Art in Britain Supporting the Struggle of the Chilean

People during the 1970s

John A. Walker (Copyright 2009)

‘Democracy must occasionally be bathed in blood.’ General Augusto Pinochet (1915-

2006).

It was poetic justice that a 1970s’ banner supporting the cause of freedom in Chile

was displayed at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the ‘Live in your Head’ exhibition

in February 2000, while simultaneously the ex-dictator of Chile, General Augusto

Pinochet, was under house arrest in England awaiting extradition to Spain to be

tried for the atrocities committed by his regime. (However, due to the cowardice of

British ministers, he was allowed to return to Chile in March.) (Below the General

with one of his British friends.)

Allende left, Pinochet right.

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During the mid and late 1970s, a number of exhibitions and festivals were organised

in Britain in support of the people of Chile. In September 1974, a year after a

military coup in Chile had destroyed a democratically elected Marxist government

and its leader President Salvador Allende, a mass rally in support of the Chilean

resistance, organised by the British Joint Labour Movement and the Chile

Solidarity Campaign (founded 1973; over 2,500 Chilean exiles settled in Britain),

was held in Trafalgar Square. Mrs Allende, widow of the President, addressed the

crowd. Behind her at the base of Nelson’s column was an impressive banner entitled

Chile Vencera designed, appliquéd and embroidered by the American artist John

Dugger (he came to Britain in 1968). Its vivid expanses of red and blue and its highly

simplified figures appeared modern in comparison to the more Victorian style of the

trade union banners among the crowd.

John Dugger, Chile Vencera banner in Trafalgar Square, London 1974. Photo

courtesy of the artist.

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In October, David Medalla, Dugger, Guy Brett and Cecilia Vecuna organised an

arts festival at the Royal College of Art to assist the struggle of democratic forces

against the fascist junta. Documentation about Chile’s popular culture, poetry

readings, murals, music, inflatables and a temporary ‘shanty town’ enlivened a hall.

600 art works were donated to be auctioned to raise money for the cause and the

Chilean surrealist painter Matta travelled from Paris to make a work in situ.

(Matta’s 1970s mural entitled "The First Goal of the Chilean People", 4 x 24 metres,

in Santiago was painted over with 16 coats of paint by the military regime of
Pinochet. The mural was restored in 2008.)

AFD Poster designed by Edward Wright.

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One consequence of this festival was the organisation Artists for Democracy (AFD).

Rasheed Araeen and Jonathan Miles were also members for a time. The following

year, AFD squatted premises in Whitfield St and then opened a gallery. AFD’s

purpose was to provide material and cultural support liberation struggles in foreign

countries throughout the world, but particularly those in the Third World - Africa,

the Middle East, Vietnam and so forth. Artists of many nationalities mounted

numerous exhibitions, poetry readings, film and slide shows, performances and

discussions. AFD lasted for three years and had, Brett has recalled, ‘a turbulent

history’.

At the AIR Gallery, London, in March 1978, a display of Chilean Arpilleras

(patchworks) was mounted with the help of Oxfam. In Chile, following the coup,

which had the backing of the United States, there was a period of terror and

extreme hardship for the poor, especially women living in the shantytowns around

Santiago. Many of them had no news of their husbands and children who had

‘disappeared’ after being arrested by the military or the DINA (secret police).

Arpilleras depicting the coup against Allende on 11 September 1973.

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Groups of such women began to organise workshops and to construct small pictures

by sewing scraps of fabric and wool – waste discarded by factories - together using

old flour sacks as supports. The women were not trained artists but they did possess

traditional craft skills such as embroidery. Stylistically, the images resembled folk

and child art: schematic drawing, profile and plan views in the same space, flat,

bright colours (for cheerful subjects) and mixtures of patterns. Some designs were

more diagrammatic and others had three-dimensional additions such as pockets in

which doll-like figures were inserted. The patchworks showed scenes of everyday

life, prison camps and brutality but they also depicted symbols of hope – such as
white birds and mountains - and dreams of plenty. Often allegory and symbolism

were resorted to in anticipation of censorship. The rag pictures were an answer to

unemployment, a means of expressing solidarity, overcoming silence and chronicling

events since the coup; in short, a form of cultural resistance to an oppressive regime.

Sensitive to the critical content of the patchworks, the Chilean authorities labelled

them ‘Tapestries of defamation’.

The Arpilleras earned their makers income by being sold inside Chile and then

abroad via the agency of the Catholic Church. Postcards of them were also sold to

raise money for exiled organisations such as the Chile Committee for Human

Rights.

