to be pasted up in the street (right). It was based on what became an infamous photo of one of the students lying dead on the ground. Together with fellow art students, I fly-posted a stack of them around London as a temporary memorial to the four who had been killed, and to show solidarity with the thousands of American students rebelling against the war. Because the prints were made as water-based dyelines, and printed in red, when it rained they appeared to be bleeding in the streets. Those that weren’t pulled down became blank sheets which were used as noticeboards for anti-war slogans and messages.

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1971: Vietnam 13 June: The New York Times begins publishing what becomes known as the Pentagon Papers, a classified Department of Defense study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. It’s leaked by one of the writers of the report, Daniel Ellsberg, who’s charged with a raft of serious offences. However, the case against Ellsberg collapses after it’s revealed that the Nixon administration had engaged in an illegal effort to discredit him. The Pentagon Papers reveals industrial-scale lying by successive US administrations about the war in Vietnam. One of the most awful crimes to have happened in my lifetime, the war killed more than a million Vietnamese and 58,148 Americans.

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1971: Vietnam

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1971: Vietnam

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The Vietnam War is a defining moment for many of my generation. The images of children burnt by napalm, and whole villages wiped out to prop up a corrupt and authoritarian government against the wishes of its people, brings home the reality of the US empire and its role as the major counter-revolutionary and reactionary force in the world. Everywhere I looked – from Vietnam to Chile to South Africa – the US was on the side of the white supremacists, the fascists, and the owners of capital.

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1971: Vietnam On 17 March 1968, I went to the huge antiVietnam War demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. Afterwards, I joined thousands of others at a protest outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which saw violent clashes with the Metropolitan Police. I remember vividly the horses with mounted police, stampeding into demonstrators across the square. In April, the legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr is assassinated. In May, French students and workers demonstrate on the streets of Paris, almost bringing down the government. In August, Soviet tanks and troops move into Czechoslovakia to destroy the liberalisation movement. All these events constituted a political awakening for me and many of my generation.

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I began to look for new ways to develop my work. Up until then, I was primarily painting, but now I felt too weighed down with the long history of this medium and all its connotations. I started experimenting with tearing photos from newspapers and magazines, rephotographing them, then laying the negatives on top of each other. Photos of struggles from around the world for civil rights, an end to the Vietnam War and state violence were merged together. I had the resulting layered images printed onto canvas and would then rough them up by adding blots, scratches and other abstract marks. The viewer had to actively engage with an image that now wouldn’t reveal itself immediately. The

default position of a viewer of endless images of people from around the world is that of a passive and distant observer. By disrupting the monotony of this daily image-reel, I hoped to re-engage viewers and make them question their relationship with the subjects of the images. I continued developing this series, which I later called STOP, over a number of years. The idea was that the images were like a Rorschach test of reality. Viewing them, I hoped, would encourage more active participation in the struggles depicted. After this period of technical experimentation, I started making work that responded to events as they happened. From this point onwards, I was a visual journalist.

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1972: Bloody Sunday 30 January: On Sunday afternoon, protesters gather in Derry, Northern Ireland, to demonstrate against newly enacted laws allowing authorities to arrest and intern civilians without trial. Members of the British Parachute Regiment open fire on the protesters, killing 13 people and injuring 15; another protester died five months later in hospital. The British later claimed they had come under fire from IRA gunmen and bomb throwers, but investigations find that none of those killed or wounded is carrying a weapon. Many of the victims are, in fact, shot while fleeing the scene or trying to help the wounded. Such brutal force by the British state against unarmed civilians was a defining moment for how the British armed forces stationed in Northern Ireland were perceived around the world. Nearly 50 years on, the legacy of this horrific event is still felt. In 2019, it’s announced that the first and only British soldier will be charged for murder in connection with the Bloody Sunday massacre. He is known only as Soldier F. The more senior members of the army who gave the orders have never been indicted or brought to justice.

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1973: Chile

11 September: A military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the CIA and big business overthrows Chile’s constitutional government and inflicts 17 years of terror on the Chilean people. Salvador Allende, whose ‘Popular Unity’ socialist government had nationalised some of the country’s key assets and resources, dies in the coup and a fascist military regime is installed. Thousands of Chileans are tortured, murdered, and ‘disappeared’ (left), that is, grabbed from their homes by the regime’s military thugs and never seen again.

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1973: Chile In 1985, the day before my exhibition Images Against War is due to open at the Barbican Arts Centre, London, Henry Wrong (sic), the director of the centre, approaches me and demands that two of the photomontages, Santiago Stadium 1 and Santiago Stadium 2 should be removed immediately. Both works were made in 1973 in response to the military coup in Chile and portrayed the bloody repression and killing that followed. It turns out that Midland Bank has hired the Barbican cinema for a meeting between high-ranking Chilean government finance officials and British bankers. To access the cinema they would have to walk past my exhibition. I refuse to remove the two works as did the people who’d just hung the exhibition. The next morning, the largest picture which had been objected to is covered over with a moth-eaten felt blanket (right, below) hung from a high ceiling. The picture must have been too difficult to remove quickly. The smaller picture has been unscrewed from the wall and taken down. The next day a Barbican spokesperson tells an Evening Standard journalist ‘We would hope to accommodate Peter Kennard. It’s his exhibition. We don’t exercise censorship.’ President Augusto Pinochet’s ruling military junta is in power in Chile until 1990. By breaking down elements in photographs of Chile, cutting them up and reconstituting them, a critical narrative of military violence and its opposition is set up. The resultant images are not documentary mirrors, although some of my photomontages use photographs by documentary and citizen photographers bravely working in life-threatening situations. They go out into danger while I work in my studio trying to connect their photographs to the forces that create the oppression their images document. The power-brokers behind the suffering are revealed in the same frame as their victims. In 1978, I made an exhibition of 30 photomontages, A Document on Chile, with text by Ric Sissons, for the Half Moon Photography Workshop. It recounted the history of Chile from the years prior to Allende, the three years of his Popular Unity government, and follows through to the barbarism of Pinochet’s rule. The exhibition was laminated in plastic and packed into a case that could be sent cheaply in the guards van of a train. It travelled around the country, going to community centres, colleges, youth clubs and even a launderette.

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11 December 1998: Protesters, holding placards illustrated with images of mine about human rights, demonstrate outside high security Belmarsh Magistrates Court in London (above). Pinochet is due to appear after being arrested under an international warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon. I remember the shudder in the crowd of demonstrators – many of them Chileans who’d suffered under his dictatorship – as a car with blacked-out windows drove him into the courthouse. Labour home secretary, Jack Straw, finally ruled in January 2000 that, on health grounds, Pinochet should not be extradited and was free to return to Chile. This he did, and on arrival, he stood up from his wheelchair in triumph while his supporters cheered. I’m sure, even though he would have been happy to be back in the country where he’d slaughtered and tortured thousands, that he’d miss taking his customary afternoon tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher had often talked about the ‘debt’ the UK owed Pinochet. On 6 October 1999, to cheers from delegates at the Conservative Party Conference, she spoke of his ‘judicial kidnap’ by Baltasar Garzon.

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1974: Nixon 9 August: Richard Nixon resigns as president of the United States in the face of near-certain impeachment by Congress. His time in power was marked by corruption, war and unrest in the US. Nixon became president in 1969, the year I first started working full-time making political art. His policies and their terrible consequences compelled me to try to produce work that would expose the reality of what he was inflicting on the people of America and the world. I made images of his face spliced with ordnance, military jets, soldiers, guns and the other horrific paraphernalia of war. I also tried to expose his depravity, which is revealed dramatically in the tapes he records of his conversations as president.

One conversation on 25 April 1972 with Henry Kissinger, recorded in what became known as the Watergate Tapes, goes like this: Nixon: I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people? Kissinger: About 200,000 people Nixon: No, no, no, I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry? Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big Henry for Chrissakes! 24

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1975: Arms conversion Workers facing redundancy at Lucas Aerospace, a British arms manufacturer, began work on a radical proposal to restore the company’s declining fortunes by converting the existing plant from a manufacturer of weapons into a manufacturer of socially useful products. What was called the Lucas Aerospace Workers Alternative Corporate Plan put forward over 150 alternative, socially beneficial applications of existing company technology based on employees’ skills. The products ranged from solar-heating appliances to combined bus and rail transport systems, kidney machines and wind turbines. Faced with such a progressive ‘swords into ploughshares’ proposal, prioritising social good over profit, the Lucas management was dismissive. The workers were supported by Labour’s industry minister, Tony Benn, though the Labour government overall – cowed by the Confederation of British Industry, which was fearful of this outbreak of industrial democracy – offered only token encouragement. The Lucas Plan, including prototypes, was serious and feasible – drawn up by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee in 1976, with the help of academics and industrial designers. It was never enacted. What it showed was that the so-called inevitabilities of the economic system – we have to produce weapons for brutal dictatorships to keep jobs in the UK and the economy afloat – are just myths. If the will is there, an economy run for society rather than for profit is possible, and that workers on the shop floor could take the lead in designing and running it. Arms development and production is a form of public spending taken for granted and supported politically by parties in power all over the world as ‘socially necessary’. Instead, the Lucas workers specifically chose ‘socially useful’ as their criteria for what was necessary. Almost all of their choices turned out to be prescient, envisaging technologies that have only now reached fruition – more than 40 years after they were first proposed. The concept of arms conversion never dies. It’s always bubbling away below the surface, and as capitalism implodes, there’s an increasing interest in the plans drawn up by the Lucas workers who showed arms conversion could be something that actually happened rather than an idealistic utopian concept. 26

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1975: Arms conversion

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I worked on a book with Bill Evans, About Turn (left), published by Pluto Press in collaboration with the Greater London Conversion Council which described the Lucas Plan and the concept of arms conversion. I also worked on The Socially Useful Show, published by the Centre of Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems, which was set up as an offshoot of the Lucas Plan at the then North East London Polytechnic. The Lucas workers had proved to me the real possibility of a world where arms factories could literally be turned on their head to become factories for peace and the social good. It led me to make many symbolic photomontages, turning tanks into tractors (right), Trident missiles into corn (pages 26–7) and bombs into sacks of grain (above). 29

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1976: Justice

4 March: Four members of the Maguire family, as well as three others, later known as the Maguire Seven, are sentenced to jail for involvement in the IRA bombings in Guildford. The previous year, 1975, the Guildford Four are convicted of carrying out these same bombings, while the Birmingham Six are convicted of carrying out the Birmingham pub bombings. All are given life sentences. The convictions of all three groups of people are eventually quashed, but not before most had served more than a decade behind bars. Seventeen totally innocent people’s lives ruined because of police corruption. Britain’s famed adherence to the Rule of Law is once again called into question.

