One cannot always be in the right place at the right time, so I shall never know what effect the recent splashing of soup on Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ might have had on me, had I been there to witness it in real time. Would I have been horrified? Or, when one of them asked “What is worth more, art or life?”, would I have seen the light and spurned the moribund unrealities of the aesthetic realm in preference for the right of a younger generation to don a T-shirt, dye their hair pink and live, live, live I tell you! I don’t rule it out; I can be a proper philistine when the mood takes me. But, alas, I was not around to see it happen, and am therefore as perplexed as just about everyone else.
On one recent trip to the capital, I did get lucky enough to find myself in the right place at the right time. Back in the days (a little over a fortnight ago) when it was still possible for the public to see great masterpieces without so much security they need a lorgnette to make them out across a cavernous room, I found myself striding excitedly across Trafalgar Square. I was on my way to see the latest exhibition at the Royal Academy, dedicated to William Kentridge’s reflections on the injustices of post-colonial South Africa. Way above me, beyond the reach of the woke hordes and untroubled by the animadversions of Afua Hirsch, Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson contended with the guano menace, as he has done since 1843.
I was heading for Pall Mall when I had the good fortune to stumble upon an unexpected art event with African associations: the installation of a Malawian freedom fighter on the fourth plinth. For those unfamiliar with the plinth, it is as much a part of the monumental furniture of Trafalgar Square nowadays as Nelson himself. Originally intended for an equestrian statue of William IV – the same monarch who opposed the abolition of slavery so vehemently in the Lords – it remained empty for decades owing to a shortage of funds.
Then, around 2003, the Mayor of London began commissioning things to occupy it. Given that the original intention had been to place an equestrian statue on the plinth, perhaps the most poignant installation was a skeletal horse by Hans Haacke (see above). Called ‘Gift Horse’, it had an electronic ribbon tied to its front foot which displayed, live, the ticker of the London Stock Exchange.
Other ideas have included a statue of a man in a loincloth entitled ‘Ecce Homo,’ numerous members of the public invited by Antony Gormley to do their thing, a ship in a bottle, a blue cockerel, a creature from ancient Assyrian mythology, a fly on a dollop of cream and a transparent inverted version of the plinth by Rachel Whiteread which, as if things weren’t bad enough already, amounted to a fifth empty plinth.
Prize for the most tin-eared suggestion, though, must go to Philip Hammond. Odd really, as I always thought ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ had a sense of humour, though perhaps this only demonstrates how right I was. In 2013, Hammond suggested that Lady Thatcher should be permanently commemorated on the plinth, a stroke of genius supported by Norman ‘on-yer-bike’ Tebbit, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, the then London Mayor, Boris Johnson, and a man whose name I shall not stoop to repeating here, but which sounds remarkably like a middle-class garage. In the words of someone or other, no, no, no and no.
Anyway, as I crossed the square, I noticed a small crane close by the plinth and two men inspecting a pair of new statues placed upon it. One of the men, it turned out, was the artist, Samson Kambalu. He was brought back to the ground rather gingerly after the inspection and I managed to get a shot of him in a hat, of which more anon.
The statues, sculpted from black stone, are based on a photograph dating back to 1914 which was taken outside the Baptist church where the black man was preacher. His name was John Chilembwe. The white man was a European missionary called John Chorley. They are roughly the same height in the photo, but on the plinth Chilembwe dwarfs the missionary. The whole work is called ‘Antelope’, apparently because the preacher’s hat reminded the artist of an antelope’s horns. He told the Guardian that the antelope is ‘the most generous animal in the bush, recklessly, stupidly generous.’ The real point about the hat, however, is that Kambalu claims it would not have been worn by a black man in colonial Malawi if a white man was present. The one in the photograph, therefore, represents a subversive act.
In fact, it may only have been the custom that black men tipped their hats in the presence of white men, a minor difference admittedly, but the whole matter of hats and how they were worn is germane to the significance of the statues. Clearly, the disproportionate height of the men acts as a retrospective assessment of their importance. To this day, Chilembwe is commemorated on Malawi’s stamps and celebrated with a national holiday. He is seen as a freedom fighter way ahead of his time, despite the fact that his uprising was a failure, and led both to his death and the razing of his church to the ground.
