Art for climate’s sake
• Anti-oil protesters follow in the footsteps of earlier generations who understood the art and activism link
The campaigners who covered priceless paintings with food have paid a backhanded compliment to great art, proving that it is the world’s town square, a global billboard on which to project powerful hopes and fears.
The protesters, who are opposed to further extraction of fossil fuels, have also blocked busy thoroughfares in London and sprayed orange paint on the headquarters of MI5 — Britain’s security service — the Home Office, the Bank of England and media baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. But what we shall remember of the month of action by Just Stop Oil is the tomato soup splattered over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery, and the impasto of mashed potato piled by the group Letzte Generation (Last Generation) onto Claude Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks) in Potsdam, Germany.
The activists singled out artworks that are covered in glass — another was Dutch master Paul Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in The Hague, which briefly became a radically unusual double portrait after a young protester glued his head to it. No lasting damage was done to any of the works.
The targets were carefully, even responsibly, chosen. But just for a moment, as the action taking place before our disbelieving eyes — an outrageous breach of the museum etiquette that most of us unthinkingly observe — there was a pang of dumbfounding loss. It is a glimpse of what awaits us with further climate change, if the campaigners are right. But will the public thank them for bringing everybody up short in this way? No-one appreciates a rude shock, a bucket of cold water — or cold soup — in the face.
Despite the sound and fury in the National Gallery, the most consequential action for the UK environment during Just Stop Oil’s four weeks of protests was the reimposition by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the ban on fracking that Liz Truss, his predecessor, had lifted.
“I stand by the manifesto on that,” Sunak told the House of Commons, referring to the commitment at the general election of 2019 by the Tories to a moratorium on drilling for shale gas. And for many people this northern autumn, enjoying a drink outside in T-shirts and shorts on unseasonably balmy evenings is the most ominous sign that climate change could be in the air, not potatoes on paintings.
Whether the protesters were conscious of it or not, they were following in the footsteps of earlier generations of demonstrators who understood the value of art as a backdrop to activism. Give a government building an unlicensed coat of paint and no-one will turn a hair, but do something similar to a universally recognisable masterpiece and you have the world’s attention.
Not every campaign has pulled its punches as Just Stop Oil did. In 1914, Mary Richardson swung a meat cleaver at The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, also in the National Gallery, leaving five slashes in the canvas, to protest against the arrest of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Picasso’s Guernica was daubed with the words “Kill Lies All” by art dealer Tony Shafrazi at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1974. Shafrazi was objecting to the release of a US officer convicted over the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Because Guernica was heavily varnished, restorers were able to remove the slogan.
The exploits of Just Stop Oil also echo a familiar dialogue between making art and unmaking it, between creating works and effacing them. Robert Rauschenberg asked his fellow artist Willem de Kooning for a drawing he could erase, and produced Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). It is now in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Jake and Dinos Chapman removed the heads of figures in prints of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War and replaced them with heads of clowns and puppies. Damien Hirst recently trashed a handful of his pictures after giving collectors a choice between a non-fungible token version and the physical thing; the ones who wanted the digital version had their hard copies destroyed.
On the face of it, the climate campaigners picked an opportune moment for their art attacks. Huge profits for oil companies posted in recent weeks come as families face unprecedentedly high bills to heat their homes. And the UN has just reported that there is “no credible pathway” to keep the rise of global temperatures below the target of 1.5°C.
But analysts who have studied people’s response to direct actions found that more aggressive methods appear to inspire the least support. In one experiment by academics from Toronto and Stanford universities, some volunteers were shown articles describing peaceful marches while others read stories about more violent actions, including a (fictitious) break-in at a lab that practised testing on animals. The campaigners who went in for extreme measures were seen as “immoral”, and respondents said they had less in common with them and felt less goodwill for their cause.
This creates what Prof Colin Davis, chair of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, calls the activist’s dilemma. “Activists must choose between moderate actions that are largely ignored and more
THE MAIN CONCERN IS THIS COULD PLAY INTO THE [TORIES’] HANDS IN TERMS OF THE FORTHCOMING PUBLIC ORDER BILL
extreme actions that succeed in gaining attention but may be counterproductive to their aims as they tend to make people think less of the protesters.”
Davis, himself a climate campaigner who was convicted of criminal damage after spraying the Extinction Rebellion logo on government buildings earlier this year, told me the research suggests Britons will not be sympathetic to the tactics of Just Stop Oil.
And there are other dangers, from activists’ point of view. “The main concern is that this could play into the government’s hands in terms of the forthcoming Public Order
Bill, which is very draconian in its attacks on the right to protest,” Davis says.
Scenes of furious motorists dragging anti-oil protesters out of the road help to make the case for hardline politicians. So does the overstretched police in London having to devote more than 9,000 shifts to attending incidents linked to Just Stop Oil. But Davis says that antagonising people is “the price of admission” for campaigners in getting media attention and helping to set the agenda. It also allows potential supporters to discover an organisation like Just Stop Oil. So while the headline-grabbing action might fail in the short term, the goal is incremental change.
In this they might have something in common with Van Gogh himself, whose radiant delight in the natural world is present in Sunflowers and so many other works.
In one of his many letters to his brother Theo, he wrote, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.”