In possibly the most talked-about single act of protest the climate movement has achieved thus far, last October, two young people from Just Stop Oil threw a can of Heinz cream of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s world-beloved Sunflowers painting.
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| Phoebe and Anna |
We know what the humans thought of it. Thanks to extensive global press coverage, social media ‘virality’, and the fact that it made enough of an impression to become a talking point in everyday conversation, we’ve gotten the picture, so to speak, of public opinion.
But what about the microbes living in the soup that was thrown? What did they think, being transported at high speed through the air, to be splattered on the glass in front of a masterpiece? What would the cow, tortured and slaughtered to put the cream in the cream of tomato, think of the action? What about the tomatoes?
These are laughable questions. According to everything we’ve been taught by anthropocentric society, the opinions of plants, animals, microbes and insects are unimportant; they’re as good as machines. All other sentient creatures on this planet are programmed by evolution to desire a mate, procreate, defecate, eat, sleep, make incomprehensible noises, and repeat (though not necessarily in that order). And plants are just plants.
Emotions aren’t exclusive to humans. Sure, it helps that the vast majority of modern animal psychology research demonstrates this without a shadow of a doubt, but you don’t need statistics to tell you. You’ve had a pet. You’ve maybe accidentally stood on a dog’s toe and heard it yelp in pain and disappointment. You know the burger in your hands once sniffed, stamped and shook its head, to discourage a fly in the midsummer heat. And plants may be plants, but I’m not the only one who flinches a little when I see a child snap a branch off a tree.
So we share this planet with millions of other life forms, all of whom have emotional understandings of the world, and are impacted by our choices. Why not consult them when we act on their behalf? Why not make art, and do protests, that have their minds in mind?
It’s not like we’re ‘separate’ from them anyway…
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Microbiome
We have more microbes in us than human cells. Various estimates have been put forward by scientists, but the most recent I could find was that only about 43% of you is human cells. The rest is bacteria, fungi, viruses, and archaea (whatever that is).
We see our bodies as entirely human. My skin is the borderline between ‘me’ and ‘everything else’.
But in fact, beneath that skin, ‘me’ is the minority. And in order to live, that 43% is entirely dependent on the ceaseless work of millions of things that I will never be able to see, never speak to, never shake hands with and thank for all their hard work keeping me alive.
I am not an ‘individual’. I’m a ‘dividual’ - divided into millions of cells beyond my conscious control. Where ‘me’ starts and the microbes end is impossible to determine. I am a metamorphic, blurry being, sustained by the work of invisible millions. These millions exist beyond my body, too; thousands of fruit-pickers, lorry-packers, shelf-stackers, bureaucrats, bosses, bullies, key workers, care workers, oxygen-breathing plants, carbon-breathing scientists, and faces innumerable, minds unthinkable, masses invisible, combine their efforts every day to sustain, strain and entertain my existence.
In this context, then, what exactly is a body? An extension of the self, a megacity for microbes, a consumption machine for the machinations of global capital, a sack of meat experiencing the universe, the universe experiencing a sack of meat, all of the above, or something else entirely?
Do the millions of microorganisms living in the poet Walt Whitman’s gut get any credit for his line ‘I contain multitudes’?
Bee Humble
What do you think a bee would think about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting?
Perhaps one has already given it a review - entering the National Gallery, buzzing past Boticelli, being distracted by an abstract Basquiat, making a beeline to bask in its yellow and black, eventually finding the room with the Van Gogh landing pads, and…
What?
Appreciating the brushwork?
It’s a bee - my guess is that it would, at best, mistake the reproduction for the real thing, and attempt to land on what look like three dimensional petals.
Is this a ‘valid’ interpretation of the painting?
Most of the (audible) initial responses to my friend’s soup-throwing protest were hostile and confused. Even people from within the climate movement, who’d smashed the windows of banks and glued themselves to motorways, would say to me “I think this protest went too far.”
Are those valid interpretations of the action?
My answer to both of the above questions is this: the binary notion of ‘validity’ doesn’t get us very far.
I know a lot more about Sunflowers than a bee does. I know what art is, I know what Post-Impressionism is (sort of); I know what paint is, who van Gogh is… in short, I have a contextual framework that helps me to parse the painting. The bee hasn’t got that. It’s a bee.
Likewise, I know a lot more about the soup protest than most people. I am close friends with one of the protesters, I was part of the same campaign group for months, I have done similar things myself, and I’ve talked to hundreds of activists about their reasons for taking scary, public-facing actions. In short, I have a contextual framework that helps me to understand the action. Most people haven’t got that. Most people aren’t activists.
The fact that a bee doesn’t understand Sunflowers doesn’t mean it has no value. Whether the bee likes it or not, whether you like it or not, millions of people take something of value from looking at that painting.
