More than 100 artists, curators, art historians, academics and other art professionals have signed an open letter asking for two Just Stop Oil protestors to avoid being sentenced to jail.
In October 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland threw cans of Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh‘s Sunflowers and glued their hands to the wall below the painting at the National Gallery in London.
While there was no damage to the painting itself, prosecutors said the antique 17th-century Italian frame was damaged as a result of the protest. Plummer and Holland were charged with criminal damage and convicted earlier this year. Judge Christopher Hehir of Southwark Crown Court told Plummer and Holland, both 22 years of age, to be “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison”.
The letter, organized by Greenpeace UK and the art collective Liberate Tate, was published on September 26, one day before Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland are scheduled to be sentenced. Liberate Tate is an art collective founded in 2010 “dedicated to taking creative disobedience” through its campaigns against fossil fuel industry funding in the arts.
In July, Judge Hehir sentenced a group of Just Stop Oil activists to four- and five-year sentences over a campaign to disrupt traffic on the M25, the major ring road in London.
Signatories of the letter including Fiona Banner, Peter Kennard and Tania Bruguera—as well as art historians and academics from NYU, Willamette University, Goldsmiths, the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and the University of Copenhagen—said the protest was “an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.”
“As artists, art workers and art historians, we are concerned by the courts’ defence of a false notion of artistic purity in their judgment and sentencing.
“Art can be, and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.”
The letter argues that iconoclasm had been a recognized part of art practice for more than 120 years, including in the work of Futurists and Dadaists; Asger Jorn, Robert Rauschenberg; Gustav Metzger, the Gutai Group, Jim Dine, Marta Minujín, “many other performance artists in the 1960s”, Alexander Brenner and Banksy.
“The work of all these iconoclasts, often far more physically destructive than the work of JSO, is now venerated in museums around the world. Such iconoclastic works are regularly the subject of state museum exhibitions, including Tate Britain’s Histories of British Iconoclasm in 2013.”
“Plummer and Holland’s protest might have given a nod to art history by using Campbell’s soup instead of Heinz,” the letter said. “It is our expert opinion that it would be incorrect to consider this JSO action, and its social message, as an attack on an artwork from without. Instead, it belongs to the well-established tradition of creative iconoclasm.”
“On September the 27th, Judge Hehir should refrain from punishing Plummer and Holland with custodial sentences for upholding a centuries-old tradition of calling on our social conscience through art.”
In viral videos posted online, Plummer said that she hoped the protest would draw attention to several issues, including the large number of fossil fuel licenses granted by the UK government, the amount of subsidies that fossil fuels receive compared to renewable energy despite the significantly lower reported cost of offshore wind, and the connection to the current cost of living crisis in the UK with growing concerns about the cost of energy.
