It’s funny how random insignificant threads in life occasionally coalesce to create mild little motifs that give a particular moment in life its own odd sense of zeitgeist. Recently, I found the translated version of 习近平’s essay written after a certain particular date, about said particular date and the relationship between the state and art, in light of a unique infamous abstract art demonstration that occurred in the leadup to the particular date. I don’t intend on saying much more in specifics because there are recipients of this newsletter who have plenty at stake in China that I don’t want to endanger in any way. But I think if you have been on the free side of the Internet and know a little bit of history, it isn’t too hard to know what I’m referring to.
Well anyways, having this in my mind, I woke up to see the news of the protest by two young teenagers who splashed tomato soup onto a Van Gogh painting as a protest for climate action. Kind of an odd sense of what feels like more than simple coincidence that these two things came to my knowledge so close together. This has of course happened all my life, and in the past I actually use to name these occurrences as the “[motif] era,” before the whole “era” meme became a thing.
So now that I’m in my art and protest era, I want to think about this tomato soup protest. I’d like to reiterate that I think it’s good to not have set answers. I am this way about this protest, I don’t think I have the final answer. My answer for now is that I dislike it.
I took a class where I had to watch a documentary about the Weather Underground. If you don’t know your countercultural history, they were an anti-Vietnam War organization from the 1960s that took to more “violent” methods of protest, including bombings and riots. The documentary was interesting because a lot of the times, I come away from these sort of things not particularly liking the subjects at hand, but feeling as if I could have very much joined them had I been there at the moment.
Anyways, the documentary drastically changed how I thought about protest, or it articulated in conscious what I had only unknowingly believed in my subconscious. Protests are not meant to be parades, but that’s what we often see in protests: people gather, have giant posters, and march through the streets with some onlookers. Aside from inconveniencing some daily commutes, only on rare occasions do these protests ever accomplish anything, and in no way are they truly subversive. One of the Weather Underground’s protests was the Days of Rage, where rather than simply walk down the street, they gathered at night and rioted. I’m not sure rioting is good, but I appreciate the fact that they thought about what real protest might be and tried to carry it out rather than do what everyone else did and have everything be absolutely the same.
Why must protests be subversive? We should think about what the goal of a protest is. At heart, a protest usually is a measure of trying to make a change from the status quo. Something that is not subversive, like an actual parade, often ends up edifying power, or at least does nothing. The Women’s March was quite a spectacle in how big it was, but what did it actually do? Not much. In retrospect it was much more a parade than a protest, and that is the case for most things that we call protest—people standing with some posters outside the White House often look more like a celebration of the status quo’s right to freedom of speech rather than an actual demonstration about the issues at hand.
One could argue that protests need not have to change anything, but merely speak out and bring attention to something. That’s entirely acceptable, and I am aware especially in light of certain events on the other side of the planet that merely speaking out is often much more subversive than the massive demonstrations here in America. So if there are two kinds of protests, the speaking out protest and the seeking change protest, I will speak to the latter, because I think that’s what most protests have as their underlying intention but fail in their methods. And this is the case with those climate protesters.
Their goal is obviously to bring about action to help stop climate change. Immediately, this starts crossing into a debate that has been happening among climate activists for a long time: who actually has the ability to make the decisions to prevent climate change? In the past, it was widely accepted that if everyone started making good choices about not littering and being less wasteful, than climate change can be stopped. Over time, this view has started to fall out of favor, especially when many people have objectively cut down their consumption by a lot when it was not relatively great to begin with, but continue to see very little change because they actually made up a relatively small portion of the damage being done to the planet. Meanwhile, the corporations and the rich who are the biggest polluters continue to escape scrutiny or regulation. I’m of the latter camp, and I think most people nowadays are. I can have turned the light off every single time I leave a room and not use electronics for a whole year and still not make up for what Elon Musk does with a few days of flights on his private jet. You can track his private jet trips here @ElonJet on Twitter.
When these protesters ask the museumgoers if they “are more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?” what do they want those people to do? Most people who go to an art museum probably skew affluent, but they’re no Elon Musk. And I’m fairly confident in guessing that most of them are very sympathetic to climate action. Why would you want to provoke your own allies, who aren’t really in the position to take much action anyways?
Moreover, the answer to the protesters’ question can be a no: no, I am indeed more concerned about the protection of our planet and people, but you didn’t have to destroy art to make that point to me, or anyone for that matter. I don’t think anyone is more concerned about art than the protection of our planet and people, but the actual challenge is aligning the powers that be so as to marshal our resources and capabilities such that our overall actions match our intentions and priorities. If they were to do their protest better, they might have splashed tomato soup onto the door of No. 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister’s office if you weren’t aware) instead.
Some have praised the protesters for at least doing something. This touches on another debate that often occurs among the left: praxis versus theory. Praxis is just a fancy word for practice, or just putting the theory into practice (action). In my opinion, praxis in and of itself is not by default good. Praxis like this tomato soup protest probably hurt the climate movement more than it helped. That’s not actually good praxis.
On the question of inconvenience, this protest inconvenienced absolutely nobody except some museum staff, people who might have wanted to see the painting, and some art preservers. The reason why I appreciated the Days of Rage was that it was at least planned as direct action, as it was supposed to end in rioting at the hotel where the judge of the Chicago Seven trial was residing. It was not a perfect protest—in fact it failed—but it at least gives us a window into how we should at least theoretically think about and do protests.
On the other hand, some oil executives in a board room somewhere were probably overjoyed to see this tomato soup protest. Every climate protester should first think about whether oil executives would be happy to see them do what they do, and if the answer is yes, then there’s something wrong with your protest.
Perhaps the most eloquent and complete argument against the protest is probably by this guy on Twitter.
I think the tweets are pretty clear in what they’re trying to say, but if you’re having a hard time understanding, it’s basically saying that that which these protesters are trying to protect is depicted and preserved in paintings like Van Gogh’s.
“Artworks are commodities that embody value, but they are also ways of illuminating the contradictions of value. The confused protest against big oil misses that the very nature they hope to preserve is disclosed and even produced by paintings like Van Gogh’s. It’s not that they are more valuable than life but that they are essential to our comprehension of what it is to live. All culture is barbarism, built on the backs of slaves. But it is no less the only defense against barbarism.”
Art, including the one doused in tomato soup by these protesters, help us humans understand and appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature that we are fighting to protect. Art can be an expression or come close to being an extension of nature itself. Van Gogh perhaps did this better than most. To destroy these paintings for the sake of “climate action” is to enter into a massive contradiction that immediately strikes most as repulsive, even if they do not know why.
Nice argument. Just too long an essay. Feel like a thesis.