Just Stop Oil: Eco-Warriors or Artists of Destruction?

Van Gogh’s sunflowers smeared with soup, King Charles III’s waxwork covered in cake. It seems that climate activist group Just Stop Oil consider the art museum their new stage. It’s the latest installment in a century-long history of such demonstrations: Nan Goldin protested the Sackler group with her ‘blizzard of prescriptions’ in 2019, flooding the Guggenheim with antidepressants; Tony Shafrazi challenged the pardoning of war criminal William Calley by spray painting the enigmatic message ‘KILL LIES ALL’ on Picasso’s Guernica in 1974; all the way back in 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson slashed The Rokeby Venus, lashing out against the justice system’s treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst. 

Why, then, is the art museum an appropriate canvas for protest? We might consider that rage has found a home there for centuries, and entire aesthetic campaigns have been shaped by anger. Take the theme of destruction in art, which grew popular as a response to the violence of World War II. Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966 – possibly the most concentrated example of the movement – was a tribute to the artistic power of ruin, and a protest against nuclear weaponry. The DIAS comprised a series of ‘happenings’ across London, one of which famously saw John Latham set fire to one of his ‘Skoob towers’ (3 metre towers of books) outside of the British Museum. On the surface, there is little difference between these ‘happenings’ and the activism of Just Stop Oil – which will continue to turn heads all over London in the weeks to come, according to the group’s scheme. Yet the former is considered an art exhibition, while the latter is solely a protest. Perhaps when a revolution enters the art house, the line between performance and demonstration becomes blurred.

Could the Just Stop Oil protests be classified as art, then? The orange-stained sunflowers are a potent image reminiscent of street art, which is in itself a medium designed for rebels. It’s easy to imagine it printed onto a t-shirt. It could be that activists choose the art museum as their platform because of the richness of its iconography; if an entire cause can be written in shorthand using a single, infinitely reproducible image, its impact multiplies. It’s entirely plausible that the Just Stop Oil protests were a result of deliberate artistic design. They don’t really need to print t-shirts, though; Just Stop Oil have been appearing in the news since their first controversial demonstration at the BAFTAs in March. Since, they have targeted a wide range of sites including Harrods, the Aston Martin showroom, and a number of London petrol stations. When the group’s entire project is considered, the museum protests seem incongruous with their more relevant domains of activism (i.e., automobile companies and petrol stations), causing us to question what on earth Van Gogh has to do with fossil fuels. Seen from this angle, throwing food at artwork appears to be little more than a gimmick. Bob Geldof recently called their actions ‘annoying’ in an interview with Radio Times, but the musician sees this in a positive light: ‘they’re not killing anybody’, but ‘climate change will’.

Featured Image Credit: The Guardian