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1976: Justice

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1977: Apartheid 12 September: One of the leading South African anti-apartheid activists, Steve Biko, is found dead in a police cell after prolonged torture. He rose to prominence in the 1960s, when he founded the Black Consciousness Movement. Biko is now revered as a hero of the movement against white supremacism. In 2002 Nelson Mandela described him as ‘the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa.’

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1977: Apartheid Alongside millions of others around the world I campaigned against apartheid. The movement grew into a major force, making life hard for the South African regime and its allies. I made photomontages that tried to expose the horror of the apartheid system. This image (right), was made in 1973 for the daily newspaper Workers Press, where I worked full-time for a year. I’d go to the editorial meeting in the morning, and with the help of their picture library and photographers, often have a picture ready for the paper by the evening. I made images as part of the newspaper production cycle. There was none of the theoretical critiques that I’d experienced at art school, which I found refreshing. I just had to fill the allotted space. By 8.00 p.m. I could see the page with the photomontage I’d made earlier that day rolling through the press and would take printed copies of the paper (below) to sell on the street.

Apartheid is extreme and obscene racism in action. Under apartheid, even the street furniture is labelled ‘WHITES ONLY’ or ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’ (see right and page 34). While a lot of the white minority look away from the horrors being inflicted on the black majority, I sought to make an image (right) where such avoidance becomes impossible. Here I combine two pictures: in the top photo, straight reportage; at the bottom, a worked on, scratched, disjointed, horrific scene. Through seeing actual physical destruction to the photographic surface, the viewer is made aware that the image is constructed. This ‘distancing effect’ aims to keep viewers involved intellectually, made consciously aware of the subject matter rather than sucked into a purely emotional reaction. This is an important strategy of the photomontage medium: it doesn’t present a ‘window on the world’ so much as a smashed mirror in which viewers see themselves reflected in the fragments of reality. 36 | 37

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1978: Grunwick 14 July: A group of mainly South Asian women workers, led by Jayaben Desai, who have been on strike to gain union recognition at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in London, call off their action. For two years over 20,000 trade unionists and supporters had joined their picket line and been met with increasing violence from the Metropolitan Police, resulting in over 500 arrests. The dispute marks the first time the British labour movement rallied behind a cause in support of immigrant workers. I remember coming out of Dollis Hill Underground Station to join the mass picket and seeing hundreds of workers from all over the country coming down the road to join the striking women and stand up for their

rights. In this photomontage (right), I try to connect the image of picketing workers at Grunwick with an advert for a perfume called 5 a.m., which I found in a magazine at the time (below). It shows a post-party couple in all their finery, supposedly lolling on a beach at 5 a.m. with the strapline ‘5 a.m. When you can’t say goodbye’. I was struck by the advert. It made me think of another 5 a.m. scene. This was when the women workers at Grunwick began their daily picket. I wanted to bring these two worlds together: the polished advert depicting a fantasy world of the idle rich, and the reality of life for working-class communities. The juxtaposition of the two images renders the advert’s image and text even more divorced from the actuality of 1970s lived experience.

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1978: Post-Grunwick

The winter of 1978–79 was marked by intense labour unrest, with many workers going on strike to demand higher wages in the face of pay caps enforced by the Labour government. It was the death rattle of British socialism for a generation, and open-ed the door to Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory later in 1979. The Thatcher Revolution was an unprecedented all-out assault to destroy labour power in the UK. The effects are still with us today.

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1979: Blair Peach 23 April: 33-year-old anti-fascist campaigner, Blair Peach, is killed by a police officer with a blow to the head at a demonstration against the National Front in Southall, West London. It took 30 years for the Metropolitan Police to release their report, which concluded that Peach was almost certainly killed by an officer from its elite riot squad, known as the Special Patrol Group. Until 2009, the official stance based on the original coroner’s conclusion was simply ‘death by misadventure’. This photomontage, Who killed Blair Peach? (right) was first published as a postcard to raise funds for the group Friends of Blair Peach, which was fighting to bring his killer to justice. It’s based on a postage stamp issued in September 1979, the same year he was killed, and is one from a set of four celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Police. The benign image of the community policeman on the stamp is forensically examined through a magnifying glass to reveal an image of Blair Peach.

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1980: Cruise missiles 17 June: The UK government announces that 160 US cruise missiles will be based at US airbases at Greenham Common and Molesworth in England. They will travel around the countryside within a radius of 50 miles, to be launched from secret sites. Francis Pym, the then secretary of defence, assures us that even though they have no dual-key system, the key for launching them being in the US, they would not be used without British assent. The Hay Wain (1821), a painting by John Constable in London’s National Gallery, has come to symbolise a certain idea of Britain, or more precisely, England, to itself and the wider world. Despite industrialisation and post-industrialisation, the notion that England is best represented as a bucolic rural idyll has a strange and persistent endurance. The Hay Wain’s iconographic status, widely reproduced on plates, mugs and cushions, has ensured that the image has become deeply embedded in our visual culture and collective memory. As resistance to the imminent stationing of cruise missiles in the English countryside was building up, this painting seemed obvious as the basis for my photomontage Hay Wain with Cruise Missiles, which was later turned into posters, postcards and even used in a Labour party political broadcast. For a time, after it was first made into a postcard, I used to take a bundle of them into the National Gallery and mix them up with the postcards of the actual Hay Wain. I heard that tourists were buying them, not realising the wain contained cruise missiles rather than hay. I especially liked the idea of my amended Hay Wain postcard mistakenly winging its way back to the USA. Ten years after I made my version of the painting, I got a phone call from the National Gallery. I thought they were going to sue me for using one of their photos of the painting (institutions can be very slow on the uptake), but they were asking for permission to show my version in a lecture on Constable. In 2011, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade discovered that Finmeccanica, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, was a sponsor of the National Gallery. Protests took place in the gallery, including on the evening Finmeccanica hosted delegates from the DSEI (Defence & Security Equipment International) arms 44

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fair when I held up a poster of Hay Wain with Cruise Missiles in front of the actual painting (left). A year later, Finmeccanica terminated its sponsorship, only to pop up seven years later under its new name Leonardo, holding an evening event for weapons manufacturers at the Design Museum, London (see page 180). In September 1981 the first Women’s Peace Camp occupied ground outside USAF Greenham

Common to halt the arrival of cruise missiles and stayed for 19 years, in one of the greatest and most sustained acts of activism of the twentieth century. Its influence can be seen in protests such as Occupy and climate camps around the world. Only in 2000 after the departure of cruise missiles, the closure of the base by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the transfer of land back to common parkland, did the camp finally disband. 45

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1980: Cruise missiles The nuclear weapons industry has developed an anodyne language in an attempt to foreclose thinking about nuclear war. Our final moments on earth could well be the result of what we have learnt to describe as a ‘nuclear exchange’. The power of 18 Hiroshima bombs is contained in each euphemistically named ‘cruise missile’. But perhaps more insidious, because less obvious, are visual images produced by the nuclear industry itself and the media more broadly. Four examples convinced me that counterwords were not enough, counter-images had to be produced as well.

A 1980 leaflet, Cruise Missiles: The Important Questions, was handed by the MOD to people living in the area of Greenham Common and Molesworth. The image shows a cruise missile in a gentle English landscape, painted in delicate watercolour washes, presumably by an MOD watercolour artist (a job of the utmost dialectical complexity). The irony is immense: watercolour has long been a favoured medium of British landscape artists to express their love of nature. Here, it is used by the government to back up their propaganda message that people shouldn’t worry about the cruise missiles being stationed on their doorstep as, in the words of an MOD spokesperson, ‘they (I think he was referring to the cruise missiles, not us!) would melt into the countryside’. After all, they are just off on a cruise! This leaflet was a particular inspiration for my Hay Wain with Cruise Missiles.

Another shows the cover of the infamous government booklet Protect and Survive, which was to be handed out to every UK household by the MOD and contained information about what to do in a nuclear war. It was met with universal ridicule and inspired my picture (far right, below) of a skeleton concentrating on reading advice such as, ‘Remove lace curtains’ and ‘If you have a home fire extinguisher keep it handy’, both of which were in the booklet.

The cover of a book, Discover the World of Weapons (for children!) and the page from the Athena poster catalogue are both examples from the time of how the commercial world was cashing in on the

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normalisation of nuclear weapons and war. Athena, which had poster shops all over Britain, was selling their heavily airbrushed poster of a nuclear explosion as suitable for young people to stick up on their bedroom walls. In their catalogue it is listed next to two posters of vintage trucks as examples of ‘The 20th Century Power and Energy’.