The theme of reassessment is familiar in this country, but it has thus far been applied mostly to statues of men who owned slaves in the Caribbean. There have also been calls for monuments associated with colonialism to be removed, most famously the one to Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, though so far Oriel College has managed to cling on to the statue of one of its benefactors. Rhodes was the man who built a personal empire in Africa, had an entire African country named after him and, notoriously, claimed he would annex the planets if he could.
It seems appropriate, then, given the efforts to reassess the legacy of colonialism, that a statue to a black freedom fighter should be erected in London’s grandest public square. As the artist has said, “we have to start putting detail to the black experience, we have to start putting detail to the African experience, to the post-colonial experience.”
The question is just how much of that detail we are made privy to. One incident from the failed uprising has not been mentioned by the artist, nor is there an explanation beneath the plinth, and the accounts by the BBC and the Guardian also neglected to mention it. Indeed, I have only found one reference to the statue on the internet which alludes to the incident at all. And yet, the Wikipedia entry for Chilembwe makes no attempt to conceal the fact that the preacher, when ordering white men only to be killed by his henchmen, called for the head of one in particular, William Jervis Livingstone, to be brought to him. Livingstone was the manager of the Magomero Estate in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi). He was known to beat the men employed on the estate. When his head was duly delivered, impaled on a pole, Chilembwe placed the grisly trophy by the altar and preached a sermon beside it.
Could it be that, after a string of inventive and often joyous creations, the fourth plinth is now home to an unhinged zealot? Though the artist prefers not to highlight the fact, on this occasion it’s fair to say the devil was in the detail.
But hey, those were different times. Perhaps Chilembwe was simply making an ironic, tongue-in-cheek reference to Joseph Conrad. Undoubtedly a rather literal allusion, I grant you, but one cannot always apply one’s own narrow reading habits to the critical sensibilities of others.
As I said, I was lucky on that occasion. One cannot always be in the right place at the right time and, sadly, my frequent visits to the National Gallery did not include the day the two protesters decided to hurl soup at a Van Gogh. Instead, I merely heard accounts of the incident afterwards. Why, I asked myself, would anyone attack one of the Britain’s favourite pictures? And why with soup?
Well, according to Claire Armitstead in the Guardian (14 October 2022), the action displayed situationist ‘wit’ – not unlike the incident with a decapitated head, then – since it alluded to Andy Warhol’s critique of exactly the sort of industrialisation the protesters were blaming for the destruction of the planet. However, even if the soup was indeed this eloquent, the protesters were rather less forthcoming. When one of them expressed a preference for real flowers over painted ones, she only left open the possibility that, contrary to the spelling on her T-shirt, she was actually intent on stopping oils, as well presumably as artworks in other media.
The people who feel most strongly about an issue don’t always want to debate their tactics. When the Guardian set up a debate between Rupert Read, a climate activist opposed to such actions, and Indigo Rumbelow, who strongly advocates them, Read called upon climate activists to ‘bring the public with us’ in developing a ‘new moderate flank’. Rumbelow, on the other hand, was more in favour of the militant strategy known to behaviourists as tossing one’s toys out of the pram. She wasn’t even able to control her anger long enough to answer the question:
‘You’re asking about tactics – which ones work and which ones don’t. First let me throw a question back to readers…’
Less than two sentences in, and she was already throwing things:
‘…why is this what your newspaper wants you to think about? Why do they want you to pit people taking action against each other? As they’ve pitted me against Rupert Read here? Why do they want you to obsess over who is right and who is wrong when climate breakdown looms over us all?’
In short, the tactics are not up for discussion. How silly of Mr Read to fall for the newspaper’s fiendish trick and discuss tactics like that. It’s a distraction to get in a flap about right and wrong when the Earth is in peril. Ms Rumbelow then proceeded to discuss how some tactics, such as tweets and marches and so forth, have failed, while in contrast the Suffragettes succeeded, though she neglected to mention the obvious precedent of Mary ‘Slasher’ Richardson, who sought to win the hearts and minds of the British people by attacking the Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver. That was tactics, obviously. Why the obsession with tactics?
