What the gentle iconoclasm of the climate action group makes you realise, fundamentally, is how powerless we all really are
Paintings around Britain breathed a collective sigh of relief this week as Just Stop Oil announced an end to its reign of soup-based cultural terror. After three years of gluing themselves to paintings, chucking broth at Van Gogh and making themselves the scourge of all UK art institutions (something art critics can only ever dream of being), they say their aims have been achieved and it’s time to move on.
Their goal was to stop all new oil and gas initiatives, and with the Labour party in power that’s now government policy. Climate crisis averted, I guess. In cultural terms, their campaign saw activists glue themselves to a Constable, a Van Gogh and a copy of a Leonardo Da Vinci; they lobbed soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ (twice); in Germany they smeared some mash on a Monet; they cracked the glass protecting the Rokeby Venus and the Magna Carta; they chucked a bit of cornflour on Stonehenge. Little to no damage was caused, with all the artworks and monuments quickly put back on display. Just Stop Oil caused the minimum of disruption to both gallery teams and audiences with the least damage imaginable.
Not that you’d know it. Judging by the reaction of people who in all likelihood won’t live to actually see the planet turn into a real-life version of Kevin Costner’s 1995 post-apocalyptic chef-d’oeuvre Waterworld, you’d think Just Stop Oil had set the National Gallery on fire and snorted the ashes of George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (1762). Aged art critics called them ‘pathetic morons’ who had turned our museums into ‘angst houses’. Oil-guzzling right wingers described them as ‘eco-zealots’ peddling ‘one-sided alarmism’ in a bid to send us back to the technological stone age. It’s a position that imagines the only possible future as one fuelled by gas and oil, and if you disagree you’re an anti-progressive luddite who deserves to be run over with a Range Rover.
And all that ire and invective, over what? A bit of soup? Some superglue on the frame of a painting? Just Stop Oil functioned as contemporary iconoclasts. But where iconoclasm gets its kicks from destroying the symbols of its enemies, Just Stop Oil iconoclasted (definitely a word) a little more gently. They slowed down traffic, interrupted plays and threw bisque at some paintings. Iconoclasts obliterate the icons, Just Stop Oil just gave those icons their five a day. They didn’t rip up and destroy, they just made life just a tiny bit more inconvenient. And even that was still too much for a nation clutching their pearls so tight it developed rigor mortis. Because if there’s anything the British can’t stand it’s people who make a fuss. We’re happy for you to protest, just do it politely, out of sight, out of earshot. We want our dissidents, rebels and upstarts to do it a bit more quietly, to not make such a mess, or cause such a ruckus. Of course you can express your anger and dismay, darling, but could you do it over there where I don’t have to hear it?
But rebellion that obeys the rules isn’t rebellion at all. If your revolution doesn’t piss off the establishment, that’s not revolution, it’s just the status quo with a bit of shouting. And the law reacted accordingly, that is with harsh sentences stretching to years, with ‘damage caused to heritage and or cultural assets’ cited as an aggravating factor. That is despite the fact that no long-lasting damage was, in fact, caused. Dozens of protestors remain in prison, while some cases are still to be heard in court. Evidently Just Stop Oil needed to crack some eggs, otherwise they would have been ignored altogether.
And you know what, maybe the gentleness of their iconoclasm was the problem. Would we have more respect for them, more awe and fear, would we have taken them more seriously, if they’d gone further? If they’d doused Van Gogh’s sunflowers in napalm instead of soup?
What Just Stop Oil make you realise, fundamentally, is how powerless we all really are. What can we as individuals really do about climate change? Use paper straws, change our lightbulbs, take the train, sort our recycling (which just gets whacked in the same landfill as all the other rubbish by government sub-contractors who will never get fined enough to care), all while major industries continue to pollute and ravage the planet? Just Stop Oil actually did something. Something stupid and performative and empty and symbolic, sure, but something. And it got attention, it got you and your colleagues and your parents and everyone they know talking. That’s a lot more useful than using a paper straw that dissolves as soon as it gets wet. And just compare all that to the mind-numbingly hypocritical futility of almost all climate-conscious art (perfectly encapsulated by Andrea Bower’s Climate Change Is Real neon shown in The Hayward Gallery’s Dear Earth group show in 2023, an artwork that said nothing and did nothing). It’s an embarrassing indictment of art’s uselessness in the face of a genuine crisis.
The whole Just Stop Oil project might feel futile right now, but maybe history will be kind to their naughty art shenanigans. When we look back at the history of women’s emancipation and the suffragettes, we think of Emily Davison throwing herself in front of the king’s horse and Mary Richardson slashing the Rokeby Venus. Think of the downfall of Saddam Hussein and you think of his statue being toppled by Iraqi civilians and US marines. Think of Black Lives Matter in the UK and you think of the statue of slaver Edward Colston being lobbed into Bristol Harbour. Think of the end of communism and you think of the Berlin Wall being knocked down.
Symbolic acts matter, they endure. And if we somehow manage to outlive our own idiocy and make it out of the climate crisis with a functioning, non-toxic society, maybe we’ll see Just Stop Oil’s acts of brothy barbarity in the same light.
If anything, I’m annoyed that Just Stop Oil have stopped just stopping oil. They say their demands have been met, they’ve achieved their stated aims. I say so what, find more aims, cause more chaos, fight harder. Surely they don’t think that imminent ecological collapse has been averted this easily? Their work is not done. Go buy some more god damn soup, because no one else seems to be doing anything.
Eddy Frankel is a London-based art critic who writes for the Guardian, The Art Newspaper and others
