On the 4th May 1914, a suffragette going by the alias of Mary Wood snuck into the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, drew a meat cleaver from under her overcoat, and attacked John Singer Sergeant’s portrait of Henry James, shattering the glass and slicing through the author’s painted face. The painting has since been restored but the cultural memory of suffragette protests in art galleries seems to have worn thin; a transgression, perhaps a tragedy, but a fairly understandable act of property destruction, given the disenfranchisement of over half of Britain’s population at the time. The suffragettes are no ideal model (see the disproportionate volume of them who later joined the British Union of Fascists), but as Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm points out, they were a fairly militant branch of a broader suffrage movement who were successful on their own terms. So Just Stop Oil’s recent forays into the galleries and museums of the UK, in particular the distinctive orange splash of tomato soup over Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, aren’t the first and certainly won’t be the last demonstrations of civil disobedience in exhibitions.
Emma, a 21 year old student at SOAS, University of London, is the young woman speaking in the now infamous soup and sunflowers video. Her speech and the actions of both activists have borne the brunt of much ridicule and criticism over the past week, something she recognises in a later statement speaking to camera in a video for Just Stop Oil’s Instagram account – she knew what she was getting into, she tells us. The possibly garbled political message the original viral video sent (who, for instance, is the “you” of “are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?“) may have been ‘bad press’ for JSO, but if it cultivates responses like, ‘I disagree with their methods but support their cause,’ is it really that bad for the profile of, and media attention given to climate change and in particular fossil fuel licensing in the UK? Even as (recently restored) Home Secretary Suella Braverman utters the phrase, “Guardian-reading-wokerati,” in the House of Commons, a compound word worthy of any Old English poet on my degree, it can’t be denied that the profile of Just Stop Oil has exponentially ballooned out during their month of daily actions this October, and Braverman’s desperate amalgamation of culture war jargon only affirms the concrete pressure JSO actions have been exerting on the government.
But when does it stop? How far is too far? JSO have made it clear on their socials that ‘Sunflowers’ was chosen deliberately as it’s covered in protective glass. Is it more of an egregious transgression of the separation of art and life to cake King Charles’ waxy head? It’s difficult as a young person aware of scientific consensus not to share in the visible glee of the activist as he announces, “Just Stop Oil: it’s a piece of cake,” to a crowd of (presumably) bemused tourists, dazed from the inexplicably long queue for Madame Tussauds in London. Perhaps this act demanding public attention hits the spot more precisely than the soup-throwers, conveying in one swift motion the sickly sweet nature of Charles’ so-called environmental activism and introducing possible historical analogies with an out-of-touch ex-monarch also memorialised in wax.
Malm, in his 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, makes the case that the hippie-pacifist image of groups such as Extinction Rebellion might be aided by more militant, politicised fringe groups which exert precise actions of property destruction and industrial sabotage, citing successful examples of the sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure in Canada. Disincentivising investment into this infrastructure, and putting pressure on both markets and governments make this model fairly convincing. Where XR’s tactic has been to clog up the bureaucracy of the UK courts with the body mass of those activists willing to be arrested, Malm points out a different path – to disrupt and deconstruct the economic and physical machinery of the fossil fuel industry and get away with it. This is a tactic not yet attempted by JSO, although the Tyre Extinguishers, an activist group who surreptitiously place mung beans into the valves of SUV wheels in order to deflate them, might be regarded as a small-scale iteration of this. However, their low profile might belie a want of effective messaging, or the difficulty in producing effective messaging without legally undermining the organisation in question, when the activists must remain anonymous to avoid conviction.
Although Just Stop Oil’s media coverage tends to be in response to their messy, controversial spectacles, their activists have also engaged in much more specified actions; the coordinated blockades of oil terminals in May, for instance. Since these haven’t been so eagerly covered and discussed across the political spread of media outlets is perhaps the reason JSO has sought to widen its audience from the infrastructurally-engaged to a bigger cultural spread; like the suffragettes, they have sought out popular artworks immediately identifiable and enmeshed in cultural consciousness rather than the expensive but obscure. This expansion of tactical approaches rings true to Malm’s multi-stranded model of climate activism, but it also reminds us that a successful climate movement in the UK and Europe not only should, but must, platform indigenous voices and models of ecology.
More mainstream climate activists and NGOs are increasingly using politicised language, perhaps shaped by the attention given to more radical activist groups; just look to Greta Thunberg’s assertions at Glastonbury Festival this year that “until we prioritise people and planet over profit and greed, we will not be able to adapt to [climate change].” In embracing a pluralistic approach to climate activism, the importance of the soup-throwing episode and whether it’s accepted by the general public as unequivocally good is undermined in favour of a more pragmatic, widely cast net of activisms which makes engagement in the climate movement more accessible and thus less insular, less exclusive and harder to be shut down whether by a hostile media or the alarmingly inflated police powers introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
The question “how far is too far?” when it comes to activism seems to ignore the irony that ecological tipping-points are being passed by the day. This question might be answered by Malm’s own questions for his readers: “At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?” During the writing of this article, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2022 has been released. Its ominous title, ‘The Closing Window,’ offers a claustrophobic image of a narrowing gap through which we might escape an unlivable future: “only an urgent system-wide transformation can deliver the enormous cuts needed to limit greenhouse gas emissions by 2030,” the report urges, in what 30 years ago would have been an uncharacteristically political message for an international body to express. The mildness of today’s activists in contrast with the cleaver-wielding suffragettes (who were relatively unpressed by the passage of time), might give us a working answer to our question; if there is a ‘too far’, it has not yet been approached in the context of a spiralling climate crisis.