On 30 June 2022, two young Just Stop Oil activists glued themselves to the frame of Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom at the Courtauld Gallery, calling for the government to end the licensing of all new North Sea oil and gas. Since then, activists have targeted Constable’s The Hay Wain at the National Gallery, Horatio McCulloch’s My Heart is in the Highlands in the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow, Turner’s Thomson’s Aeolian Harp at the Manchester Art Gallery, and the copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper at the Royal Academy. They have, most famously, thrown soup at the glazing on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, and more notoriously broken the glazing on Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’).
Most recently, activists propelled orange corn starch onto the great megaliths of Stonehenge. Similar protests have taken place around Europe and in America. All these ‘direct actions’ are part of an ongoing campaign of civil disruption that also involves concerts, theatre and sporting events.
That you probably know all or at least some of this already is testament to the effectiveness of these actions, at least in getting Just Stop Oil and climate activism to the forefront of the public mind. This, it should be said, is the purpose of the actions — certainly not to be popular, liked, or to ‘save the planet’; but rather to break the public and media silence on the dire urgency for action on climate breakdown.
For activists, such shocking tactics are necessary when the stakes are so high: unprecedented rises in ocean and land surface temperatures in 2023, and acceleration levels of C02 in the atmosphere; heat relief camps and school closures in many countries, the prospect of unliveable cities, and the devastation caused by fire and flooding around the world. The ‘delusion of normalcy’, as it has been called, in public life and in the media is intolerable to anybody who is awake to these facts.
The routine description of climate activism in museums as ‘vandalism’ is misplaced. Iconoclasm itself has a long history: the shrines, monasteries, paintings, sculpture, stained glass, books, destroyed during the English reformation are an obvious example, but also the more wilful vandalism of art in modern times: the man who smuggled a shotgun into the National Gallery and blasted a hole in the Leonardo drawing The Virgin and Child with St Anne and Saint John, for instance, or the person who wrote with black paint on Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958) at Tate Modern in 2012, to take a very few examples.
Climate activism is an entirely different matter, a point that some prominent art critics and commentators have failed to grasp. Activists know well that significantly damaging a work of art would severely undermine their cause — the ‘light surface damage’ allegedly done to the Rokeby Venus was for this reason worrying.
The safety hammers used were at least a far cry from the meat cleaver wielded by Mary Richardson in 1914, and the action planned carefully, with the exact number of blows to specific areas of the glass. None of this excuses the shocking nature of the action, or denies how upsetting it was for curators and gallery workers. But in truth no work of art has been in any way significantly damaged by activists, and the risk of this happening has always been very low.
Such nugatory risk must be set against the climate catastrophe as a whole —the accelerating deaths throughout the world from fire and water, as well as environmental degradation, but also the widespread loss of archaeological sites in coastal areas, and in those regions, such as Iraq, on the frontline of climate change. We nurture a culture of preservation which considers works of art as sacrosanct, and yet, paradoxically, storage and transit themselves represent a threat to works of art, both in terms of immediate damage and the long-term impact of climate breakdown.
Whether you like their tactics or not, the success of the Just Stop Oil campaigns obliges us all to take a position on the catastrophic effects of climate change on nature and society, according to our own conscience. There is little evidence that such protests alienate people, but rather have the effect of forcing an issue into the forefront of public life — you might imprison the messenger, but you are still left with the message.
As such, Just Stop Oil have undoubtedly been one of the most successful campaigns of civil disobedience in history — and all without causing any significant damage or harm to anyone or anything. Other inspiring art activist campaigns such as Culture Declares, who have used a combination of art and persuasion to ensure that national institutions take a stance on climate change and declare a climate emergency, or Liberate Tate, who played a part in ending BP sponsorship at Tate, have been highly effective at underlining the seriousness of the climate crisis and spurring institutional change, although remain largely unknown to a wider public.
The impact of direct actions in museums is bound to lessen over time, and the 92 museum directors (including those of the National Gallery, the V&A, and the British Museum) who signed a letter drafted by Icom in November 2022 condemning climate activism in museums might be relieved to hear that, for the time being at least, Just Stop Oil have ceased targeting works of art, at least those hanging on the walls of museums and galleries.
The trial of Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland on 22 July at Southwark Crown Court for criminal damages caused to the frame of the Van Gogh Sunflowers, to the value of £6,000, might well bookend this particular episode of activism. For those who see their actions from the point of view of the ever-deepening climate crisis, dire warnings from climate scientists, and the continued reluctance of world leaders to commit to a rapid phase out of coal, oil, and gas; and also considering their position as young people who do not have time to acquire power and change from within, their acquittal might appear a victory.
But by this time Just Stop Oil will be celebrating a wider victory, of sorts, if the likely new Labour government holds to its promise to stop all new North Sea oil and gas
• John-Paul Stonard is an art historian and author. To hear our discussion with him about art activism, listen to the latest episode of The Week in Art podcast
