Throwing Soup on a Painting Wasn't As Nonsensical as People Claim
My inner art school kid coming in with a hot take about Just Stop Oil.
After scrolling through memes making fun of Just Stop Oil and shrugging them off as a bunch of politically uneducated kids who love attention and just don’t get that it’s 780% of big corporations being responsible for all of everything!!.. I finally got over my inner smartass and had another look at the action itself.
My initial reaction to what took place was similar to that of Andreas Malm, author of “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” and the NYT opinion piece “History May Absolve the Soup Throwers”:
“Oh, no, not another attack on some object with no causal relation to the climate emergency, something innocent and beautiful.”
And sure, there may not be a causal relation. Neither Van Gogh himself nor his painting have been active contributors to the climate crisis. I understand that. But there are clear symbolic connections and the action was by no means random.
Instead of an action that was really supposed to make a difference in climate politics, I am now convinced that the whole thing was a performance art project. A successful one, at that. One that has brought these people enough attention that maybe, just maybe, more eyes will be pointed to the other forms of activism they’ve engaged in that have received absolutely no media attention. They’re not just soup throwers. But sometimes, if you want people to report on your rekt pipeline, you need to come up with something new and provocative, so they came and did an art performance.
By provoking the reaction they did, they have successfully shown that the outrage about defacing a beautiful piece of art is greater than our collective rage towards the system that will create our extinction in the decades to come if we do not make moves now that are more effective than making a mess and then glueing ourselves to a surface for a creative statement. I actually think it would have been kind of metal if they’d managed to damage the painting itself, but it was covered and protected by glass. So people went incredibly up in arms about the simple audacity of people just thinking about, and simulating, the destruction of something nice, something they like, something that symbolises a world in which all is well.
Fake destruction seemed to upset people more than the actual material destruction happening all around us and threatening our lives, which is something I find quite interesting. Are we all living in our own mental metaverses, keeping ourselves preoccupied in a world of virtual images and representations that help us find comfort in the face of constant crises and a melting planet? (in virtual images I include paintings – virtuality does not require digital media, virtuality is simply “the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its real or imagined physical form”)
Have we given up on our physical environment to the extent where nothing that happens within it affects us emotionally, since we’ve reluctantly accepted our creeping entry into the apocalypse? Have we reached the point of shit getting too real only when the world we have found an escape in – a world made up of symbols that help us manage our depressing daily lives – is also being threatened, even if it is only by soup? Is it too much for us to handle that there is no more virtuality to cosy up in as the crisis mode has entered even our simulated mental universe, the life that is beginning to feel more real than reality itself? Was the action so triggering because the artists showed that by now, there really is no escape, and we’ve run out of time to lose ourselves in paintings and memes and pictures and movies and books and music, and the artists have come to disrupt our virtual reality, effectively taking away something we’ve become as attached to and dependent on as a small child depends on their special comfort blanket, so now we’re having a tantrum?
The glueing, at its most obvious, served the purpose of prolonging the period in which people get to see what is going on before some museum person comes along and wipes the glass clean, restoring the image of normalcy. Does it look dumb? Absolutely. But there was thought behind it. Besides the practical purpose, it could tell us that while they as annoying activists are going to stick around, whether people like it or not, the problem we are dealing with is also a sticky one that is going to require a lot of effort to dissolve.
Now, let’s look at why Sunflowers in particular was the target. While looking for a header image to this blogpost, I came across an article that tried to assert that instead of an act against the climate crisis, the soup action was entirely a soulless attack on Western art and culture. As much as I love to rant about anti-enlightenment identitarian politics from a leftist perspective, I do think they were reaching for the stars in trying to make this all about a post-modern neo-marxist attack on Western values. Where there is pink hair, there is not always wokeness.
