The Van Gogh Soup Fiasco: Are Climate Activists Doing it Wrong?

The Climate movement threw the nation into uproar again in October, when Just Stop Oil activists were filmed throwing Heinz soup onto Van Gogh’s painting ‘Sunflowers’ in London’s National Gallery. In front of shocked spectators, activist Phoebe Plummer asked,‘What is worth more: art, or life? … Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?’ The connection between the painting and climate change may seem like a stretch, but the message is crucial. Regardless of our individual feelings about chucking soup at a Van Gogh, what this act did was secure a global platform, creating a valuable opportunity to demand change. Radical disruptive activity has become increasingly frequent in the UK: from controversial road-blockings to orange spray paint on buildings. The relentlessness of these activists is justified; the last eight years have been the hottest on record and devastating floods in Pakistan are demonstrating that the climate crisis is already here. However, this method of environmental action is not without its problems.

Twenty-one-year-old Plummer later explained the stunt, stating that they intended to get ‘the conversation going’, to ask the questions that really matter. This makes sense, the activists turn heads by doing outrageous things and use the attention to create mass conversation about fossil fuel licensing. Just Stop Oil’s statement asserted that this was a deliberate act of cultural transgression, posing the question, ‘you are outraged about this, where is your outrage of 33 million people in Pakistan losing their livelihoods’ and other devastating effects of climate change? When anger at damaged property is louder than anger at environmental injustice, we are forced to confront our own hypocrisy. We are pushed to ask ourselves where our priorities lie.

Unfortunately, the public response does not align with this reasoning. The numerous articles and the tweets made after the act weren’t talking about the cost-of-living crisis or the climate emergency. They largely discussed art or property damage, and trivial preconceptions about the activists in the video. The stunt might have gone viral, but how many people stayed to listen to the words? Some may argue that current methods of climate groups direct the conversation wrongly, distracting people from what matters rather than drawing their attention to it. Most people just don’t seem to be listening.

Those who are unsympathetic to environmental activism responded with the usual outrage and mockery, even though the painting was undamaged. Many others also responded negatively and, almost immediately, conspiracy theories began to float around social media. Their claim? That Just Stop Oil is funded by ‘Big Oil,’ pulling ridiculous stunts to make climate activists look bad. This is pretty outlandish. Yes, oil heiress Aileen Getty has publicly made donations to the organisation. However, receiving around a million dollars from an oil tycoon’s granddaughter hardly equates to being a puppet of the oil industry, or a masterful psy-op undermining anti-oil activism. Getty most likely feels a bit guilty for the source of her family’s fortune, and there’s not much else to it. What this theory really displays is the lack of support from both sides of the political spectrum, suggesting that Just Stop Oil has failed to win over the public.

Following a series of blocked roads and angry motorists hurling abuse, the Met had to urge the public not to ‘directly intervene with Just Stop Oil protesters.’ I recognise that blocking roads can create genuinely serious repercussions, but the outrage at the soup stunt – which endangered nobody – shows that these activists just can’t win. It looks like the general population has made climate activists its enemy, but this isn’t just a result of flawed methods. Though surveys suggest that over 80% of people in Britain are concerned about climate change, the British media actively stirs up hostility towards environmental activists which limits the support they receive.

There seems to be a general reluctance among people to support groups like Just Stop Oil. The popular image of the modern-day climate movement is one of privileged, out-of-touch teenagers, an image that is used against the cause to attack its credibility. Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and now Just Stop Oil are routinely mocked and dismissed; people focus on the specifics of their actions rather than their larger message. In this case, many comments focused on trivialities, like the accusations of ‘wasting soup’. People – especially in mainstream media – are on a constant search for a satisfying ‘gotcha’ moment, aiming to expose these crazy hippies as hypocrites. Greta Thunberg flew on a plane somewhere, maybe. The activists blocking the road have hair dye and plastic jewelry and shoes imported on smog-exuding ships, so we can dismiss their words, return to our comfortable lives, and ignore this huge existential threat that impacts every last one of us. Only when people get past this discomfort about climate activism and confront the crisis will real change occur.

Finding a solution to these problems isn’t easy. The approach of UN summits is ineffective, too concerned with the interests of transnational corporations and economic development. On the other hand, radical civil disobedience seems to just make the public seethe with anger. It seems almost impossible to find a viable way forward, to mobilise the population to act against oil licensing and pollution. But I don’t want to encourage climate doom and pessimism—there is still hope. Action to protect our planet is on the rise. Look at Brazil, where indigenous activists like Txai Suruí fight to defend their land against deforestation, and the President who pledges to protect the Amazon. At this point in time it is essential to redirect anger and frustration, not at damaged property or disruptive activists, but at our government’s lack of meaningful action against climate change.

December is often referred to in the music review industry as “list season”; magazines, blogs, and social media personalities scurry to crank out ranked list after ranked list of their favourite albums. Inevitably, I’ve begun to find it rather trite.

Working on a list myself, I’m aware of the irony. Regardless, I’ve never been a fan of musical analysis being reduced to (or shorthanded by) numbers, as such exercises often retain an irritating sense of self-importance. Ultimately, we must recognise that any attempt to evaluate a year’s crop of releases is not objective but intermingled with our personal lives; we can never evaluate art on objective criteria. There is something very commercial about modern “criticism” – paintings were never rated in stars nor “reviewed” as products but analysed, perhaps thanks to the nature of the gallery. All modern music deserves intellectual honesty. It too is art.

