Protests involving the attacking or altering of works of art to make the severity of the climate crisis visible have increased in recent years. This type of event ensures much greater media attention than a traditional protest.
The teacher María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco considers the use of violence or any action that puts cultural heritage at risk unacceptable. The writer Azahara Palomeque let us remember that throughout history civil disobedience has been fundamental to achieving progress in terms of rights.
Violence is incompatible with a good cause
María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco
On March 4, 1914, the Anglo-Canadian suffragist Mary R. Richardson slashed with a kitchen knife the Velázquez painting that in Spain we know as The Venus of the mirror and which in England they knew how Venus of Rockeby. The painting was visible to everyone in one of the rooms of the National Gallery in London, and Richardson, well aware of the prestige of the work and its ability to attract public attention, decided to attack it to protest against the arrest of one of his colleagues in the women’s suffrage movement, Emmeline Pankhurst. It wasn’t the first time that things like this had happened in museums and other spaces dedicated to culture, and it wouldn’t be the last.
The motives and forms of attacks on works of art have been very varied. Throughout history, simple acts of vandalism have alternated with mental health problems: I still remember the impact of the attack on Compassion by Michelangelo on May 21, 1972, the work of the geologist László Tóth, who believed he was Jesus Christ. But in most cases these attacks are protected, as happened with The Venus of the mirror, in ideological factors, in great causes that try to justify these actions as social protest or activism. The timeless aura of the work in the museum thus intersects with historical temporality. For example, in the context of the Vietnam War, Tony Shafrazy decided to write “Kill Lies All” in red ink on Guernica by Picasso, then kept at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He said he wanted to give the painting back its power of denunciation to protest against the possible pardon of the soldier responsible for the My Lai massacre. Likewise, we have witnessed attacks aimed at raising public awareness of climate change that immediately attracted media attention. Curiously, in some of the latter cases the action had a predominantly symbolic character because it was carried out either on the frame or on works protected with glass. In this way the desired publicity was achieved without causing irreparable damage to the carefully chosen artistic object, from Van Gogh to Goya to Leonardo. It is interesting to underline this fact, which seems like a minor detail but is not.
All this allows us to reach one conclusion: works of art matter. Why? Because they are part of our sentimental education, they shape us and challenge us. Because they have much more to do with us than we know or imagine. Paradoxically, the general consensus behind attacks on works of art is precisely this. Here some doubts arise: starting from this evident general consensus, why doesn’t art occupy a higher place in governments’ priorities? Why don’t those who have to ensure its production, promotion, interpretation, custody and dissemination take seriously its sense of heritage and its emotional strength?
In the revealing book In search of the city. Material culture and museums, Aurora Fernández Polanco and Pablo Martínez explain that, even if we are sometimes unaware of it, in museums – large and small – works of art and museography build an indissoluble plot that reveals a story that we assume is ours. It is what we call culture, canon, tradition. Too often we assume it uncritically, but when we analyze it critically we don’t even give it up. This is demonstrated by our shock when we hear news of attacks against works of art in museums, whatever the cause. In some cases, the shock itself in the face of an attack confirms the piece’s belonging to what we call culture. Even when it comes to objects like fountain, by Marcel Duchamp, conceived precisely to question it.
It can always be argued that the survival of the planet or humanity – or some part of it – is above the preservation of culture in general or some works in particular. But this line of thinking is very dangerous: both the destruction of images of the iconoclastic movements of centuries ago – or of recent Afghanistan – and that of what in Nazi Germany was called “degenerate art” claimed to respond to apparently high and regenerative purposes. If the definition of a higher goal is always questionable, violence rarely corresponds to something high and often generates more violence. It is perhaps no coincidence that Mary R. Richardson later led the women’s section of the British Union of Fascists.
Paint a livable future
Azahara Palomeque
“There will be no art on a dead planet.” The first time I heard this phrase was from the mouth of Marta Moreno Muñoz, the artist responsible for the project. The walk: A mostly walking journey from Granada to the permafrost to warn of the climate emergency. Marta made a documentary during her trip and that material is part of a doctoral thesis that she is about to finish. She, like many other activists, combines profound intellectual activity with the political ability to build a collective conscience commensurate with the ecosocial crisis we are experiencing. She too has participated in acts of civil disobedience similar to those in which paint is thrown at works of art, sometimes staining the frames or the glass covering them, but never the canvases themselves. It happens that, sometimes, those who cause symbolic damage to paintings of great value are the same ones who adore art with a dedication and ethics that exceed those of the average citizen; and they do it because they know that, without a viable ecosystem, our species will not be able to create beauty. Their detractors accuse them of vandalism; Meanwhile, sensitized citizens might be able to understand their actions, free from prejudice.
I confess that adapting my understanding of the ongoing ecological disaster to the discursivity of this type of show, peaceful in its civil repercussion but aggressive in its gesture, cost me a lot of reflection. Art humanizes us; It constitutes a form of transcendence and enhances everyday life to transport us to a better place; spiritualizes our banal existences and educates, as the Pedagogical Missions have made clear. However, it is difficult to make it sacred when we have already reached 1.5°C of global warming – the figure that, according to the Paris Agreement, was to be avoided at all costs – and suffer from painful terrors like the Dana of Valencia, whose anniversary we have just commemorated. Precisely, throwing a can of paint or binding yourself with glue in a museum, and doing so for climate justice, has the power to juxtapose the sublime and the horror, generating new languages that replace the current void of unfulfilled agreements. In other words, these unpopular protests clash with the teleology attributed to historical time – crystallized in art galleries – to the intelligence of men and women in producing works. long-lastingwith the urgency of a problem that puts our survival in the medium to long term to the test and social illiteracy when it comes not to imagining solutions, but to implementing them.
This fact, which can only occur in the artistic field, evokes the great question that Theodor Adorno asked himself in the midst of a destruction that only our civilization is possible: is poetry possible after Auschwitz? The updated version of that philosophical reflection invites us to think, like Martha, what kind of humanistic creation will come to light in the age of ambient darkness. Now that the COP is taking place, it is worth remembering the long decades during which we have witnessed similar and useless summits; nor that the resulting commitments are not binding on governments; that we find a fundamental inequality in the fact that the most terrible consequences of the catastrophe will mainly affect those who did not cause it: third world countries and younger generations; that the survival of an economic system is put before that of life. If this whole web of inequity and absurdity does not enter the heads of key leaders, usually under corporate pressure, and there is no critical mass of citizens willing to change their habits, how can we encourage even minimal social change?
I wish the last resort to generate the necessary media reaction was not to attack with such virulence the supports of such precious canvases. A responsible geopolitical map would have already used democratic mechanisms aimed at stopping this debacle from the moment the first warning signs were released. Unfortunately, history has shown us that civil disobedience was necessary to abolish slavery, ensure universal suffrage, give women rights, or bring about the independence of colonized countries. No one dies when checkered pigments are thrown, and thousands of people do so every year due to the ecological debacle. Violence, therefore, is not part of the work of these activists.