The fact that people disagreed with the soup-throwing doesn’t make it an ineffective protest. Protests are always misunderstood. People always argue they’ve gone too far. Martin Luther King Jr. had a 75% disapproval rating during his lifetime. The fact is, if protesters always conceded to their detractors, women wouldn’t have the right to vote (or to abortion or to their own money or to say no or to exist, at all, in any form); Black people wouldn’t have the right to sit next to white people on buses (or to not be lynched or to be happy or to be alive). We’d be a planet of slaves, a nuclear wasteland, or under the perpetual misery of an unimaginable kind of global fascism. Protest is right up there with food, water and shelter as essential for life.
But it’s not all about whose interpretation is the most ‘valid’. We can’t entirely disregard the bees, nor the people who petulantly protest that the protest was detestable. Bees might not know much about artistic sunflowers, but they have an intimate knowledge of actual sunflowers in a way I’ll never achieve. Non-activists may not know much about what makes an effective direct action strategy, but they do know what they are motivated by.
Let’s work towards art that bees can appreciate - we depend on bees to live, and their survival depends on our ability to value their lives. The endeavour to communicate artistically with them would provide enormous riches in restoring our relational understanding of insects!
Let’s work towards a form of protest that everyone can get behind - overcoming the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction will involve everyone changing their lifestyles in some way, so we need everyone on board in some way. Protest can’t be exclusive to people who are willing to make it their whole identity!
But let’s not lose what we have - bee art and mass-appeal disruption should be accompaniments, not alternatives, to the valuable stuff we’ve already developed. Painters for humans, activists for activism, keep going.
In Order to Keep Going, Just Stop (Oil).
If we let billionaires keep making fortunes from their fossil fuel fortunes, thrusting trillions of dollars into industries that blacken the sky, billions of people will die. That’s our moral situation: act and save billions, or don’t, and die ourselves.
This depends on us getting rid of the fossil fuel industry.
The main argument for fossil fuels over renewables is this: what if the wind stops blowing? Do I have to put up with the fact that my lights will turn off every time there’s just a light breeze?
The main response from activists is this: look, thousands of scientists, policymakers, engineers and other experts all believe it’s entirely possible for us to have a diverse, flexible energy grid that provides for all our current energy needs without ever cutting out. Also fuck off: I’m telling you billions of people are going to die, and you’re worried about temporary power cuts?
The truth is, I think my fellow eco-zealots can take the argument a step further: it’s possible that wind power might mean power cuts. But we might actually be better off beholden to the whims of the wind.
Fossil fuels are a solution to a problem. Capital wants predictability. If I build a power plant, I want to know, with certainty, how much money I’ll be making from it, and when. I don’t want to risk an investment that doesn’t pay back because the wind isn’t blowing.
The free market also wants freedom from another kind of unpredictable element: workers with rights. As Andreas Malm’s Marxist analysis of the early development of fossil capital has shown, major changes in energy supply from wind to fossil power were largely motivated by an attempt to force workers into more controlled environments. Community and family-owned water mills gave people too much time to relax - and people accustomed to freedom from labour are difficult to exploit for labour!
But, like all of capitalism’s ‘solutions’ to its own problems, it’s only a temporary fix. The predictability provided by fossil fuels is beginning to wobble, as a result of those very same fossil fuels. In the wake of bigger and bigger tsunamis, floods that displace tens of millions, and hurricanes that ravage ever more infrastructure, the capitalists need to start asking: what if the wind doesn’t stop? What if it just keeps blowing, getting more and more intense, ripping apart more and more homes, provoking even more rage from the masses, who then start to block and destroy fossil fuel infrastructure? And don’t get me started on the workers - as we’re seeing with the mass strike actions all over the country, workers won’t just roll over and let their rights be revoked forever.
The word ‘nature’ itself originated as part of conservation efforts - we didn’t even bother coming up with the concept until we realised we were killing it in ways that might start killing us.
Subjects of violence find a way of making themselves heard eventually. The oppressed people of Iran are rising after forty four years of torturous authoritarianism. The workers of the UK are rising after decades of austerity. The life on this planet is rising to swarm the sites of its sweltering new temperatures, after decades of abuse.
But all this rising up shit is really getting tiring.
We shouldn’t have to wait until something is lashing out, screaming ‘let me live or I’ll kill you’, before we negotiate with its existence. What we need is more disruption - more non-violent disruption - to call attention to problems before they ever get to crisis point.
I’m talking about direct democracy. Anarchism.
It’s not just a political philosophy, it’s a way of life. Let’s say you’ve got an essay due. It’s pretty common wisdom that you’ll do a better job of it if you start as soon as you can. It’s certainly more likely you’ll get a higher grade for the essay you started researching immediately after being assigned it than the one you only skim-read half the book for the night before the assessment, and speed-wrote on Red Bulls and cry-breaks.
Let’s say you want to live more non-violently with the world around you. It stands to reason, does it not, that you are better off doing as much as you can now, while there’s still some semblance of stability left, rather than leaving it to the last possible moment, joining a march with a group that now has millions of members and zero time, and hoping some billionaire’s panicked geoengineering project will sort everything out?