I try to use these easily recognisable images, but to render them unacceptable. To break down the image of all-powerful missiles in order to represent the power of the millions of people who are actually trying to break them. And after breaking them, to show new possibilities emerging from the cracks and splinters of the old reality. I had the idea of using the text on the Times advert (above right) for my montage of the skeleton reading Protect and Survive (below right) for a CND poster. It’s not only the imagery of the state that can be turned on its head, but also the language used by its supportive media. So here a prominent advert of the time for a pro-nuclear newspaper is subverted to ‘advertise’ the ridiculous government booklet.

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1980: Cruise missiles When I first went to see the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), they were a small group working from a cramped room in Holborn that soon grew into part of a worldwide movement for nuclear disarmament. We discussed how to reinvigorate the brilliant CND symbol which had been designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958, and I returned a couple of days later with tatty roughs that I’d made deconstructing the symbol. Each attempt failed. It was looking increasingly like an advert for British Rail (below).

Then I made a cardboard version of the CND symbol which was photographed at different angles. I overlayed a photo of a broken missile on the symbol, as if it was being mangled in the spokes of a wheel. At first it didn’t work, as the photo of the missile (which I’d got from the MOD!) was too flat and unthreatening. So I went to what looked like the ‘missile department’ of a large toyshop, bought a plastic missile, smashed it up with a hammer and photographed it. It’s crudely put together, the cuts and breaks are not airbrushed. There is no attempt to conceal the fact that two or three discrete images have been stuck together. This type of montage reveals how it’s constructed, the implication being that change is possible, nothing is static. I’m not trying to compete with adverts where the imagery is mainly seamless. Their aim is to create an image of a smooth and carefree world in which to shop. I always want to make images that attempt to uncover the cover-up. To smash a hole in the corporate image, and pull out the reality, kicking and screaming, which is hidden underneath. In some montages the rough-

ness is left so that people can see the joins, signposting the fact that it’s the result of action and that nothing is hidden. It implies that we have to act to make the break and encourages people to make their own versions of the image in collage, drawing, painting, papier mâché (see page 72) or other media. Many did.

I’ve been of accused of making images that are ‘bleeding obvious’. I know this isn’t meant as a compliment but, in fact, one of my main goals is to make images that do make the bleeding that comes from our wars and profiteering obvious. I see my role as the opposite of the corporate media. They apply the plasters, I let the blood flow across the page. Their job is to dam the tide, my job is to damn well create a river.

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1980: Cruise missiles

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1981: Solidarność 13 December: General Jaruzelski, the leader of the Polish Communist party and prime minister, imposes martial law in Poland in an effort to destroy the burgeoning pro-democracy Solidarność (Solidarity) movement. Soviet tanks and military vehicles roll into the capital, Warsaw, and other major cities. Over the next 18 months, thousands of political dissidents are thrown into jail and up to 90 people are killed. Solidarność was founded by workers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980 and advocated non-violent resistance to Soviet control of their country. As this was unfolding, I was reminded of August 1968 when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to stop the reforms of Alexander Dubcek’s government (see pages 78 and 81), which had begun to end censorship and support public debate about changing the authoritarian system. In both countries, the demands of the people are met by Soviet military might. Soon after the crackdown in Poland, I was asked by the Polish Solidarity Campaign to hurriedly make a couple of posters that supporters could paste up in Europe and also sell to raise funds. Solidarność had a great logo created by Jerzy Janiszewski, who said at the time he wanted to combine the letters of the word Solidarność ‘as if they were people walking together, shoulder to shoulder’. Working at speed, I decided to add barbed wire to imprison one logo (below left), and montage a bayonet to cut through another (right). I needed an image of a bayonet, but as this was long before Google Images, I rushed down to Buckingham Palace, where I remembered soldiers stood on guard, and quickly photographed one of theirs.

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1982: Unilateral disarmament 1 October. Delegates to the Labour party’s annual conference vote in favour of the policy of Britain unilaterally disarming its nuclear weapons. It’s the first time that the Labour party has ever officially supported unilateral disarmament, and it was included in its manifesto for the 1983 election. Labour has traditionally been on the wrong side of history on this. In fact, in 1947, it was the Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who committed the UK to developing an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, against the wishes of large sections of his party.

After losing both the 1983 and 1987 general elections, in 1989, Labour party leader Neil Kinnock persuaded the party to abandon unilateralism (see pages 128 and 164). So the photomontage of the crushed missile (far right), which I’d made for Labour is currently still in their bin marked ‘pending’. I’m hoping under a future Labour government this will change. Meanwhile the crushed missile has been taken up and used by anti-nuclear campaigners around the world. The idea that keeping the bomb buys a ‘seat at the top table’ – which UK prime ministers always wheel out – puts me in mind of all the other horrors on that table (see fragment 3, pages 108 –9). 54 | 55

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1983: Anti-nuclear 23 March: US president, Ronald Reagan, announces the development of a space-based anti-missile system he calls the Strategic Defence Initiative, more popularly known as Star Wars. Reagan’s crackpot scheme is hatched a year after the biggest ever demonstration against nuclear weapons in New York City in 1982, where it’s estimated a million people marched. Reagan argued this new missile system would protect the US. In fact, it was just another expression of the false idea that you could fight a nuclear war and win. Later in 1983, three million people took to the streets in Europe to demand an end to the arms race, including 400,000 people who marched through London. In 1983, CND asked me to take the right-wing Coalition for Peace through Security to court for breach of copyright for reproducing my photomontage of Britain encircled by a CND symbol on one of their anti-CND

leaflets (below right ). Because they had reproduced my montage dot-for-dot without permission it appeared an open-and-shut case. Of course they’d also added a hammer and sickle just to make clear that peace campaigners were all in the Soviet Union’s pocket. We didn’t bother about that libel as it would have been inordinately costly to fight.

At the hearing, a learned theoretical debate ensued between the judge and Douglas Hogg, representing the Coalition, about what constituted a work of art. In the end the bewigged judge decided that there were not enough ‘thought processes’ involved in the making of my image to constitute it as a work of art under the 1956 Copyright Act and we lost the case. 56

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1983: Anti-nuclear

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1983: Anti-nuclear

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Photomontage is concerned with fitting together disparate elements and exposing the hidden connections between them. In the three roughs (left, above) for the picture opposite (left, below and page 60), I merged a human skeleton with a nuclear explosion. By doing so, I was attempting to make the connection between the two different images seem inevitable. After many false starts, I saw that the smoke column at the bottom of the explosion fitted into the top of the spine. Strangely, it was an exact fit. The two conjoined images became one, and the viewer was forced to confront the reality of nuclear war in a way neither image would be able to convey by itself. In this way, the new image

disrupts the dominant narrative with its talk about nuclear weapons in terms of ‘jobs’ or ‘deterrence’ but never their potential for wreaking armageddon on civilisation. After the end of the First World War, Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann, two of the originators of Dada collage, said, ‘We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as construction: we assembled our work, like fitters.’ Around the same time, the German artist George Grosz made a portrait of the great antifascist photomontagist John Heartfield, called The Engineer Heartfield. The words ‘fitter’ or ‘engineer’ seem to me closer to the actual act of making photomontage than the word ‘artist’. 63

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1983: Anti-nuclear Between 1981 and 1986, a radical socialist administration led by Ken Livingstone was elected in London and took over the running of the Greater London Council (GLC). It was based in County Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament where the Conservatives were in power, led by Margaret Thatcher. County

Hall became an extraordinary forum for, amongstst others, women’s organisations, anti-racist groups, trade unions, anti-nuclear campaigners, tenants groups, community artists and gay rights activists, the very people who were being attacked by Thatcher and her government across the river. During 1983 the GLC designated London a nuclear-free zone and I was commissioned to produce street posters and Target London, an A3 box (left) containing 18 posters, designed by Peter Gladwin (above and right). Through a combination of text and photomontage, the posters elucidated the government’s plans to ‘protect’ Londoners in time of nuclear war. This protection was part of the GLC’s official remit, but they countered by campaigning to get rid of nuclear weapons altogether – the best possible protection of all. The text in Target London quoted from the government’s Protect and Survive booklet (see page 46) juxtaposed with highly researched reports on the effects of nuclear war written by experts: nurses, doctors and scientists. This conjunction pointed to the fact that the government had no credible plans to protect Londoners in the event of nuclear war, as the reality was that protection was impossible. The box of posters sold very cheaply as a portable exhibition. I heard that people had seen them on display in community centres, bus depots, schools, youth clubs and town halls across the UK.

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1984: Miners’ strike 6 March: Miners at Cortonwood Colliery in South Yorkshire walk out after threats to close the pit. It would be the start of one of Britain’s most divisive industrial disputes. The following day, the unions were told that Cortonwood was only one in a comprehensive schedule of pit closures. Twenty pits were signed for closure, throwing 20,000 miners out of work. Over the next year, 142,000 miners would become involved in the miners’ strike against the colliery closures and loss of jobs. Escalating police violence against the striking miners culminated at the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ on 18 June, when picket lines at the Orgreave coking plant in Rotherham were charged by mounted police, and hundreds of unarmed miners who’d been corralled into a field were beaten with batons. 

The year-long miners’ strike was the defining battle in Thatcher’s full-spectrum war against the working-class and labour movement. Through new anti-union legislation, she aimed to cut down the power of the trade unions and destroy the working-class solidarity they represented. Ultimately, the Conservative strategy of stockpiling coal and coordinating local police to disrupt pickets led to the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers. For many ex-mining communities, Thatcher’s successful war is still felt through high levels of continuing unemployment, massive poverty and impoverished communities.

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1985: BAE 26 September: The first stage of the Al-Yamamah arms deal is signed between Britain and Saudi Arabia. The prime contractor is British Aerospace (BAE). It’s the largest arms deal in British history and the foundation stone of an alliance that continues to this day. Britain still sells billions of pounds worth of fighter jets and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia, an extremist Wahhabi dictatorship run by a sprawling monarchy. As I write, Saudi Arabia is carrying out war crimes and causing mass civilian casualties in neighbouring Yemen, helping to create the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Underneath all the propaganda, this is what our politicians mean when they talk about our ‘shared values’. 

