Vincent, Duck! Soup!

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

+On October 14 two protesters for the climate group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on the protective glass covering Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and then glued themselves to the wall at London’s National Gallery. I was dismissive at first. After all, if you’re willing to go to jail for a direct action why not target an oil or coal company? But the intensity of the reaction against them from nearly all quarters–but particularly from putative progressives like Matt Taibbi–has won me over. It proves that even a simulated threat against a piece of art whose value is entirely subjective generates more outrage than the ongoing decimation of the planet.

+The point of these “stunts” is to generate moronic tweets like this from the self-appointed guardians of High Culture. As an act of political DADA they succeeded behind their wildest expectations. Van Gogh, who hated museum art, which he considered dead, would have likely approved.

+ Like many, Taibbi’s more upset about soup smeared on protective glass than the death and misery inflicted by climate change–proving the point of the protest: where threats (in this case totally benign) to commodified representations of Nature prompt more outrage than real Nature being roasted.

+ In this case the activists intentionally tried to avoid inflicting any damage on the painting and in fact the Van Gogh wasn’t harmed in any way. But people got very upset about soup being thrown on glass. Some much more upset than they did about the entire Columbia Gorge going up in flames several years ago, in fires that scorched spectacular panels of Native rock art more than 500 years old …

+ Before casting stones at the soup-flingers, one might consider the role that corporate sponsorship of art exhibitions–including Van Gogh exhibits–have played in helping to greenwash the reputations of villainous enterprises, including the fossil fuel industry, and the tax write-offs they enjoy for such “sponsorships.”

+ Van Gogh is one of the most commodified artists in history. His work has been bastardized by corporations for over 50 years. A car company (Lexus) literally purchased the rights to use his work to promote their planet killing products. He’d be horrified…

+ Van Gogh was the ultimate outsider, an outcast even. His paintings were so radical and idiosyncratic as to seem almost solipsistic to the critics of his time, the blazing solipsisms of a madman. Very few got what he was up to. His work seemed dangerous, a kind of vandalism against the rules of proper art. Today, every gets Van Gogh. Or thinks they do. He’s been tamed. His work rendered as safe and as a common as wallpaper. Some of his images have been turned into wallpaper. His work has become a product, endless reproductions of reproductions. Many of the paintings themselves have become trophies for billionaires, multi-million-dollar hedges against the vagaries of the market. Everyone loves Van Gogh now, hence the reflexive outrage over the National Gallery protest. He’s the loveable eccentric. In life, he was a pest, a nag, irritable and anti-social. He was the guy who’d bust up any social gathering by saying the wrong thing, by speaking his mind, regardless of the circumstances or consequences. His paintings now hang in galleries and boardrooms he would never have been invited into. His work had long since lost any cultural relevance, until a splash of soup reinvigorated his art, let us see it again in a radical perspective, infused with new layers of meaning.

+ Van Gogh: “It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.”

+ Vincent was right on the merits, but dead wrong in his assessment of the modern psyche, which has now lost almost all feeling for Nature and, conditioned by the demands of late-capitalism and its creature technology, is excited only by simulations of Nature, usually on flat screens.

+ I’m just glad those two young activists read and acted on the writings of the Situationists, and created a “situation,” even if they didn’t read them the same way I did or create the same situation I would have.

+ As to charges that the protest was “mere vandalism,” culture snobs condemned graffiti as vandalism and it became the greatest art form of the 20th century–apartheid walls, overpasses and boxcars serving as the canvasses of the poor and oppressed, free for all to view, no lines, reservations or special exhibition fees.

+ As a kind of performance art, the National Gallery protest was understandable to anyone who knows anything about art movements of the last 100 years. Did Robert Rauschenberg “vandalize” a Willem deKooning (an artist as important as Van Gogh) when he erased one of his drawings and claimed the erasure as a work of art? It’s now hanging at SFMOMA.

+ In the Van Gogh caper, the only thing erased was the tomato soup, when it was wiped off the protective glass shielding Van Gogh’s ubiquitous sunflowers. The video of the protest will probably be playing in the Saatchi Gallery next year. Maybe someone will unplug it as a waste of energy and create a new art event for the prudes to get upset about.

+ My friend (and CP writer) John White sent this photo of one of the latest offerings in the gift shop at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. What’s the greater harm to his reputation?