She ended by asking,
‘Honestly, answer me this: if our government is ready to destroy humanity in the race to make oil profits, why would it listen to a tweet?’ (Observer, 30 October 2022)
To which the world-weary reply would be, ‘Why would it care how many cans of soup you throw at the nation’s favourite pictures?’
My own preference is to look, precisely, at the tactics, since it is obvious that Mary ‘Slasher’ Richardson is not the best model for effecting change. Women’s suffrage was not won by attacking Velazquez. Indeed, women did not win the vote till after the Great War. Thereafter, the world moved on. By 1932, ‘Slasher’ had joined Oswald Moseley’s Union of Fascists, claiming
“I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement.”
She had a genius for tactics, did our Mary. She was also prepared to squander her hard-won vote on the tin-pot founder of Britain’s fascist party, who would happily have terminated democracy altogether. Moseley was certainly a courageous figure. In his declining years, it is said he would vent his frustration by strangling chickens.
If one wishes to understand the thinking behind the ‘Sunflowers’ attack, a speech delivered by a Dutchman in The Hague’s Mauritshuis Museum repays closer inspection:
“How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless is apparently being destroyed before your eyes? Do you feel outraged? Good. Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed?” (Guardian, 27 October)
The first Dutchman delivered this speech immediately after tipping soup (one detects a persistent motif here) over the head of a second Dutchman, which ended up down his back, as the second Dutchman attempted to glue his own face to Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. This he did without great success, but then no one had ever attempted to do this before; it is not one of those crafts passed down from generation to generation.
Though it cried out for an explanation, the speech made no reference to the gluing attempt, nor did it allude to the soup, presumably on the mistaken assumption that the soup spoke for itself. Instead, the speech was designed to explain the choice of Vermeer for the attack, in a manner that even the people standing nearby found confusing, some of whom expressed their dismay and told them to stop, which is ironic, since they were supposed to tell that to the oil companies. The fact that the bystanders were able to speak at all was surprising, as most members of the public present were rendered speechless, and were probably thinking along these lines: that it had taken one Dutch genius to paint the portrait, and one Dutch idiot to try gluing his face to it.
You can see the problems here, from the point of view of optics, public perception and communication. Just as there was no obvious link between soup and Van Gogh’s vase of flowers, so its relevance to Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ was unclear. Warhol’s multiple cans aside, just how rich is soup, in the semiotic sense? Often pretty thin.
In other instances, however, the protesters have come up with a more satisfying exegesis, to the point where they’ve begun to sound like disaffected art historians. After a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper came under attack at the Royal Academy, Simon Bramwell – who had anticipated the Dutch attack by ‘affixing’ himself to the image – told Deutsche Welle “It is possibly one of the most iconic representations of Western values and spirituality.” That ‘possibly’ was a little noncommittal, but Bramwell knew instinctively that there was a wide spectrum of opinion out there. He went on: “The painting also resonates with ‘crop failure’ and the increasing malnutrition linked to climate change. We have a whole generation for whom it may be the last supper.” Now that’s what I call art criticism. Eat your heart out, Andrew Graham-Dixon.
A similar symbolism was highlighted by two members of the Italian climate activist group, Ultima Generazione (Last Generation), when they glued themselves to the ancient statue of Laocoön at the Vatican Museums. Priest of Apollo in the city of Troy, Laocoön had warned his fellow Trojans against taking in the wooden horse left by the Greeks outside the city gates. But, as with the appeals of today’s climate scientists, very few listened, and the city was destroyed:
“This statue reminds us of the sad story of the Greek priest that tried to save himself, his children and all citizens of Troy,” said Laura, one of the activists. She added that their action was symbolic of a movement “united by the will of influencing our government to make the right choices in order to mitigate climate change.”