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In my installation Boardroom (left, far left and pages 160–3) the devastation of war is tattooed with a BAE Systems logo which includes their strapline, ‘INSPIRED WORK’ (sic). A blood red projection falls on children, women, men, hospitals and schools. It could be followed by the words ‘MADE IN BRITAIN’. In 2008, British company BAE Systems topped the international ranking of the world’s biggest arms companies. It’s never out of the top five. In 2008 the financial value of BAE arms sales is greater than the gross domestic product of 105 countries. Human value nil. 69

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1986: Chernobyl 26 April: Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine (then part of the USSR) explodes, leaving the local area uninhabitable for thousands of years, due to invisible background radiation. It’s one of only two nuclear accidents classified as a ‘Level 7’ event, the maximum classification, the other being the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011. What does a photograph of a nuclear power plant show us? Not that uranium and plutonium can be produced in nuclear reactors for use in nuclear weapons. Or a photo of a computer or mobile phone? Not that our personal histories are food for the omnivorous algorithms of Facebook, Amazon and the other tech behemoths. Or that the supply lines of mobile phones begin with dirtpoor workers in countries with next to no labour rights. Or that we have underdeveloped the poorest countries to get their resources cheaply for our ‘developed’ products. The literature produced by the nuclear power industry is full of photos of technicians in white coats staring hard at mysterious technology. The implied message is that they are in control and all is safe. This

message is put out by government suits, well-versed in PR, whenever a community objects to the imposition of nuclear or industrial facilities in their area. When in 1972 a nuclear reactor went critical in Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, a local inhabitant said: ‘A lot of people didn’t understand the threat because they couldn’t see it. It would have been different if the radiation had blown over us in a red cloud which people could have seen rather than this invisible gas.’ A century ago, Walter Benjamin quoted Bertolt Brecht as saying that picturing the world is complicated by the fact that ‘less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality […] So something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed’. In the digital age invisibility is built into our technology. This increasing invisibility means it’s more vital than ever that we try and construct images that picture what we know is going on not just what we see.1 Ripping, tearing, cutting, joining, connecting and assembling are all ways of taking action against our designated role as acquisitive consumers. The problem is to make visible the invisible webs of power and subjugation that underpin our lives – to search for ways to picture all of today’s red clouds. 1 ‘We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know’, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821.

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1987: Thatcher 11 June: Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister of Britain for the third time. Her years in power transform the UK into a deregulated offshore tax haven where the rich can safely stash their wealth. She continues destroying industry and the trade unions. There is, however, one sector that is saved and promoted to new heights – the arms industry. Thatcher privatises British Aerospace (BAE) and spends much of her time on foreign trips trying to sell British weapons to autocrats, dictators and Gulf monarchies.

rich. This image was originally made for the cover of the New Statesman (below), as a response to Thatcher’s call for a return to ‘Victorian values’. It also appeared in Time magazine in a feature on Thatcher’s Britain. Rumours reached me that Thatcher rather approved of the image of herself as an imperial monarch. A failed montage!

Hopefully though, the critical element in a photomontage is integral to the image, making it ideologically watertight; opposing interests intent on subverting its meaning will have a hard job doing so. However, such intention can be achieved by issues of context. An example is the Economist cover of 8 October 1983 (below), which used a photograph of a version of my photomontage Defended to Death, reconfigured as a terrific sculpture made by anti-nuclear campaigners. The article inside was assiduously pro-nuclear weapons. Of course I have no control over this process.

My photomontages are critiques, statements made deliberately difficult for people from opposing positions to co-opt, but it can happen. A glossy colour magazine showed my montage, Maggie Regina (far right), as a poster on the wall of a smart living room in one of those interminable features on the homes of the 72

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1987: Thatcher

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1988: Vanunu

26 March: Israeli nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu, is convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison – 11 spent in solitary confinement – for leaking information about Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to the Sunday Times in London. Israel has never publicly acknowledged it has nuclear weapons, but Vanunu’s disclosures are the evidence, a brave and important act that changes the politics of the Middle East. The act of whistleblowing is one of the most important and effective ways of holding power to account. In 2003, Katharine Gun, a translator at GCHQ (one of the UK government’s intelligence and security organisations), leaked secret information about illegal activities by the US in their push for the invasion of Iraq. In 2010, the US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked evidence of war crimes and corruption by the US to WikiLeaks and was sentenced to 35 years in prison before having her sentence commuted by president Obama. At the time of writing, the fate of Julian Assange, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, awaits a decision by UK courts on whether he should be extradited to the US to stand ‘trial’ for the crime of practising journalism and exposing the powerful. The US whistleblower Edward Snowden currently lives in exile in Russia after having revealed several global surveillance programmes run by the US National Security Agency, and supported by ‘Five Eyes’, the intelligence operations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, with the support of the telecommunications companies of those countries.

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1989: Berlin Wall 9 November: The East Berlin Communist party announces that citizens can move freely between East and West Germany by passing through the Berlin Wall. Up until now, the heavily fortified and intensely guarded concrete barrier built in 1961 had divided the city and its people. One year after the fall of the wall, and after 45 years of post-war partition, the two Germanys were formally reunited in October 1990. Images of Eastern European conflict were a constant in my work for many years. I often used photos of Stalin as a spectre haunting the people struggling to break free of Soviet rule. The image of Stalin projected onto clouds (below), originates from the Soviet propaganda machine of the 1930s. I used it in conjunction with an image of a Soviet soldier sitting on a tank amid Czech protesters during the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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1989: Berlin Wall

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Two days after the wall came down, I began work on this picture (above left), for the Guardian. It had to be finished in a couple of days. I got some photographic prints of the Berlin Wall from the newspaper’s picture files, but I couldn’t find any images of the wall actually coming down. This was before the total digitalisation of photography. Nowadays there’d be hundreds of photos to choose from on the internet, just minutes after it happened. I found a photo of the wall intact with the Brandenburg Gate in the background (below far left) and then scoured the area around my studio in Hackney for a broken wall to photograph. I found one with rubble and exposed concrete blocks and montaged it onto the Berlin Wall. Jenny Matthews, the great documentary

photographer I often work with, photographed me and a friend shaking hands. The image went through many roughs until it all seemed to click and I rushed it to the Guardian where it was printed the next day. The end result looks like a kind of documentary surrealism. A photomontage like this has to look realistic, in the sense that if there had been two giants around, their hands breaking through the wall would have looked something like this. Of course, today the assemblage of disparate elements could be pieced together in Photoshop, with no need for a day in the darkroom. But for me the breaking up of the actual Berlin Wall is echoed by the actual breaking and cutting up of the photograph of the Wall.

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1990: Mandela

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11 February: South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela is freed from prison after serving 27 years behind bars. He’d been sentenced in 1962 to life imprisonment, charged with conspiring to overthrow the state. His ‘crime’ was to oppose the inhumanity of apartheid: a unique form of state organised racism. During his incarceration, he served time in three prisons, including 18 years on Robben Island. Four years after being freed, in 1994, he was elected president in South Africa’s first ever democratic election. In this photomontage (left), made for the Guardian (below, showing a later version), an actual ‘WHITES ONLY’ sign is smashed in two to reveal a young Nelson Mandela in the last photograph taken of him before his imprisonment.

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1991: New World Order 16 January: US President G. H. W. Bush announces the start of Operation Desert Storm, the air campaign of the Gulf War, forcing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded and annexed months earlier. The Gulf War would instigate an uprising by the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shia in the south. But despite giving assurances that the US would support their uprising, president Bush withdrew US support and left Saddam Hussein to murder hundreds of thousands of people. In the aftermath of the Cold War, US free-market capitalism was resurgent. The Soviet Union had collapsed and there are now minimal checks on the ability of the US and its satraps to dominate the globe. The US attack on Iraq in 1991 was part of president George Bush Snr’s call for a ‘New World Order’, which was meant to be a new post-Soviet rule-based order. What it meant in reality was the US now considered itself able to use its military might to get its way wherever it wanted, with no other nation able to contain them. Iraq would pay the price for this imperialist vision, first in a brutal sanctions regime that killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, and then in 2003, with the criminal attack on Iraq by Bush Jnr and Tony Blair.

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1992: Maastricht

7 February: The members of the European Community sign the Maastricht Treaty, which further integrates the continent and is the foundation of the modern European Union (EU). The enigmatic British prime minister, John Major, comes under fire from the eurosceptic wing of his Conservative party, and is caught in the middle of an age-old feud. After 2016, the divisions within the Conservatives on Europe have become even more extreme, with arguments around the UK’s exit from the EU, or ‘Brexit’, threatening the party’s total destruction.

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1993: Human rights 14 June: The World Conference on Human Rights takes place in Vienna. The language used around the issue of human rights is something I’ve been questioning since I first started making work. The contrast between the rhetoric and the reality of my country’s attitude towards human rights and human life motivated me to set about exposing these contradictions. It’s unendurable to watch politicians and their media courtiers echo platitudes about commitments to ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ while at the same time funding and politically supporting the world’s worst tyrants and human rights abusers. I remember as a child going to Paddington Library on Saturday afternoons with my dad and being fascinated by a long row of lecterns made from heavy polished wood. Each one had a copy of that day’s newspaper laid open on it. That memory is, I think, the basis for my installation Reading Room (below), in which 21 lecterns fill a dark space. Each has a lamp front and back shining onto world newspapers, all turned to the stock market pages. On each spread the face of a woman, man or child from across the world is printed staring back at the viewer (right, far right and next page).