These humble artefacts attracted the interest and stirred the emotions of those on

the Left in the British art community who were concerned about the fate of Chilean

workers. They were also of interest to feminists because women made them and to

socialists because they were an example of genuinely Popular or People’s art (in the

sense of art made by the people for the people). The art critic Guy Brett was a keen

supporter and wrote a catalogue essay and articles praising the Arpilleras.

Chile was also the theme of a travelling exhibition – ‘A Document on Chile’ (first

shown in June-July, 1978) - organised by the Half Moon Photography Workshop, of

photomontages by the British artist Peter Kennard with text by the journalist Ric

Sissons. At the time, six Chileans were on hunger strike in St Aloysius Church,

Euston as part of global protest against the ‘disappearance’ of prisoners in Chile.

Thirty montages were laminated on to panels to facilitate transportation and

hanging, and for two years, the show visited community centres and universities
across the country. Chile Solidarity Groups also saw it.

Kennard (b. 1949), who trained at the Slade and Royal College of Art, is a socialist

who was radicalised in the 1960s and worked throughout the 1970s in the tradition

of John Heartfield. His montages were primarily intended for reproduction and

appeared on postcards, on placards carried in demonstrations, in many magazines

and newspapers. Thus, his work was political in content and function.

Regarding Chile, Kennard, of course, did not have to pull any punches because of

fear of arrest and so he was able to attack the barbarity of the military junta head

on. One of his montages merged three images: at the top, ranks of soldiers, in the

centre, a slaughterhouse with suspended animal corpses, at the bottom, a dead man

with a rope around him. The slaughterhouse metaphor, of course, had previously

been used by political film-directors such as Sergei Eisenstein in Strike (1924) and

Fernando Solonas and Octavio Getino in The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).
Peter Kennard, Soldier paints out the images of Allende supporters.

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Another powerful image showed a steel-helmeted soldier armed with a rifle and a

brush engaged in painting out the portraits of Allende supporters (he was making

them ‘disappear’). Other montages were designed to portray the period before

Allende was elected, the three years of the Popular Unity Government and the

Pinochet period of repression. Kennard’s montages were also intended to explain

the economic, political and social structures that lay behind the coup including the

involvement of the Americans, their monetarist economists and the CIA. (This was

well before the ‘shock doctrine’ [2007] theory of Naomi Klein.) Clearly, Kennard’s

aims were agitational and educational: to inform the public about the true character

of the regime in Chile and to arouse anger.

Kennard did not expect to encounter censorship in Britain but, in 1985, when two
of his Chilean montages were displayed at the Barbican Centre, London, one was

removed and the other covered with a blanket because a high-ranking official from

Chile was due to visit in order to address British bankers.

‘Live in your Head’ included several more examples of art that was political in

character and, arguably, if there was anything distinctive about the art of the 1970s

it was its repoliticisation and feminisation. In 1978, exhibitions such as ‘Art for

Whom?’ and ‘Art for Society’ made the case for what was disparaging called ‘Social

art’ (James Faure Walker) and ‘Social Functionalism’ (Peter Fuller). Formalists and

Right-wingers denigrated the attempts of socialist artists to reconnect to society and

influence it. (Bernard Levin, writing in the Establishment newspaper The Times,

accused Left-wing artists of ‘poisoning the wells of art’.) They argued that the idea

of art intervening in world events was a collective fantasy. Art, of course, is only one,

minor determining factor among many but the examples cited above clearly

demonstrate how art and artists contributed to a particular cause and campaign,

and had positive effects.

 A Chilean caped crusader.

The events in Chile during the 1970s also demonstrate how paper-thin is the

civilisation of the bourgeoisie. This class will behave with absolute force and

ruthlessness if its power and property are really threatened (another example: the

mass killings that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871). Its ‘love of

art’ was illustrated by what happened to some of the Chilean artists and musicians

who supported Allende: they were arrested, tortured and executed. For instance, the

theatre director, folksinger, guitar player, poet and political activist Victor Jara was

shot 44 times with a machine gun His body was found dumped outside the

Metropolitan Cemetery; his wrists and hands had been smashed with rifle butts. (1)

Victor Jara. Image may be subject to copyright.

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(1) See the report on the arrest of the Jara’s killer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/28/chile-regime-murder-charge-victor-

jara

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John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Left Shift: Radical
Art in 1970s Britain, (London & New York: I. B. Taurus, 2002).