We need to care for things long before they reach a crisis point.
The people who put the protective screen on the Sunflowers understood that.
Souper-Heroes
It doesn't take much skill or thought to throw soup on a painting. Most people could smuggle a can of soup into a gallery, open it, and splat it on a masterpiece. Don't believe me? I encourage you to try it yourself!
It wasn't even their idea - Anna has told me it was more a case of 'right place right time' for them and Phoebe. Strategists in Just Stop Oil had been planning a similar action for a long time before it happened. Anna and Phoebe showed up, asking “what needs to be done?” and were offered the ready-made soup action.
Neither of them would have put on those Just Stop Oil t-shirts and entered the National Gallery that morning if it hadn’t have been for the work of Roger Hallam, who, in coordination with hundreds of others, can be credited with most of the strategy formulation behind the top household names in UK climate activism - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil. Likewise, it wouldn’t have happened without hundreds of Just Stop Oil activists and campaigners working tirelessly to keep the momentum of the campaign going, nor the rich history of organised civil disobedience campaigns, and their respective thousands of members. When we focus too directly on the famous figures of mass movements - Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Emmeline Pankhurst, Anna Holland, Phoebe Plummer, Louis McKechnie, Greta Thunberg - we lose the sense that history is made by the collective. By - oh, shit - people like us.
And if history’s made by people like us… maybe we ought to do something.
That’s not to say what Anna and Phoebe did was altogether easy. The strategy team may have planned it, but they didn’t face the consequences of doing it. Anna and Phoebe now face continued global public scrutiny, transphobic abuse, hostility from progressives, criminal consequences, and Anna even had a surprise interview with Katie Hopkins.
People often wander through the Tate Modern, look at the abstract paintings, and say “my three-year-old could’ve done that”. To which most art theorists would respond: “oh yeah? Well your three-year-old didn’t do that, did she? Jackson Pollock did.” Artists are those who actually do. They actually create. Whether it’s difficult or not, whether it’s overvalued or not, they did it, and now you’re talking about it, and you never would’ve been talking about it if they didn’t do it.
If you don’t like Jackson Pollock, fine. Spam his instagram comments. Get Katie Hopkins on a podcast to tell him off. Or, alternatively, if you can see what Pollock is missing, what makes his art less valuable to you, do something else. Present an alternative to the world.
Shouting at climate activists for doing something you don’t like won’t stop them. Critiquing the method of stopping climate meltdown without offering a better, working alternative is like sitting in a house fire, telling your rescuer you won’t move unless they change the escape route. Sure, there might be a better way out - but sitting arguing about it will kill you and everyone else. Armchairs aren’t fireproof.
Yo(Us) and They / Them
“I just don’t really understand the they people. They is plural. It’s bad grammar to say ‘they’ and mean one person.”
Gary recently posted on Instagram. Tap to see their latest post.
‘They’ has always worked as singular. Respect Anna and Phoebe’s pronouns. Especially if you’re a journalist, for god’s sake! (Anna they/them, Phoebe she/he/they).
Now that I’ve gotten that out the way, here’s a more interesting counterargument to singular ‘they’ pronouns than you’ll hear from transphobes: what if ALL pronouns should actually be plural? They, he, she and all the rest of them included?
As we’ve seen, there is no such thing as an ‘individual’. We’re reliant on so much other life that establishing a clear boundary between ‘me’ and the rest of the world is near-impossible. Pronouns that continuously remind us of our relational identity would perhaps lead us to see ourselves even more vividly as participants in our environments.
This concept of relationality - the notion that existence is best understood as things interacting with one another - will save us.
We’d all be better off deeply appreciating our interrelatedness with the universe. I don’t want to live in a simple, controllable world that I fully understand, that never surprises me.
I want to live in a world that confounds me, confuses me, that actively and arbitrarily disrupts my plans. An unpredictable world: one that frequently reminds me I am tiny and blind - a mere speck in the infinite expanse of a universe that, largely, holds none of my beliefs, has no knowledge of me, and will remain unseen by me, no matter how hard I look. I want a universe that humbles me, shakes me, shocks me. "Don't get all cosy there, thinking you know all there is to know. You're missing something big. Here, look..."
I’m from the North East. We’ve pluralised a pronoun that, for one reason or another, doesn’t usually distinguish between individuals and groups (and everyone understands it perfectly fine and always will!). I use ‘yous’ to mean multiple you-s. How yous all doing?
In order to bring about the relational world I want, a world in which we deeply appreciate and engage with the consciousness of other beings, in which we are grateful for the millions of others who sustain our lives, and we act to reciprocate their care, in which disruption is understood as a firewall against fascism and a cornerstone of democracy, of care, of love… I can’t act alone.
Throw some soup, real or symbolic, at some art - real or symbolic. Do something. Make a blog a bee would find interesting. DO something.
Everything in me, and in the world, is counting on yous.
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