The faces are printed by unfixed photocopy and then worked on by drawing in charcoal so that the photographic and the autographic marks become totally locked together and seamless. The faces are injured, smeared, smudged, dissolving into the grain of the newspaper so they seem to emanate directly from newsprint. Their faces contradict the endless bland columns of share prices which appear as tiny pieces of shrapnel piercing their skin. The price of the ‘free market’ is etched into the faces that stare back to implicate us: the global south’s daily losses created by the west’s daily profits. 88 | 89

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1993: Human rights

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1994: Palestine 25 February: Far-right Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, walks into the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, occupied Palestine, and shoots 29 people dead. Fourteen years later I’m in Hebron making work with a Palestinian printer. I’m with an international group of artists organised by Banksy to put on an exhibition called Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem, a city described at the time by National Geographic as ‘one of the most contentious places on earth’. A former fried chicken café on Manger Square is converted into a makeshift gallery to show and make work alongside Palestinian artists. All the money made from the sales stays in Palestine to be used on local social and educational projects. What I saw in Bethlehem had a deep impact on me. The sight of the eight-metre high Israeli West Bank Barrier, Separation Wall (or, more accurately Apartheid Wall), the watchtowers, the uprooted olive trees making way for heavily fortified Israeli settlements, all stay in my mind. In Hebron I walked down an old Palestinian street market which is literally overlooked by an Israeli settlement. Netting, put up by Palestinians, is draped across all the buildings to catch the rubbish and rocks that had been rained down on them by the settlers. The street now appears to be almost abandoned. It all brings home the reality of life under a hostile military occupation.

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1994: Palestine

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1995: Srebrenica 11 July: Bosnian Serb forces, commanded by Ratko Mladić, enter the Bosniak town of Srebrenica, where over the next three days they massacre an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. In 1993, the United Nations had designated Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ under its protection. But the UN failed to disarm the Bosnian Serb Army or keep them out of the area. It’s an horrific genocide; no one was spared, including children. I couldn’t even conceive of how to make work about it, but wanted to memorialise it in some way. I kept thinking of Adorno’s words ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. In the end I made a series of small pictures on scraps of paper called UNwords, using unfixed photocopy and charcoal. The

images (below and right) are fugitive, on the edge of disappearing, rubbed away; traces of hands clawing at sentences from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN communiqués on Srebrenica. I wanted to show the anguish of the people on the ground, their hands clawing at the lofty words of the UN, now rendered meaningless and exposed. The UN was founded with great hope in the aftermath of the Second World War, committing the peoples of the world to upholding human rights and dignity for all. But since then, it has failed again and again to live up to its high-minded ideals. In the case of Srebrenica, the people were told by the UN they were safe – but instead they were massacred.

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1996: Nuclear treaties 10 September: The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a legally binding global ban on nuclear explosive testing, is signed. But the US Senate rejects it in 1999, and other countries, including India, North Korea and Pakistan, fail to ratify it. In 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is signed by 122 countries. Again, all countries with a nuclear arsenal, including the US, China, UK and Russia, don’t ratify it. This treaty had been set up and campaigned for over many years by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition of organisations in 100 countries. In 2017, they receive the Nobel Peace Prize. I designed their logo, based on the Broken Missile (see page 49) that I originally made for the UK Labour party.

Treaties get ratified by some, but the madness continues. Politicians and generals lie about new, smaller nuclear weapons being ‘useable’ as they’re ‘low yield’. They call them ‘nuclear bunker busters’. The stakes get raised ever higher in the casino of ordnance. Using a photo of gamblers in a casino, a superimposed photo of missiles morphs into gambling chips (right). In the process, the two images become one, joining together cause and effect: the picture shows, not describes. Separate images, which previously would glide in and out of consciousness without a thought, are problematised and become critical. The resulting image could be of arms dealers profiting from war, or maybe it’s government ministers gambling the lives of millions of people globally. No matter who the specific gamblers are, the fact is, they’re all gambling with extinction. 98 | 99

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1997: Kyoto Protocol 1 December: 192 countries sign the Kyoto Protocol, a non-binding agreement that commits the signatories to bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. The protocol states that climate change is happening and is predominantly human-created. The US, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, refuses to sign.

I feel it’s important to show the long-term horror we face from the climate emergency. I often have to argue this position with protest groups who think that tough imagery might put potential supporters off. My view is that the carbon neutral world they’re fighting for won’t gain support through the depiction of rainbows and polar bears, but rather through new images of what the future has in store unless we act. That may be images of spewing oil spills, deforestation, or refugees. To me, depicting a sunny and just future does not encourage protest, it imposes a utopian vision. Such imagery deprives people of the ability to use their own imagination about what needs to happen and where we want to go. I see my job as critiquing what we’ve got now. I don’t want to lay down a blueprint or prescriptive plan of what should follow. Propaganda tells people what to do; I’m trying to open up a critical space that allows people to critique images they’ve become inured to, and hopefully, jolt and disrupt deeply held assumptions. 100

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1998: Famine

April: A combination of war and drought brings famine to more than a million people in Sudan and Ethiopia. It’s one of many famine disasters in a continent rich in resources but that’s been subjected to western exploitation for two centuries. My images seek to smash the illusion that this is all the result of inexorable natural laws and impersonal forces. For me it’s clear that the inequality and poverty we see all over the world is a man-made crisis that could be solved if our economic system was built for the good of human beings, rather than for the good of share prices. 

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1999: Seattle 30 November: The annual World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle sees thousands demonstrate against corporate ‘globalisation’ and the unfair trading terms enforced primarily by the west. The protestors are violently suppressed by tear gas, the National Guard, dogs and armoured cars. The protesters argue that the US is using the WTO to protect its own markets and open up lucrative new ones. A petition is quickly signed by 1,700 groups across the world to support the people opposing this corporate stitch-up. Both inside the meeting and outside on the streets, the ‘Battle of Seattle’ gained infamy as a major skirmish in the war between the exploited and those whose job it is to extract their wealth by every means possible.

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2000: Millennium 1 January: New Labour’s disastrous vanity project to welcome in the new millennium, the Millennium Dome, opens to the public. It’s meant to be a ‘millennium experience’, engaging the population in a vast celebration of life under New Labour. My memory is of a logo-strewn shambles of patronising displays for ‘the people’. It was a success in the sense that it was a strangely precise portrait of the logo-strewn interior of Tony Blair’s brain, full of disdain for people unless they were oligarchs, dictators or billionaires. The idea was that millions of us would turn up, pay the entrance fee and be entranced. We didn’t, and we weren’t. There was a vast overspend on New Labour’s creation to the tune of £80 million and it got less than half the number of predicted visitors. After it finished, the Dome was empty for seven years. In 1999, in the dying days of the old century, I wrote Domesday Book, which combined photomontages and a long poem. It centred around a wandering character who arrives at the Millennium Dome while it’s under construction and is caught in the flash of security lights. He then hallucinates the twentieth century through words and images. The narrative is punctuated

with doubts and questions about how to convey reality through constructing images. It’s about the flashes that Walter Benjamin described when he wrote, ‘to articulate the past historically means to seize hold of the memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ The People’s Dome (below), was my riposte to the Millennium Dome. It comprised of pallets and flimsy wooden struts found on the street holding up a ‘dome’ made from a torn umbrella. Strewn around were 40-watt light bulbs flickering in shoddy holders. Unlike the one upriver, it was free to enter.

I also wrote a letter to the Guardian (above) which was published on 31 December 1999, the last day of the millennium.

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2000: Millennium At every locked gate An intruder alarm — A click of light on auto-switch.

This toxic celebration Sees out the century, Leaving the mute mute.

For every movement A movement detector, Photo-cells flashing —

2

Like boxes of flesh Fork-lifted onto pallets Off the public shelves.

Fragments from Domesday Book:

Contact printed Autopsies Of the bodies emulsion.

1 That night, with my carriers Of clippings, photos, junk, I pushed on

‘All isolated cases’ Forcibly removed From the civic glare.

Under the river Walking a car tunnel, I arrived at construction and mud.

That night I saw the foundations, The pile of rubble, The empty circle.

On pallets — Faces, Caught in transit.

Eyes, ears etc. Caked in blood, Turin Shrouds of the written off. Dissolved in light — My brain, a projector Flashed back unstoppable images

3

As if photos were hauled Onto the scaffold Of a century ticking under.

In the hauntings That flash, Dark space

From rubble, a century’s slip-way Exports emerge, The dealers profit through the mud.

Clicks on and off In random fits And stops —

From their gobs The logo grin Prevails.

Sitting at a table, Its leg propped On Jane’s Fighting Ships,

Designed to omit The export of arms Designed to kill. In everyday war, Fought by all means Unnecessary.

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I glue down cuttings In a scrapped book Of the century’s exit.

Banker winks At General, General winks

Uproot the artist’s impression And a flood of bodies Covers the concrete.

Matters of fact, fleshed out In a chaos of photos Torn through and cut.

At Minister. Minister shuts both eyes Tight on ‘collateral damage’.

From global debt, Interminably signed Dead cheques,

At the top table, Set for celebration In dead space

4 Picture this — In the casinos Of ordnance,

Dud babies Dud cheques Dead babies. The nibs that sign, Are squashed and splayed By bodies

When a country’s Bombed off the map Over there,

Falling through the century. Two lines of blotched ink, Never meeting: going nowhere.

It’s put On the map Over here. Photos are trafficked By dealers, Stills are snapped up. Smart hands are dealt To brokers Of smart bombs Are scattered treaties, Statements, declarations, Invoices, sanctions,

From a gone century Pitted with ordnance Ordnance survey the ordnance.

Spreadsheets, communiques, Export orders, Edicts, dicta —

5

Needs asphyxiated by profit, Land unpeopled In conglomerate stink. The centrifuge of power, In an imperial glide, Chucks out the grit. The unsponsored voice Is thrown to the edge Of the audible.

