In early 1983, the former Labour MP Brian Walden interviewed Margaret Thatcher live from 10 Downing Street. The interview began at noon. The prime minister restated her belief that individuals had grown too dependent on the state, and that strikes were really nothing more than a selfish howl for a greater share. Walden quickly interjected, suggesting there was nothing particularly new about her ideas. “They have a resonance of our past,” he said. “You’ve really outlined an approval of what I would call Victorian values.”
This appeared, unexpectedly, to please the prime minister. “Exactly,” she half-whispered to Walden, whom she had already named publically as her favourite interviewer. “Very much so.”
Perhaps one of the best known images to come out of Margaret Thatcher’s assertion, and continued reassertion, of what she believed to be “Victorian values” was Peter Kennard’s Maggie Regina. The montage was originally designed for the front cover of the New Statesman in May 1983, but is now owned by the Tate collection and is exhibited regularly. The magazine assembled a pull-out supplement in which university historians wrote to explode Thatcherite conceptions of liberal purity, which they argued were mistakenly attributed to the Victorian era, just as the Victorians had attributed them to the Middle Ages in their own day.
“She wasn’t a PR construction like Cameron is,” says Kennard, now Senior Tutor in photography at the Royal College of Art. “She was direct – we had to attack her directly as well.” Kennard’s latest exhibition, “Blue Murder”, devised in collaboration with Cat Phillipps, aims to break through the thicker sheen of modern politicians, working with the “flat screen desert” of David Cameron’s face.
The work is purposefully modest – old newspapers, ink, charcoal – and designed so as to be easily transported and hung outdoors or in unconventional spaces. The message is not. A series of symbols explode through Cameron’s profile: cash, stock listings, riots and adverts for Rolex watches. Their main point of contention is the dismantling of the welfare state. “He’s a PR man,” says Phillipps. “His face is just a surface. We want to rip it apart and try to reveal some of the shit that they’re doing.”
Today a ten-day exhibition featuring Kennard’s Maggie Regina and a selection of artist’s responses to Margaret Thatcher over the years opened at London’s Gallery Different. “If people can see images which support what they feel then it helps them,” Kennard explains. Where the late prime minister provided plenty of material to work with, the coalition government is an altogether more opaque, more corporate and controlled operation. This is what lies at the heart of the new work: again, artists must puncture the veneer in order to expose the false assumptions upon which those in power act. “We need to look harder now,” he says.
Blue Murder opens at the Hang-Up Gallery, 56 Stoke Newington High Street, on 27 April.
Images courtesy of Peter Kennard/kennardphillipps.
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