The Art of Climate Protest

In 2006, one of Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup” prints was sold at auction for a record $11.8 million. In those works, Warhol used the quotidian tools of printmaking and reproduction to critique the exclusionary world of fine art and to disclose art’s enmeshment in a consumerist culture. Despite their “outsider” beginnings and oppositional intent, the soup can prints have now become fully incorporated into canonical art history and the art market as prized emblems of postwar American art. Soup, though, once again made an iconoclastic splash in the art world when, in 2022, climate activists from “Just Stop Oil” splattered Vincent Van Gogh’s famous “Sunflowers” in a viscous layer of red tomato soup. Using soup as a tool for protest in the gallery aimed to draw attention to the ties between the art world and fossil fuel capitalism.

Art auctions regularly draw attention for the exorbitant wealth they display. With attendees like hedge fund managers, high-profile celebrities, and oligarchs, single pieces of art are regularly sold for millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Since the 1980s, those valuations have risen rapidly as art has increasingly become an investment machine for the protection and accrual of wealth. The dramatic stores of wealth available for investment in art have increased in step with resource extraction and consumption since 1950, mapping onto a period that historians have termed “The Great Acceleration” to refer to dramatic increases in human activity and their impacts on the Earth’s systems.

Enter into this context the environmental activist groups “Just Stop Oil” and “Letze Generation” (“Last Generation”), nonviolent civil resistance groups focused on fossil fuel divestment and sustainable futures for all. In the fall of 2022, when the group staged protests in prominent art galleries and museums across Europe and Australia, museum directors were understandably shocked. Employing direct action methods, protestors marked iconic artworks: mashed potatoes strewn on Claude Monet in Potsdam, tomato soup splashed on Van Gogh in London, blue pen scrawled on Warhol in Canberra, hands glued on Pablo Picasso in Melbourne. The works the protesters targeted are exactly the kind that draws the biggest prices at auction: icons of Impressionism, Cubism, and pop art. While the works were unharmed, their defacement in the name of direct climate action challenged not only the cultural value of such prized, irreplaceable objects but also the system that preserves, exhibits, and validates their worth.

In the wake of the protests, directors of high-profile museums and art galleries around the world released a joint statement in which they disparaged the protests as stunts that “risked” the “endangerment” of not only multimillion-dollar art, but also the social life and discourse art facilitates. Commentators quickly divided into camps: for some, activists had gone too far; for others, their actions were necessary and timely responses to the severity of the climate crisis. While registering the disruptive effects of the protests, these various responses severed the tactics of the protests from the cultural institutions and expressive discourses of the art they targeted. Failing to register the activists’ engagement with the tools of artistic expression misses a crucial point. These protests not just sowed disruption in one realm to precipitate change in another (a frequent activist tactic), but they drew explicit links between the fossil fuel economy and the institutions and markets of the art world.

In many ways, that world is a microcosm of a world economic system that has had profound impacts on Earth’s geologic systems, quickly making the planet uninhabitable for many. While contemporary art auctions might be an especially conspicuous display of wealth accumulation, the very founding of art institutions has in some cases been closely entwined with the extraction of resources: the renowned Getty galleries and research institutions that dot the globe were founded by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty; New York’s Museum of Modern Art was founded by the Rockefellers, who made their fortune through oil; the Guggenheim was founded with wealth amassed through mining; the Metropolitan Museum’s “environmentally-friendly” Koch Plaza is inextricably tied to the Koch brothers’ support of climate denialism and investment in the tar sands.

Today, many art galleries and allied cultural institutions rely on funding from oil companies, though some have been rapidly divesting. Despite commitments toward divestment over the last five years from many major institutions, even among galleries the protesters targeted, the commodity culture that feeds fossil fuel capitalism by valuing and protecting wealth at the expense of environmental health and justice remains entwined with cultures of art preservation. One protestor drew attention to this cultural impasse, demanding that spectators consider: “What is worth more, art or life?”

The paintings the “Just Stop Oil” protestors targeted are symbols of an economic system that has taken the planet to the brink. In their protest tactics, the activists show how the paintings are objects whose critical modes have been vacated by their incorporation into systems of wealth and prestige. In doing so, the protests arguably seek to revitalize—rather than erode, as the museum directors claimed—the cultural discourses and expressive critiques that spaces of art caretake.

Activists imagine and actively frame their protests as continuations of traditions of anti-capitalist art and cultural critique. After scrawling on Andy Warhol’s pop art prints of Campbell’s soup cans in Canberra, activist Bonnie Cassen claimed she was continuing in Warhol’s own critical tradition. If Warhol was depicting “consumerism gone mad,” Cassen said her performance critiqued “capitalism gone mad.” Contrary to being an “attack” on art discourse, Cassen’s performance participated in the same subversive tradition as Warhol, confronting the latest icons of capitalism: no longer mass consumer brand, but elite art object. Her scrawls resemble graffiti, a form of protest art against property that flourished with the entrenchment of property rights in the 1980s. Graffiti as an expressive critique of trespass in the museum calls out a link between art institutions and broader forces of privatization and inequality. The protest levels the critique that galleries are exclusive spaces, policed sites of wealth preservation, accumulation, and privatization.