Smudged with mucus and grime, Napkins At an arms fair. Embraced in the fetid cling Of the arms Of the arms dealer —

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2001: Terrorism 11 September: A series of four attacks in the US are carried out by terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, killing 2,996 people and injuring over 6,000 others. President George W. Bush immediately announces the War on Terror and less than a month later, on 7 October, the US begins its invasion of Afghanistan, the start of a war that carries on to this day and shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

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2002: Afghanistan 1 July: Less than a year into the attack on Afghanistan, the US military bombs a house full of wedding guests, killing more than 30 innocent people. ‘At least one bomb was errant’, admits Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, who goes on to say: ‘we don’t know where it fell.’ A long-term concern of mine has been to make images that expose the perversion of language, the politics-speak designed to sanitise barbarism. Orwell wrote that political language ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. ‘Collateral damage’ is one example I particularly hate. The phrase first appeared in the 1960s and sounds innocuous enough: a clinical term that is hard to decode. But actually, stripped down, it means the murder of innocent civilians perhaps by so-called ‘smart bombs’. The cross hairs in this series of portraits are like those used by military fighter jets, drones and helicopters to ‘find, fix, finish’ their targets. They sell the illusion of accuracy and precision, but many miss. Collateral damage, or murder of innocents, is priced in.

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2002: Afghanistan

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2003: Stop the war 15 February: Co-ordinated protests across the world take place against the imminent attack on Iraq by the US, the UK and the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’. A million-strong march snakes through the centre of London, the biggest demonstration of its kind in the country’s history. In Madrid, 1.5 million people take to the streets. Every country on the planet sees some sort of protest. The world is shouting ‘NO’. But the warmongers didn’t listen. The invasion begins a month later, on 20 March. Blair and Bush lied about Iraq’s supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs), with which we were told Saddam Hussein could launch an attack in just 45 minutes. This follows in a long history of imperial lies, no different to the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, which formed the pretext for starting the Vietnam War. It was completely fake, as was the threat of WMDs in Iraq. No WMDs were ever found. A million people killed or injured. A region destroyed. For a lie. The photomontage (far right) was first used as a book cover for Defended to Death in 1983. I put a gas mask on a globe, photographed it, cut it out and then placed it onto a photo of the earth. The flags of the USSR and the USA were put into the mask’s eyes and missiles were cut together to pour out of its ‘mouth’. For the invasion of Iraq, the flag of the USSR was changed to a Union Jack and made into a poster and banner for the Stop the War Coalition. My first use of the gas mask (an object originating from the Second World War) was to protest against the cold war then later, against the war in Iraq. The continuity of war creates its own symbols which can be subverted for use against war. The photomontage uses the ‘given frames’ of the gas masks mouth and eye sockets (see also pages 6–7). Photomontage is the result of a search for everyday images that fit together to form a new reality. It’s this fitting together that differentiates it from collage where often fragments deliberately don’t cohere. In a classic Dada collage it’s as if images and words are sent into orbit, causing fragments to fly off in all directions. Collage leaves the jigsaw puzzle in pieces in its box; photomontage reconfigures the pieces together. Both rage against war. 116 | 117

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2004: Iraq 29 October: 18 months after the attack on Iraq, the Lancet medical journal releases its study calculating the war has cost 100,000 Iraqi lives so far. Two years later, in 2006, their estimate has risen to 654,965 Iraqi deaths caused by the war. The US and UK have a policy of not counting the number of Iraqis who die as a result of the attack on their country. General Tommy Franks, the US commander at the launch of the attack, commented simply: ‘We don’t do body counts.’ Military culture relies on dehumanising the occupied populations. The indigenous people are inevitably seen as backward, which is how the atrocities carried out against them can be rationalised. It’s why medals are handed out to those who successfully pacify and subdue the recalcitrant natives. This happened in Iraq, but it’s happened in all wars in my lifetime. These medals could be given from any army to any soldier in that time. War is, and always has been, a crime and it’s the soldiers and civilians who die, not the generals and politicians. In this series of photo-paintings, I try to link the shiny medals given to soldiers in Iraq to the actual victims of imperial violence, something our society never allows. No separation is guarded more forcefully than the line drawn between the venerated medals of war, and the victims of an invading army’s violence. A line of three metre high canvases are propped against the wall like a row of leaning tombstones (see page 121).

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2004: Iraq

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2005: United Nations 24 October: The 60th anniversary of the United Nations is celebrated, while wars across the globe flash up on our screens and arms sales rise. ‘We the peoples of the United Nations are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, says the preamble to the 1945 Charter of the UN. Ever since I first went to art school in 1965, I’ve been concerned with picturing – first through pen and ink, then later through scissors and paste – the lofty ideals of the UN alongside the filthy truth of how our world is run. The UN Security Council is regularly made toothless by vetoes reflecting the self-interest of the world’s most powerful states. In 1989, I was invited by the UN Staff Movement for Disarmament (a group of UN workers who were putting pressure on the UN to fight for nuclear disarmament), to show my exhibition, Images for Disarmament at their headquarters in Geneva (left). While there, I heard a speech by Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, Director-General of the World Health Organization, which has haunted me ever since. He opened with a deadly equation. He said that for one billion dollars – the cost, at that time, of just 20 military fighter jets – the world could control illnesses that killed 11 million children every year in the global south. The single click of a camera shutter cannot picture this equation. You can have a picture of 20 military jets, or a picture of a malnourished child. But they are separate events, separate realities, a separation that our politicians, military leaders and corporate titans want to sustain. But, through photomontage, they can be entwined. For me, only when considered together can we really understand in whose interest our world is run and within what moral framework our leaders take decisions. Two clicks can be brought together to reveal a third meaning.

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2006: Climate emergency 30 October: The economist Nicholas Stern presents his report on the environmental impact of climate change. It warns that warming of just 2° C could leave 15–40 per cent of species facing extinction. He concludes that what we do in the next two decades will have a profound effect on climate in the second half of this century. As I write, over 10 years later, the oil is still flowing freely, the chimneys are still belching and the luxury yachts grow longer. Now, in the midst of climate emergency, it’s even more imperative that artists act as early warning systems, positioning themselves as the canaries in the coalmine. Through our work we need to imagine the dystopian reality of where the earth is heading and to work with activists struggling to find another way. I’ve used the first photo of the whole Earth, taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, ever since I saw it. I’ve covered it in oil, montaged belching chimneys onto it, dressed it in a gas mask vomiting missiles, and many other incarnations. I remember when I first wanted to use the photo. I went around several picture agencies to get a print and found that a number of them seemed to hold the same picture. This was surprising: photos are usually held by one agency that owns its copyright and charges for use. Because so many held the copyright to the Earth picture, I was suspicious. I contacted the US space agency NASA instead, seeing as it was their astronauts who took the photo. In the end, they sent it to me for free, saying there was, in fact, no copyright on the image. As someone who deals with issues around photos and copyright endlessly, this was refreshing. The source of this image acknowledged that the picture belongs to us all. The picture agencies were revealed, however, to be trying to make a quick buck out of a photo they’d got for free. I had to laugh – business is business.

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2006: Climate emergency

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2007: Trident 14 March: The House of Commons passes a motion authorising a £20 billion upgrade of the Trident nuclear weapons ‘system’. More money down the drain. The dictionary definition of system, however, is ‘a set of things connected as a considered whole’. The considered whole, in this case, is nuclear extermination. This, funnily enough, isn’t mentioned in Parliament. The nuclear weapons industry has not revealed its destructive potential to society at large since the

world saw photographs of the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Parts of Britain’s nuclear ‘defence’ system are situated in Holy Loch in the Firth of Clyde, a picturesque part of Scotland. My subverted postcard (below) hints at the grim reality that lies half submerged. It still doesn’t reveal the other half of the equation, that another layer of vital social services has been cut to pay for the upgrade to a ‘system’ the sole purpose of which is mass destruction.

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2008: Crash

15 September: Lehman Brothers, a global financial services firm started in 1850, files for bankruptcy, sparking the world’s most significant financial crash since 1929. The system is saved through massive tax-payer-funded bailouts of the so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks. Not one banker responsible is put behind bars and soon after the crash, it’s back to business as usual: the huge bonuses start flowing again and the casino culture carries on as if nothing has happened. For the rest of us, it’s a decade of austerity, an attack on resources and massive cutbacks to services for working people across the world. News Truck is a ‘rapid-response vehicle’ that I made in the 1990s (above). It’s a large metal street vehicle, filled with giant news screens, based on the ones found outside newsagents. I pushed it from my

studio down to the London Stock Exchange three or four miles away and laid out the screens against its front wall (above right). Each screen contains an enlarged stock prices page from one of the world’s newspapers, overprinted with a hand tearing at the prices. I stood by the side of the screens offering no leaflets or explanations. Some suits in the City thought I must be selling or advertising something. A couple of stockbrokers even thought it was art made especially for them to buy. Stockbroker art! I thought of it as a form of live visual dissent. By portraying the serried ranks of share prices overlaid with their human cost, I was trying to find a way to open up a discussion in the belly of the beast. In fact, in the process of explaining what I was doing, I got into a number of interesting discussions with City workers about the morality of ‘free-market’ capitalism.

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Images of hands have become a key emblem for me in portraying the global struggle for change. This fascination with hands and what they represent also reflects the actual process through which I make work. I use my hands to tear at the paper, in frustration at the impossibility of being able to show what’s really happening. Hands tear at stock prices, furious at the distance between this matrix of numbers and the victims of the system that these numbers inadequately represent. I’m literally trying to rip through the lie, to physically dig for the truth. The action of tearing becomes the image. The physical assault on the paper is my way of answering back.

