Boticelli’s Primavera in Florence, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Paris, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London, and most recently Monet’s Le Meules in Potsdam. Climate activists are waging a war against apathy and environmental inaction by attacking where it seemingly – if social media reactions are anything to go by – shocks and hurts us the most. That is, at the core of the European fine arts tradition, .
Media sensation from Fridays for Future climate marches is slowly waning off, forcing climate activists to explore new grounds to organise protests and catch public attention. This goes hand in hand with a change in tactics. The traditional formula of billboards-march-chants has been getting less and less effective, forcing protest performances to become more creative and rapturous. Almost as if following a neo-avant-garde instruction book.
In the inter-war era, it was the avant-gardes who called for a collective radical change in a hope that the destruction and atrocities of the First World War could be avoided in the future and the world built anew. Through consciousness-raising methods and rapturous artistic activities, they strived for radical transformations of the social, political, and economic systems. The presumption being that if one managed to change the underlying structures, human beliefs and aspirations would inadvertently follow. However, to achieve this, one’s habituated ways of seeing and understanding the world had to be challenged. Art, and visual art especially, was chosen as the most fitting medium for this purpose due to its sensorial and emotional effects. Experimenting with aesthetic shock, dissonance, and de-familiarization, the avant-gardes tried to snap viewers out of their comfort zone and present reality in a new light. In a sense, ‘shocking’ them into reflecting on their relation to the world, while forcing them to recognise that they, too, had agency to actively intervene in it[LJ1] .
Similarly to the avant-gardes, climate activist movements also believe in the possibility of change and society’s agency in bringing it about. Because of the urgency of the task at hand, their message needs to be shared with the wider public. And in what better place to start this conversation, then in one of the most prominent agenda-setting cultural spaces: the museums.
Arguably, the role of museums has been largely criticised and contested. Be it either their mostly unquestioned right to value-judgement, discriminatory selection criteria on who becomes visible and who stays in the shadows of the art market, and their numerous controversial investment partners (including fossil fuel companies). Many decades have already passed since Guerrilla Girls launched their 1984 protest campaign against MoMA’s discrimination of female artists and artists of colour. Since then, this debate has snowballed a plethora of other issues, continuing until this day.
However, despite often seemingly out-living their potential and turning into “mausoleums[LJ2] ” of deceased art giants, museums sometimes retain their more positive and forward-looking potential as spaces of experimentation, exchange, interaction, and discussion. The topic of climate disaster presenting no exception in this regard. Be it either Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs positioned in front of the Tate Modern or the “Stop Oil” and other climate movement campaigns already mentioned above, museums provide a very fruitful ground for protest. For a seemingly very simple reason – despite all their criticism, many museums continue to present an important institutional authority and act as active gatekeepers: telling the audiences what is important and worthy of attention in the (art)world.
Organising protest performances in or outside of museum spaces, therefore, has a lot of benefits. Firstly, media and social media attention is almost guaranteed. Secondly, an institutional setting provides a hint of legitimacy to the cause. And lastly, if I were to come back to the avant-gardes, there is a hope that when viewers get snapped out of their mindless scrolling because someone threw a bowl of soup or smeared cake on a protective glass frame of a famous painting, this shock might lead to a wider reflection on the causes of such rapturous stunts. And subsequently our possible role in this broader picture.
And if not, maybe there are more important questions we should be asking ourselves. Why are we so outraged and almost personally offended by someone staining a protective glass of a famous painting but do not seem to mind nearly as much when art collectors and even artists themselves burn their physical artworks, if only to increase their NFT value in the virtual world? Arguably, these artworks are just as part of our cultural heritage as are those located in a museum. The only difference being that without a dedicated wall space and a dimmed spotlight, we do not seem to be so sure about their “genuine” value.
Many have dubbed the recent protest performances as extreme, stupid, or simply harmful, questioning the activists’ understanding of the importance of cultural heritage and art protection. Firstly, as becomes obvious after reading interviews with the activists, they never planned to harm those artworks and only proceeded with their actions after making sure no damage would be caused. In the end, it only took 20 minutes to wipe off the glue from Primavera’s protective glass, a supposedly small price to pay for getting international headlines about an issue that is rarely mentioned on newspaper cover pages.
Secondly, the choice of (at least some of the) targeted paintings was not random, serving as an allegory of what issues are at stake if nothing is to be done. The Ultima Generazione [The Last Generation] group chose Boticelli’s Primavera because it represents “with a finesse of detail that borders on the encyclopaedic – more than 500 botanical species that bloom precisely in the months of spring… This is a reality that we are in danger of losing.” The Stop Oil activists extended their criticism to other inter-related issues, pointing out that money invested into fossil fuel extraction could instead be used to help citizens deal with soaring living costs, caused by increased fuel and energy prices. A tin of soup thus serving as a metaphor for impoverished families “who could not even afford to heat up a can of soup.” In this sense, choosing to perform their protest on a Van Gogh painting seems fitting, as he presents one of the most prominent artists when it comes to depictions of poverty and social injustices.
Thirdly, I find myself at full agreement with George Monbiot’s commentary for The Guardian, in which he says: “Everywhere I see claims that the ‘extreme’ tactics of environmental campaigners will prompt people to ‘stop listening.’ But how could we listen any less to the warnings of scientists and campaigners and eminent committees? How could we pay any less attention to polite objections by ‘respectable’ protesters to the destruction of the habitable planet? Something must shake us out of our stupor. [...] The soup-throwing and similar outrageous-but-harmless actions generate such fury because they force us not to stop listening, but to start.”
I suppose that at the end of the day, we can only hope that this type of “shock activism” will prompt at least some viewers to become as outraged and fearful of the possible destruction of living forms, as they seem to be for the depicted ones. And that at least some museums will eventually stand up to their task of cultural mediators, leave their mausoleum-like characteristics behind, and shift their gaze also to the living.
~ Lucie
[Ad1] Herwitz, Daniel. 2021. The Political Power of Visual Art: Liberty, Solidarity, and Rights. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
[Ad2] Smithson, Robert and Allan Kaprow. 1967. “What is a Museum?” In: Flam, Jack (ed.). 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. London: University of California Press, Ltd.