On Last Generation’s website, Aimee von Baalen, the organisation’s spokesperson, explained their attack on a Monet painting of hay ricks as follows: “Monet loved nature and captured its unique and fragile beauty in his works. How can it be that so many are more afraid of damage to one of these images of reality than they are of the destruction of our world itself, whose magic Monet so admired?” She added, “There will be no time for admiring art if we fight each other over food and water!”
I ask you, how many iconoclasts in the past were this sensitive to art history? But perhaps this is itself a problem. Everyone’s a critic nowadays. Just as we are at liberty to like or dislike everything, so we can all impersonate the art experts. It must have been hard for the museum authorities in Potsdam to know that the Philistines were upon them. Until, that is, it was too late, when the mashed potato had already turned their Monet into a shepherd’s pie.
One imagines a guard being interviewed in the aftermath: “You can’t tell who the vandals are these days. It’s true they looked like punks, but their sensitivities were so refined.” In the cases of Van Gogh and Vermeer, the protesters made sure beforehand that the pictures were protected by glass. But how much longer will they be able to smuggle in foodstuffs undetected?
I’ve given this problem some thought and concluded that, henceforth, all protesters should confine themselves to a campaign of expectoration. Mashed potato, soup, even a modest word salad can easily be confiscated and/or silenced, but no one can take our saliva away. Just think how much clearer the message would have been, had the Dutchmen in the Hague refrained from making speeches and simply gobbed in the painting’s direction.
I vividly recall, from my school days, how John Ritchie managed to gob almost a hundred yards, and the important lesson I took away from that was this: success at anything requires dedication. John Ritchie was no child prodigy when it came to the propulsive ejection of spittle. Over the weekends and in every free moment he could find, he had honed his gobbing skills to a point where both distance and accuracy were the wonder of his fellow schoolboys. He was even able to invest his gobs with a kind of defiance one did not encounter in the average, casually expelled phlegm observed on the public highway or football pitch.
I don’t recall Ritchie ever expressing an opinion regarding a) art or b) the destruction of the planet by the burning of fossil fuels, but then he was a simple soul at the time I knew him. They were simpler times. Imagine, however, the way it would enhance awareness among the public if the Just Stop Oil campaigners displayed a fraction of John Ritchie’s gobbing skills.
Of course, they would have to practise as tirelessly as he did. Spitting ranges could be built somewhere in the countryside where they could hang actual size reproductions of Van Gogh, Monet and Vermeer at appropriate distances and work on their technique. But the attacks themselves would require the minimum of planning. By dint of the judicious study of floor plans, they could calculate the optimum trajectories. Eventually, they would be able to attack an entire room-full of paintings without having to go anywhere near the security wire. Firing gobs at great speed, and with wondrous accuracy, they could take out maybe ten masterpieces a minute from a position at the centre of a room.
But there would be no need. Instead, why not take on the greatest challenge of all, that holy grail of iconoclasts, equivalent to the toppling of Nelson’s column itself: Turner’s painting of ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.
Although this masterpiece is sacrosanct now – the nation’s favourite, as confirmed by a poll taken for Radio 4’s Today programme as recently as 2005 – this was not an opinion shared by its creator, as Timothy Spall demonstrated (to the disgust of all clean-living filmgoers) by spitting at his own canvas, exactly as if this was an intrinsic part of his Romanticism. Attacking the ‘Temeraire’ would risk alienating the maximum amount of art lovers, which is precisely why the expectorators should do it, with the added advantage that they could point at the revered artist and say “Well he started it!”
There is, moreover, a clear symbolic justification for spitting at the image, in the shape of the little tug belching smoke as it drags the old warship to the breaker’s yard. It’s hard to imagine how Turner could have devised a more compelling image for our times – nothing less than the triumph of fossil fuels over wind power.
Finally, gobbing over this image with great élan would have the virtue of authenticity, as who can doubt it is an action of which Turner himself would have heartily approved? Not to mention John Ritchie, or (as he would later be known to the world, many moons after becoming my boyhood idol) the immortal Sid Vicious.