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2008: Crash

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2008: Crash

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2009: Drones 20 January: Barack Obama is sworn in as president of the United States. In his first year in office, he unleashes more drone strikes across the world than his predecessor George W. Bush ordered in his entire two-term tenure. Obama eventually orders 563 strikes targeting Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during his period in office. Between 384 and 807 civilians are killed in those countries. The estimate is so rough because the US refuses to release casualty figures, unless the numbers are for its own troops. The use of drones is one of the most horrific developments in twenty-first century warfare, making the act of murder even more clinical than previously. People in the desert in Arizona sit in front of screens tracking human beings thousands of miles away like ants, before deciding whether to blow them – and anyone near them – to smithereens. It’s warfare as video game. Victims report seeing the shadow of a drone on the ground and hearing a faint hum before the terror is unleashed. The Americans call their main reconnaissance drone the RQ-7 Shadow. I’ve read reports from the Middle East that low-flying drones are often used as a tool for intimidation and to strike fear into people on the ground: we know who you are; we know where you are. I had these people’s testimonies in mind when I made this work (far right), using lights projecting the shadows of drones over three mouthless faces (see also pages 168–74).

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2010: Deepwater Horizon

20 April: The Deepwater Horizon, a BP-operated offshore drilling rig, catches fire and explodes in the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting oil spill goes on for three months and causes devastation to the local environment. Fossil fuels are the main cause of the current climate emergency, a suicidal energy source that is only maintained because of the lobbying power of the huge

companies which profit massively from the industry. Renewable energy technology has advanced far enough that, if the political will was there, we could convert to a clean, green future. It won’t happen until we have an economic system which places the needs and welfare of human beings above short-term profit. We need systemic change. Time is running out.

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2010: Deepwater Horizon

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2011: Arab Spring 4 January: Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire in Ben Arous, Tunisia, to protest against the constant harassment and intimidation from the authorities as he tries to make a living as a street vendor. His act of martyrdom sparks the biggest uprising in the Arab world in modern history. The Tunisian people have, within a month, toppled the US- and France-backed dictator, Ben Ali, who’s ruled with an iron fist for a quartercentury. The wave of people power spreads to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and many other countries, before the forces of reaction reassert control again. Political dissidents, journalists, human rights activists and workers find themselves under new and concerted attack as the counter-revolution plays out across the region. It’s said that when Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution he replied, ‘Too early to say.’ Likewise, the long-term impact of the Arab Spring will probably not be known for a century, but it shows how one spark can ignite the power of the people. Democracy is hibernating. The people, placards doubling as shovels, will dig it up again.

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2012: Military-industrial complex The level of funding proposed for the US defence budget in 2012 is the highest since the Second World War. The $682 billion spent on the military by the US in 2012 is more than the combined military spending of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. Together, these countries spend $652 billion. Equating the cost of the military to the cost of alleviating poverty and disease is at the core of my work. The UN, which was set up to stop hunger and disease, has an annual budget that is only 1.8 per cent of the world’s annual military budget. That horrendous disparity

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is one connection that I’ve tried to picture over the years. Years in which the gap between the cost of weapons and its equivalence in alleviating poverty has grown ever wider. The weaponry is winning the war on poverty. There is another connection to cut and paste together. The US military is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. The figures published vary between 100 and 144 million barrels a year, approximately 90 per cent of all the oil consumed by the US annually. The military-industrial complex eats up the earth, spits out its poorest people and then wages war on them.

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2012: Military-industrial complex

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The top photograph shows the moment a wristwatch stopped when the world’s first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan on 20 August 1945. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, another 35,000 were injured and at least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of radiation fallout. 147

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2013: G8 17 June: The G8 is an annual summit of the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, USA and Russia (though suspended in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea). The G8 meetings are also an annual signal for the people of the world to protest against their leaders’ weasel words and imperialist power plays. In 2013, the meeting is held in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. I produce a set of posters which are uploaded to the internet for anyone to download and print out and use themselves. The posters aim to show realities that would never get a mention inside the G8. From my upload some people print pocket-sized stickers, while others make hoarding-sized posters. The images, I hope, can disrupt the smooth imagery around the G8 and give visual expression to people’s resistance. Noble words like ‘democracy’, ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ – used repeatedly inside venues holding events like the G8 – when uttered by this elite, have been put through the corporate washing machine, laundered into oblivion and spun of all meaning. Over and over again, I’ve seen that the only way these very words can be reclaimed is by the actions of the disenfranchised who dissent and fight back.

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2013: G8

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The question of how to reach as large and varied an audience as possible is as vital to me as the work I make. I try to show my work in locations beyond the spaces designated for experiencing art. I want to develop forms that can easily slide from the gallery into the street and back again. For me, there’s no right or wrong place to show my work. It might be a public museum or gallery, but equally it might be on the street, in a newspaper or book, on a badge, placard, T-shirt or online. If the work connects with people, I’m okay with it.

When I get asked to put up some work in a public space it’s often from an organisation that’s not on the official art circuit. More than likely they’re skint and local funds, if there are any, have been diverted to an official arts venue. In these situations my exhibition will be determined by the size of the van they can afford to hire to move the work. It can be an ‘8.5cwt show’, a ‘Luton van show’ or a ‘roof rack’, ‘hand luggage’ or ‘parcel van show’. The work is exhibited in relation to economic necessity. Sometimes I’ll send the venue the scans and the venue will print out the work at a size it can afford. Being London-based, I’m constantly made aware of the fact that I’m in the privileged position of being able to make work that rails against the government, but not get locked up for it. In more and more countries, artists, writers, theatre workers, film directors and cultural activists who criticise their governments are being suppressed, imprisoned, even killed. I try and speak out through showing critical work in public spaces and institutions, but there are insidiously subtle forms of censorship attached to showing work in these places. In the UK, the fear of losing corporate sponsorship means institutions often self-censor: whole exhibitions never happen or certain works are excluded before an event. In 1997, I was invited by the Serpentine Gallery, London, to take part in a project in Kensington Gardens. Artists were asked to submit images that would be printed onto deckchairs. Before I’d even put forward my rough ideas, I received a letter from an Arts Council trainee at the gallery. I won’t name her – she was being considerate in warning me not to waste my time – but the letter reveals the usually hidden machinations operating within the art industry. She writes: ‘…having spoken with the powers that be [at the gallery], I fear that this project may not be the best place for an overtly political artist. The indication [I received] was that controversial work may be at risk of censorship and I feel it would be unfair to ask you to invest in a project when this is a possible outcome.’ The ‘indication’ suggests that in order to save myself from being censored it might be best if I didn’t participate – by censoring myself.

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2014: Austerity 6 January: UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, promises £25 billion in further spending cuts to the welfare budget, arguing the Conservatives’ brutal austerity programme is ‘not even half done’. Austerity is a political choice – a decision to balance the books on the backs of the poorest, while giving the bankers who caused the financial crisis a free pass. Five years on, in 2019, Humans Rights Watch, a New York-based NGO, published a report stating that Conservative government ministers had ‘largely ignored growing evidence of a stark deterioration in the standard

of living for the UK’s poorest residents, including skyrocketing food bank use, and multiple reports from school officials that many more children are arriving at school hungry and unable to concentrate’. The UK has experienced reductions to nearly all its public services, with many of the most savage cuts imposed on local government and the vital services it provides. You can see it when you walk around any city in the UK. Homelessness is everywhere again. Millions are living in desperate conditions. Austerity has been a catastrophe for Britain’s ever-increasing poor.

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2014: Austerity In 1987 I was commissioned by a charity to make work about homelessness in London. I went out with a camera, but found I couldn’t photograph homeless people on the street. I felt something of what Martha Rosler talked about when she was making her great work from 1974–5, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, about people living out on the streets of New York. She photographed doorways on the Bowery and placed the photos next to words she’d heard there. She didn’t want to photograph those ‘twice victimised; first by society and then by the photographer’. The title of this work is also a kind of talisman for me as it expresses how it feels trying to make political work about local or global poverty – inadequate. I noticed that a number of street homeless people were sleeping out on wooden pallets that they’d found abandoned in the city. I gathered up some pallets near my studio and evolved a method of printing photos of faces and hands onto very thin photographic paper which I glued onto the pallets, some of which I smashed up with an axe. Household dust was then sieved onto them so that traces of people seemed to emanate from the wood or as if people had lain on them (see also fragment 2, page 108). Pallets are normally made to move objects on, here the ‘objects’ are people, almost invisible in the dust. Unseen, we walk past them in the street. I lost the original commission. Perhaps dustcovered pallets are not what a charity needs to communicate directly to possible donors. But in the process, I developed a way to make physically based work in which 3D material directly relevant to the subject matter is used rather than my usual mode, using a 2D photograph. In response to new draconian austerity measures announced in 2014, I smashed up some more pallets and tried once again to picture people who, forced by circumstances, live on the street. When the pallets were to be shown at an exhibition, I arranged for movers to pick them up. When they arrived, all they could see was a pile of dusty, smashed-up wood, which they assumed they were depositing at the local dump. At the other extreme, after one of the pallets was shown at Invention d’un Art, an exhibition celebrating 150 years of photography at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, it arrived back at my studio in an enormous packing case swaddled in layers of archival packing made from a variety of obscure materials. Encased in the middle, cosseted and pristine, was my smashed-up pallet. 158 | 159

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2015: Militarism World military expenditure in 2015 is estimated to be $1.7 trillion, representing 2.3 per cent of global gross domestic product or $228 per person. Nine states – the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) – possess approximately 15,395 nuclear weapons, of which 4,120 are deployed with operational forces. Roughly 1,800 of these weapons are kept in a state of high operational alert.1 This is known as ‘arms control’. The installation Boardroom (right and over page) was constructed for my exhibition, Unofficial War Artist, at the Imperial War Museum, curated by Richard Slocombe in 2015, and has since been shown in other venues. It consists of numerous prints hanging by hand vices attached to different lengths of studding applied to wooden boards which encompass the whole space. The work concerns how different sorts of data can be communicated to a general audience at a time when facts have become highly contentious, contested by unapologetic liars sitting in seats of power across the world. In Boardroom, statistics which might normally be glossed over as too abstract to consider are brought into focus by being printed onto strips of glass through which light is passed onto photomontage prints hanging at different levels all around the space. The numerals, many consisting of numerous zeros, leave their projected shadow on montages of our past and current inhumanity. The key is printed out on the guard rail surrounding the work, providing each statistic and its source. An example is the number ‘1,000,000,000’ printed on a glass strip. On the guard rail are the words ‘More than 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. Another 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than $2 a day’.2 The noughts suggest vast numbers, the text gives the facts according to the UN. Statistics can be questionable, but each is followed by an authoritative source which people can look up. I saw lots of school groups in Boardroom discussing the statistics and checking them out on their phones. It sets up a visual conversation. 1 Data: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 2 Data: United Nations (UN)

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2015: Militarism

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All elements in Boardroom are moveable. If a new war breaks out or a prime minister changes, the images can be changed, as shown (below): a photo of Cameron is replaced by one of May while the exhibition was in Somerset House, London.