When thinking about how I wanted to approach this column, I oft returned to the observation that we do not consume art but bond with it. The art and the perceiver never leave the same after they meet. In that spirit, I aim to be somewhat diaristic; the albums I discuss having a personal significance I will attempt to elucidate. And how better to begin than with my own yearly retrospective; a trio of picks with no pretension of objectivity?

I must begin with local heroes Ashenspire, a band who I’ve watched soar out of avantgarde black metal obscurity, and into major-league metal publications. In Hostile Architecture the studio vocalist, drummer, project mastermind and chemistry teacher Alasdair Dunn roars lines of visceral and profound protest poetry such as

“When you can’t see the stars

You stop dreaming of space!” addressing topics from toxic masculinity to fascist riots – a welcome confrontation with the far-right sympathies that have sometimes emerged in the genre’s history. Just as genre-confounding as the lyrics is the music; a well-woven blend of vicious black metal and lilting European folk, which occasionally thins out for gripping, profound monologues and even a choral piece.

No other band have such a camaraderie at their live shows; Alasdair and the band’s boundlessly energetic live vocalist Rylan Greaves are genial offstage and charismatic on, and I have made some wonderful friends in the pit – or the pub afterwards! After wrestling with heating bills, ridiculous food costs, and constant overdraft brinksmanship, screaming

“Only three months to the gutter

Never three months to the peak!” in unison with an ecstatic crowd was a profoundly moving catharsis, and I’m truly grateful to be part of a community as welcoming as Glasgow’s metal scene. I’ve been lucky during this crisis; that so many people I know have suffered further perhaps explains why this record has gained the traction it has across the world, as the desperation of life “tangled in austerity” has become further intertwined with the zeitgeist.

Sometimes, music can say and mean a great deal without any words. Exemplifying this, the Czech duo of Šimanský & Niesner produced a gorgeous and enticing work of primitivist folk in the cheerfully titled Všechno Dobré (All Good), one that I’ve listened to more than any other release this year.

While its pastoral vibe has become intertwined in my memory with tranquil wanders across a campus littered with Autumn leaves, I found that the more tense sections of tracks like “Ztracená” (“Lost”) seemed to illustrate my growing anxiety over impending deadlines and exams. This tension is something that is slowly teased out in the record, the interwoven threads of complex picking creating elaborate pieces that slowly work away unease, apprehensions resolved with often cheerful deliberation. The meditative drone of “Pražská Rága” (“Prague Raga”), which nods to the devotional brilliance of David Grubbs, is particularly soothing, while dramatic 11-minute centrepiece “Lesní Chodci” (“Forest Walkers”) evokes John Fahey at his most fluid and intense.

These two musicians have a clear mastery of their genre – my vinyl copy of the album came with a brief history of the primitivist folk movement – but master above all else the ability to entice the listener and excommunicate their worries. As its arboreal path comes to an end, the record lives up to its name; all is good indeed.

The record that resonated with me most, however, is Daniel Rossen’s You Belong There. The Grizzly Bear alumnus melds bustling jazz rhythms, technical acoustic wizardry, and insightful lyrics, to create a timeless indie folk album. From the mellifluous grandeur of a “hurricane” of piano runs in “Tangle”, to the tentative stringdriven atmosphere of the title track, Rossen’s music evokes chaos, tranquillity, and everything in between, lyrics addressing Rossen’s interpersonal relationships of the last “ten years gone”. As I’ve continued to struggle with the death of my mother last year, my exegesis of his observations has been made in the harsh light of grief, his honest, almost cynical grappling with loss deeply relatable. Of an ex-partner he notes

“The diatribes and lectures left unsaid That’s you and me” acknowledging the complex feelings we have to those now absent from our lives; while much of my grief has been, to quote Jamie Anderson, “a love that has nowhere else to go”, it is also drawn from frustrations and conflicts that are now irresolvable.

Rossen’s emotional journey concludes in a fittingly plaintive manner, with the heartrending admission

“I still need you”

The lack of closure embodies, to me, how grief is a process of adaptation, not resolution – in a way, it never really ends. Perhaps concurring, the album has one more track after “The Last One”, where Rossen widens his scope beyond personal experience. As acoustic picking, bowed strings, and plaintive woodwind weave between each other, achingly beautiful in a way that always makes me shiver, he delivers the most potent statement of the album;

“What a life

Whatever lasts

Repeat the pattern… from the beginning”

Rossen sums the absurdity of our very existence in these lines, elucidating the grand and bittersweet truth that grief has imparted to me; no matter how great our pain, the world continues, billions of other stories written alongside us, beyond us, and before us, often lost to time before long. “Repeat the Pattern” was the track Rossen opened with at St. Luke’s, initiating an intimate set where all other instrumentation was stripped away. I found myself moved to tears as the lone, guitar-toting musician gently commanded;

“Set yourself to the side

And admire this anonymous place

A riff to fill up the hours Stretched for years, the space of a day” breaking of the fourth wall of his art to elucidate music’s power to distend time and space to its will. A magic that mere numbers could never come close to portraying.

I hope you try one of these albums, and that they come to mean something to you beyond sounds and words, as they have for me. Merry Listmas, and a happy new year.