In designing the protests, “Just Stop Oil” and “Letze Generation” activists may or may not have been tracking all the cultural and art historical nuances of their interventions. Nevertheless, cultural conflicts play out in different approaches to representation. In their own times, the works the activists targeted created representative modes that indexed social and political critique. The activists, plastering the works of two of the most famous practitioners of Impressionism (Monet and Van Gogh) with the literal materials of consumer capitalism—tomato soup—that a Pop/postmodern artist like Warhol depicted in his famous prints unwittingly dramatizes generational shifts in formal methods and social subjects of art. The tossed food—tomato soup and mashed potatoes—are visceral expressions of frustration with capitalism-as-usual that also recall the splattered paint and expressive gestures characteristic of Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist paintings.

Climate activism is thus in step with traditions of late-twentieth-century protest art such as that of the collectives Guerilla Art Action Group and Guerilla Girls, deploying the expressive methods of art-as-critique to disrupt the oil-powered commodification of art itself. These actions breathe life into art’s vital processes of defamiliarization and transformation. At the core of these protests is a two-fold provocation: that how we represent and imagine our environments shapes approaches to environmental management and injustice beyond the gallery walls; and that those modes of representation and imagination are currently under conditions of restraint, enclosed in the galleries, funding structures, and commodity cultures grown to protect the value of the art object.

Inserted into the thick space of the gallery, these climate protests both demand new institutions of art and culture and enact a model for that future. Soup and potatoes splattered across famous paintings turn the images back into mere canvases. The demand here is to burst through the patina of an approach to preservation that goes to great lengths to protect art as capital investment but not to protect the material conditions of livable futures for all humans and animals. The soup and potatoes flung across canvases also interject in the gallery a visceral realism: what is the material life of a painting when environmental crisis disrupts the provision of the basic necessities for human survival? When a painting burns in a wildfire or drowns in a flood, is it anything more than a canvas? This realism is palpable in the hands of the activists shaking as they struggle to open small vials of glue, spread it on their hands, and affix themselves to the wall. The activists’ shaking hands force a continuity between civic life, sustenance and survival, and art institution.

Galleries and museums are at the forefront of the cultural work of responding to environmental crisis. By disrupting the codes of conduct in the gallery—no touching the paintings, for example—the “Just Stop Oil” activists challenge these institutions’ cultural authority. If such scholars are drawing into relief the power structures that archives perpetuate, artists of the so-called “institutional critique” school of practice challenge the supposed social neutrality of galleries and museums. Artists like Andrea Fraser and Chris Burden, among others, take the governing conventions of galleries and museums as subjects for art, doing things like excavating the floor of a gallery or inhabiting the personae of a museum docent to critique assumptions about art’s cultural autonomy. Art in this vein puts the gallery itself into the frame to make visible the socio-political and economic underpinnings of art institutions, which are notoriously hermetic and economically exclusive. The art of institutional critique disrupts the gallery itself in a similar vein to the environmental activists who lodge their critique on the surfaces of the paintings, transgressing the conventions of access to open up the gallery to unexpected and unscripted forms of meaning making. Splattered food productively dirties and disrupts the fantasy of the neutral gallery space.

While art galleries might seem far away from the frontlines of the climate crisis, galleries are implicated in climate crisis all the way through, from fossil fuel capitalism to environmental cultures. In turn, the impacts of climate change are now affecting galleries and museums all over the world. As weather becomes more extreme and the effects of climate change become more broadly felt, floods and fires are increasingly destroying the artifacts and built environments of galleries, museums, and archives. For example, in 2017, a flood at the Svalbard Seed Vault caused by melting permafrost threatened seed samples; while in 2018, a fire at the National Museum of Brazil caused Alexandria-level losses of irreplaceable—and prominently Indigenous—artifacts. Recently, the 2023 wildfire in Lahaina destroyed the Lahaina Heritage Museum, resulting in the loss of its entire collection.

The “Just Stop Oil” and “Letze Generation” protests therefore were not just disruptive, they were also timely and prescient. While tomato soup and mashed potatoes manifest a critique of an institution out of step with its civic potential as a space for productive dialogue and education in pursuit of social equality and justice, climate change puts into material crisis the cultures shepherded by galleries and museums, and the very preservation of contemporary life.

If the objects galleries and museums hold let us tell stories about who we are and where we are going, those objects and those stories are quickly transforming. How do we need institutions to change in and for the climate crisis? To what extent is culture as we know it entwined with the perpetuation of resource extraction and capital accumulation? What cultures do art museums preserve, really, and what is their civic role in the face of environmental crisis? These are the questions the “Just Stop Oil” and “Letze Generation” activists pose in their protests. They are burning questions that art institutions should heed and live with—not just in their curation, but in throughout their structure and function.

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Featured Image: Last Generation protestors with a Monet painting covered in mashed potatoes. October 23, 2022, Potsdam, Germany. Courtesy of Last Generation.

Jayme Collins is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and a project leader at Blue Lab, an environmental art, storytelling and research group. She is at work on “Composing in the Field: Situated Poetries and Environments,” a book about poetry and land stewardship since 1960, and “Archival Ecologies” an audio storytelling project about culture and climate change in the archive. Her work can be found in Inscription Journal, ISLE, Wordsworth Circle, and Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997-2020). Contact.