I also designed 100 business cards printed with the actual logos and straplines of the world’s top 100 weapons manufacturers. Instead of the customary habit of handing out such cards to the men in suits at an arms fair, here it’s as if they’ve been visited on the desolate victims of the manufacturers’ weapons.

Many of the visitors to the exhibition I talked to couldn’t believe I hadn’t made up the words they use to describe their companies. The world’s top five armsproducing companies and their straplines are listed here in descending order. They constitute an obscene poem: We never forget who we’re working for Lockheed Martin Forever new frontiers Boeing Customer success is our mission Raytheon Inspired work BAE Systems Defining the future Northrop Grumman 163

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2016: Trident vote 18 July: British MPs vote in Parliament to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) estimates it’ll cost at least £205 billion to build and maintain. How many hospitals, schools, houses, community centres is that? UK prime minister Theresa May, says in the parliamentary debate on Trident renewal that ‘yes’ she would push the nuclear button. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says ‘no’ he wouldn’t. Yet it’s Corbyn that the establishment says is a mortal danger to us all. The campaign against Trident renewal used my 36-year-old broken missile photomontage (see page 49) on placards and posters which were put up in Underground stations all over London (see right). I’m glad the work gets used in campaigns over and over again, but it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – something I made over three decades ago is as relevant today, maybe more so in the age of Trump, as it was in 1980. A lot of my work has focused on the role of Britain in the world, because I believe we are all implicated in the crimes committed by our own country. I also focus on my own backyard, because the work can be directly used as the visual element in British campaigning and protest. Britain is stacked with nuclear missiles and is the second largest arms dealer in the world. London, the city where I was born, regularly hosts DSEI (Defence & Security Equipment International), the world’s biggest arms fair. If this wasn’t enough, London is the world’s financial and money-laundering capital too. But these are also global issues. So I might create an image for a campaign in the UK that quickly circulates around the world online or through newspapers, posters or badges that people make. For all non-profit groups campaigning around issues like human rights, climate justice and peace, there’s no copyright and my work is free to use.

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2016: Trident vote

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2017: Refugees 19 June: The UN refugee agency announces a record 65.6 million people worldwide are either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced. Wars in the Middle East, climate catastrophe and poverty in countries which the west has plundered, have created a refugee crisis that’s rendered millions of people stateless. These people are unheard and unseen – they are unpeople. In response, refugees are presented with ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘Fortress America’, a nativist xenophobia which allows them to die on the road, plummet from an airplane or drown at sea. The countries from which refugees flee have often been destroyed by the very same countries that then refuse them entry. We light the fire, but stop anyone leaving the house. I wanted to make a series of works that slowed down our confrontation with the face of a fellow human. At first sight the ‘face’ paintings appear to be a row of small blank, black canvases. On closer inspection, each one is an image of a face looking back at us. We face them, they face us. Their mouths have disappeared, not gagged, but gone. The people are anonymous. I made a free newspaper (see page 174) to be piled up next to the paintings when they were exhibited. I was with the printers as it was coming off the press and they thought it was a disaster: fuzzy grey images next to smudged words of a dictionary definition of the word ‘face’. As you turn the pages it’s as if the ink is being rubbed away and the words and faces, seemingly unfixed, land on your skin. 168

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2017: Refugees

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2017: Refugees

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2018: Capitalism 20 December: Oxfam reports that the world’s 26 richest people own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity, or 3.8 billion people. This is business as usual for capitalism. It’s the system running as it should. It’s not a mistake. The whole system is set up to increase the wealth of the richest. The logic of free-market capitalism puts profit above humanity and always will. Making images about all the stuff going on is as everyday to me as brushing my teeth. It’s not special. It’s using the tools at my disposal and the time I have, to be a reporter by other means. I’ve never thought of my

work as an ‘intervention’ (a word that is often bandied about). This suggests being outside of the experience that you depict. I’m not homeless but my studio leads through a passage onto the street where people are sleeping in doorways and food banks multiply. I’ve not experienced the horror of the war in Syria or Yemen, but I’m living in a country whose actions are globally tied up with what’s happening in those countries. To make work about this is not about being a ‘political artist’ in the sense that Morandi is not called a ‘bottle artist’. It’s about being a citizen.

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2018: Capitalism

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2018: Capitalism

July 2018: Over a third of the artists in the exhibition Hope to Nope at the Design Museum, London, decide to remove their work from display after hearing that the museum had been used by Leonardo, one of the world’s biggest arms and weapons manufacturers, for a corporate event during the run of their exhibition. The hypocrisy of the museum booking Leonardo for a jolly get together with clients while simultaneously showing activist art protesting about a whole raft of issues, including war, human rights abuses, the climate emergency and racism, created outrage on the part of the artists and the global arts community. Leonardo, (a whitewashed company name if ever there was one) had amalgamated with Finmeccanica, who, under their new name, had transferred their love of culture from the National Gallery (see page 44) to the Design Museum. Before taking down their work, the artists contacted the directors of the museum numerous times to get an explanation from them about why they were quietly supporting and profiting from the most deadly and destructive industry in the world and to ask them to consider having an ethical funding policy. The museum came out fighting, accusing the artists of being influenced by outside activists (they obviously hadn’t noticed that most of the artists in the exhibition were in fact activist artists). They said that the museum ‘welcomes a plurality of voices and commercial entities’, but did

concede that they would hold a special trustees meeting to ‘review our due diligence policies related to commercial and fundraising activities’. A year later, not a word has come back from them. It’s been a long meeting. In solidarity with the artists in Hope to Nope I demanded that the gallery take down my print of Union Mask (see page 117) which was on permanent display in the museum and to keep it down until they’d come to a decision not to raise funds with the help of blood money from arms dealers – in other words, asking the museum to develop an ethical funding policy. It now feels like Union Mask will remain in their store an awfully long time. I made the montage (shown in the process of being put together, above left) for the poster (right), designed by This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, that promoted the exhibition of work that had been removed by the artists from the Design Museum. The group found a great free public space, the Brixton Rec. This is just one example of a growing global movement amongst artworkers to question and fight the connection of arts institutions to corporate money from drug, oil, cigarette and weapons manufacturers who’ve quietly been using culture to whitewash their products for decades. Now, institutions are being put under an ethical spotlight by the actual people who produce the work they rely on for their existence. Dodgy sponsors cannot just silently piggyback on culture to gain a veneer of ethical respectability.

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2019: Trump

1 February: President Trump confirms that the US is exiting the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, which was signed in 1987 to prohibit nuclear missiles with ranges between 500km and 5,500km. Trump tears it up and starts a new arms race. In 2017, he had announced he was withdrawing the US from the non-binding Paris Agreement, which sought to get all the world’s powers to stop rising temperatures through a commitment to carbon emissions reductions. He tore it up and the oil barons laughed all the way to their tax havens. Noam Chomsky writes that, ‘Humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war.’ The Trump Reality TV Show has bulldozed through our screens, making both these threats far more likely. Trump is the symptom of a system that’s collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Antonio Gramsci wrote, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Trump … morbid symptom … enough said. 182

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2019: Trump

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2019: Trump

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The n00se of n0ughts The estimated cost of the modernisation for the current US arsenal, including ‘life extension’ programmes for nuclear weapons and procurement of new delivery systems is $1 trillion (or $1,000,000,000,000).1 Each nought forms a noose with which we are killing ourselves. But, as in a photomontage, through splicing these noughts together, they can be linked into a chain – a chain of resisters and protesters refusing to accept the nightmarish calculus of endless war, climate catastrophe and poverty. The images in this book are historical and tied to particular dates. But they are also ahistorical in that they all speak about a universal yearning for freedom from lies and whitewashing. The realities exposed are always current. Images I made half a century ago take on themes which we’re still fighting against today, and that the corporate and political elites are still trying to cover up. For this reason, I’ve not been too strict with the chronological origins of every image: most appear in the years they were made, but not all. My work erupts from translating anger at oppression into image. Today many artists all over the world are making work for the same reason. Corporate imagery has slid off the billboards to invade every crack and crevice of public space as well as our conscious and subconscious minds. Artists – whether in studios, communities or the street – are ripping aside the corporate veil to reveal what we really have in common: the fight against profit at all costs and our struggles against racism, war, sexism, inequality and climate disaster. The scalpel needed to puncture the propaganda bubble in which we all live has been blunted over the last 50 years. Corporate control of our societies is more potent than when I first started out. But then so too is the resistance. 1 Data: Center for Nonproliferation Studies

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18 April 2019: Extinction Rebellion projection onto Marble Arch, London.

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