Graphic by Sunny Wei ‘23.
By Sarah Grinnell ’26
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article mentions the Holocaust.
On Oct. 14, 2022, two climate protestors from the U.K. activist group Just Stop Oil were arrested for throwing tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s National Gallery, a Vox article reported. Just a week later, New York Post reported that two protestors from the climate activist group Letzte Generation, which is German for “last generation,” were arrested for hurling mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s “Les Meules” in Potsdam, Germany. Most recently, on Oct. 27, a Netherlands-based protestor attempted to glue his bald head to Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”, according to New York Daily News. In all three of the articles on the different incidents, each group cited the reasoning for their actions as being to promote climate awareness. This method of climate activism has instigated much debate, raising particular discussion around the use of art in environmental activism.
In a video posted by MSN, the Just Stop Oil activists can be heard shouting, “What is worth more, art or life?” after throwing soup on the painting. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?” they continued.
The German protestors employed a similar message in their mashed potato demonstration, The Wall Street Journal article reported. The Vox article about the “Sunflowers” incident includes a tweet the group made after the protest that reads, “If it takes a painting … to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!” Their stated goal was “to temporarily disfigure a treasured artwork and call out the people who would be more concerned about a painting than the planet,” the WSJ explained.
Although Vox, NBC and the WSJ confirm that all paintings were behind glass and only the frames sustained minor damage, the protests prompted discourse on social media, with many users raising questions as to the validity of the groups’ activism. Per the Vox article, some condemned the members of Just Stop Oil as mere “reckless protesters” who “had ruined van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ just to make a point.” Others, including the author of the Vox article, Aja Romano, saw the demonstrations as being effective in garnering “public interest or sympathy.”
Helen Gloege ’23, member of the Mount Holyoke Climate Justice Coalition, accepted both perspectives in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “There’s no particular [or] right way to be a climate activist,” she said. They mentioned the fact that the protest did not do any actual harm to the painting itself and noticed that the protest was “getting a lot more attention” than many grassroots protests would receive. Still, Gloege recognized that these kinds of protests “sometimes can hurt the rest of the climate activist community based on how [they’re] interpreted.” Seeing as NBC cites that much of the media attention on these protests has been negative and centered on the public’s ire, Vox argues it has mostly served to divert attention away from the various groups’ actual messages.
In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, Art History Professor Ajay Sinha took a similar stance as Gloege, saying he would like to “give credit to the protestors for using tomato soup, as … there [are] toxins, that even if there had not been glass, the painting would have been preserved.” He pointed out that “they could have slashed it,” but their choice of targeting a painting behind glass suggests they had no intent of actually damaging the work. “They took responsible action,” Sinha said.
Whatever stance one takes on the matter, the idea of art in activism is nothing new. As Vox mentions, these protests extend from a long legacy of using art as a form of protest. As Jezebel describes, “Destroying art is its own genre of political theater,” and its use in politics dates back to historical examples such as suffragists vandalizing Velasquez’s “Rokeby Venus” in protest of gender discrimination, as well as the Nazis using art as a political tool by destroying and looting important works, Vox reported. As a Marie Claire article on the topic put it: “Art and advocacy have a long and complex history.”
In the Marie Claire article, artist Zaria Forman explained that “psychology has proven that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions more than anything else,” which she believes accounts for the effectiveness of art’s political use. Vox describes how the tomato soup protest was successful for its ability to “activate our love of art, [and] our sense of wonder and awe and reverence.” These reflections complimented the questions posed by the protesters who tried to glue themselves to “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” “How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your eyes? Do you feel outrage?” and why do you not feel this same sense of loss for “the planet being destroyed before our very eyes?” they asked, quoted by NBC. Sinha added that “the idea [is] that these are objects of pride, and they are national heritage.” For this reason, although art is, in essence, “a useless object,” Sinha emphasized how people “cherish [works of art] in such a way that we preserve them in these grand buildings,” even as global disasters such as the floods in Pakistan fall from many people’s consciousness, he explained.
Sinha described this phenomenon by bringing up how “looking at art and these monuments becomes an integral part of becoming a citizen of a particular nation. Climate is fuzzier than that … nation is also fuzzy, but is embodied and concretized through these very specific processes. But climate, which transcends national boundaries … it affects everybody … it doesn’t feel like our property, our heritage, as directly.”
In Sinha’s opinion, art is therefore a way of bringing “tangibility” to complex social problems. “Last year, in the U.S., we saw the removal and breaking of statues … because statues are tangible,” Sinha described. Art makes these issues, such as systemic racism in the case of the statues, more visible and palpable by targeting objects that are “readily available” in “a public place” and in public consciousness, Sinha noted. “In medieval Christianity they broke images, and in Islamic cultures they broke images, but it was a fight at the religious level, and now it’s a fight at the level of capitalism,” Sinha explained, going on to explain that art is “really at the center of cultural politics.”
Miranda Whelehan, one of the Just Stop Oil protestors, made a similar point, stating, “my fear is that they will only understand the reality of the climate crisis when it is on the doorstep.” It seems such globally beloved and iconic paintings as “Sunflowers,” “Les Meules” and “Girl With a Pearl Earring” have become the manifestations of this “doorstep,” and, as the Vox article shows, these activists’ approaches to environmental action succeeded in making climate change an international conversation.