Similar to the point I’ve made earlier about people paying more attention to the simulated destruction of art than the slow boil of the planet, this shows another preoccupation people engage in to avoid dealing with real material issues: the culture war. A meaningless social identity crisis, if we compare it to issues that are threatening humanity itself. The author provided some useful context to what the painting actually represents, so I’ll quote part of their complaint to help me make my point:
The assault on van Gogh’s Sunflowers is a repudiation of human civilisation. Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers captures a rare moment of optimism in an otherwise troubled life. In February 1888, van Gogh rented a property in Arles in the south of France, which was to be known as the ‘Yellow House’. He envisaged this to be a haven for artists, and had invited Paul Gauguin to join him. His hope was to decorate the house with paintings of sunflowers, 11 of which were eventually produced (one was later destroyed in an air raid in Japan). With their bright and striking yellow tones, these paintings are infused with van Gogh’s sense of hope and possibility – a stark contrast to the ominous dark violet blues of the self-portrait produced at the asylum at Saint-Rémy, a year before his suicide. (1)
A repudiation of human civilisation? I would instead say that it is a bright neon arrow pointing us to the fact that human civilisation, along with all the art and bright flower meadow optimism and other nice things we currently enjoy within it, is in danger. Using soup might have had a particular purpose as well – I don’t believe that anything in this project was a coincidence. It could have been paint. It could have been pig’s blood in some sort of Carrie punishment directed at the people who go to museums and enjoy art instead of blowing up pipelines or protesting. They chose not to do that. Their message was not to attack or guilt us. So they decided to use soup.
What do we think about when we think about soup? We think about warm winter evenings in heated apartments, we think about caring for ourselves or being cared for during sick days, we think about cosy cooking sessions and knitted blankets, scented candles, happy happy times. Those times are under threat. There will be no more Christian Girl Autumn, there will be no more fruit punch at the winter market, there probably will be no winter to speak of at all at some point. Destroying a symbol of hope and possibility using the food that most represents comfort and warm nourishment says: “There is no hope, there is no possibility, there is no comforting satisfaction of our human needs, if there is not radical change to save what we still can before it’s lost forever”.
There will be no sunflowers without appropriate soil and water conditions for them to grow. The flowers symbolise all of nature and all living beings, including humans, who are dependent on a healthy environment and a safe climate to survive. The slow boil of the planet will leave no “safe haven” for artists and article-writing climate deniers, unless you believe you’re somehow one of the chosen ones who will be escaping to Mars, which let’s face it, will never happen. That is what the people who wrote the above snippet, and the post attached, refuse to understand. A good amount of people, especially on the right, like to believe that climate change isn’t a real problem, so it is easy for them to frame any activism as part of a hidden woke identity political agenda. It is, however, very much a real issue. One of the Just Stop Oil activists said the following when explaining their mission to Andreas Malm:
“We need to break the mirage that everything is fine and shatter the illusion of normal life”
They aren’t out to change any individual’s opinion, they’re working on disturbing the overall image of “life is fine” in the world. And that they have done successfully. We live in abnormal times, and although I do think this shouldn’t mean that we can’t enjoy beautiful pieces of art and enjoy our brief existence while it lasts, sometimes you have to destroy what is nice in order to show that what is nice could be destroyed.
I myself am a climate doomer. I don’t know what to do. I put my energy into the cause of socialism because radical systemic change is the only thing that could pull us out of the mess we’ve created. We need to let go of the profit motive in order to establish truly ecological economies - it was quite disheartening when I tried to prepare a workshop about circular economies at work that trapped me within a cycle of “but (these methods of production and reduction of waste) are really expensive in the short term, no company is going to want this – repeat with the next one – hey, but that costs a lot of upfront money, how are we going to convince these capitalists to invest..”, I might write a post about my research concerning this topic one day – but anyway, when we take a look at the state of the left, socialism seems to be quite a way off.
So I don’t have solutions. But I do know that something needs to change, and as long as nothing more transformative happens, I’ll take some artistic activistys doing over the top actions to remind us that anyone who has even a small clue should get up and do what they can to help the cause.
In fact, the oil kids themselves might have a clue. Engaging in the activities they do is a way of acting against capitalist realism and the idea of the end of history by demonstrating the kind of revolutionary optimism we need. The people who truly are not helping are the people who are doing nothing at all. Being passive is the best way of demonstrating absolute hopelessness. Those who do nothing believe, or communicate that they believe, that nothing can be done, since it should be clear that climate change is something most of us are concerned about to some extent.
But the oil kids are convinced of their mission and its success. They’re throwing soup at the wall and seeing what sticks – reminiscent of the expression people use to say that they don’t know what’s going to be the solution that works, it could be anything, it could be everything, or any combination of things, so they try whatever they can think of. This time, it happened to be performance art, nothing more, nothing less. They aren’t changing the world, but maybe they are contributing to a change in the general mood, disturbing the “business as usual”, like they intended.
Let the kids do their art, you bunch of nihilists. Go throw a used car battery in the ocean or something, it’s a safe and legal thrill.
Recommended Reading:
Just Stop Oil isn’t a fucking psy-op by Jay Lesoleil