Just Stop Oil have attacked another painting and I can't bring myself to condemn it

I revere art as much as the next person but if I get more angry at the protesters than their cause I need to reevaluate
Just Stop Oil activists after smashing the protective panel over The Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in London
AP

On Monday, museum leaders across the UK issued their first ever joint commitment for collective action on climate change

"As leaders of the UK museums, we feel a responsibility to speak out about the current climate and biodiversity crisis and call upon UK politicians and businesses to accelerate action to mitigate this crisis before it is too late,” the statement read. 

“We are already around or beyond crucial tipping points: global temperatures are higher than they have ever been since humans emerged as a species, and extinctions are occurring at around a thousand times the normal rate. There is an existential threat to the world we have become accustomed to…. UK museum leaders feel they have an ethical obligation to take action to alleviate that damage.” 

They then listed a number of pledges to action, all of which I rather hope they’ve been doing for ages, and a number of recommendations to embed sustainable practices in every stage of museum activity. 

It’s good. It’s good! But, you know, as they say, it’s getting a bit bloody late. And it was a stark coincidence that this announcement should be made on the same day that Just Stop Oil protesters brought safety hammers into the National Gallery and smashed the glass covering Diego Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus – the same artwork that was slashed several times with a meat cleaver by the women’s suffrage campaigner Mary Raleigh Richardson in 1914.

"Women did not get the vote by voting, it is time for deeds not words. It is time to Just Stop Oil,” announced the protesters on Monday. "Politics is failing us. It failed women in 1914 and it is failing us now. New oil and gas will kill millions. If we love art, if we love life, if we love our families we must Just Stop Oil."

Outrageous. Isn’t it? Is it though? I find my views on this are perhaps not what those of a Culture Editor should be. Speaking at this year’s Art for Tomorrow conference in Italy about an earlier Just Stop Oil protest, in which they chucked a tin of tomato soup over the glass covering Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Clare Farrell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (who have done their fair share of this kind of thing), said, laconically, “It’s not going in a good direction, folks.” 

Just Stop Oil protesters threw tinned soup at the glass covering Vincent Van Gogh's 1888 work Sunflowers at the National Gallery
AP

The climate emergency is just that, she indicated, an absolute emergency. “Some soup on some glass on the front of a painting is the very least that people could be doing to draw attention, to bring alarm.”

I’m not sure she’s wrong. I revere works of art as much as the next person. The Rokeby Venus, as the painting is known, is a rarity from Velazquez; his only surviving female nude, painted in an environment (17th century Spain) where sensual images were very much frowned upon by an oppressive Catholic church. It is luscious and beautiful, a dream of tender brushwork, with a flash of pale yellow hollowing out the dimple above her left buttock, a smear of red heating the pulse point behind her knee. My instinct is to preserve this man-made miracle of human ingenuity and imagination. I would not touch it even if I owned it. 

And it’s important to note that Just Stop Oil have largely targeted works of art quite carefully. The Sunflowers sustained light soup damage to its frame (which is unlikely ever to have even been seen by the artist); protestors avoided the actual canvas of Horatio McCulloch’s My Heart is in the Highlands at Kelvingrove in Glasgow in June last year, glueing themselves to the frame. Later that month they did the same to Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom at the Courtauld Gallery, and again to Constable's The Hay Wain at the National Gallery in December, after first covering the canvas with their own image, a dystopian version of the same landscape.

As far as we know yet, Venus remains unharmed. Watching the video, I noticed that the protesters avoided repeating a blow in the same place, possibly so as not to harm the canvas beneath. This may be out of respect for the artwork; more likely I think it’s in order to avoid being done for actual serious money’s worth of criminal damage, and to limit the public backlash that might undermine their point. Either way, I’m relieved. 

But art is a thing in the world, it’s not actually sacred – only life has that status. That’s not to say that I think art should be vandalised, or disregarded, but if you believe the cause for which you are protesting to be so existentially urgent as Just Stop Oil and other organisations like them evidently do (as Farrell told the New York Times, “When people are about to get hit by a train and they don’t realise it, you don’t invite them in for a meeting”) then that overrides everything. That is your position, and in all honesty, though I find myself less able than these protesters to commit to it, it is hard to argue against. 

Just Stop Oil targeted Venus because it was the painting targeted by Richardson. Would I condemn that action, the actual slashing of the painting? As a woman my age in 1914, faced with that image, of a nude, idealised, sexualised woman, painted by a man, experienced alongside the violent frustration of utter powerlessness, the criminal, wilful waste of my and other women’s intellect and creativity, the incessant underestimation of our abilities in every area except possibly needlework, and decades of being unable to take a full breath from morning til night due to the strictures of my underwear, honestly, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have taken a cleaver to it myself. 

Just Stop Oil protest
Protesters from Just Stop Oil cover John Constable's The Hay Wain with their own picture at the National Gallery
PA

I fully support UK museum leaders in their measured, meticulous call to action. After all they are dealing in some cases with huge organisations that are hard to turn around fast. And I can’t bring myself to celebrate the art-trashing of Just Stop Oil, but I find it harder and harder to condemn it, when an issue that may mean the difference between human survival and the end of civilisation is being highlighted.

Art is one of the best things about humanity (even if artists are as grubby and venal as the rest of us) and yet through the actions of humanity we lose entire species every week, to give just one example. If I get angry about light damage to one work of art but not about that, then I need to reevaluate.


What the Culture Editor did this week

These five new galleries, providing a new permanent home to this vast but lesser known part of the Imperial War Museum’s collection, interrogate the power of the image as a reminder, a warning, an illumination, a protest against or even a weapon of war. From propaganda and witness to horror to images of care and light in the darkness, they’re unendingly fascinating and thoughtful.

Backstairs Billy, Duke of Yorks

Penelope Wilton and Luke Evans are a hoot as the Queen Mother and her favourite, longstanding servant, but this weirdly larky production, though it’s hugely entertaining, never quite seems to know why it's happening.

Listen to Nancy, Nick Clark and Nick Curtis review the week's biggest shows and talk to the creatives behind them in the Standard Theatre Podcast. A new episode lands every Sunday.

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