On October 14th, 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland of Just Stop Oil threw two tins of soup at an 1888 Sunflowers painting by Vincent van Gogh at the National Gallery in London, glued themselves to the wall and asked the crowd whether art was worth more than life. In the uproar that followed, which eventually led to their conviction and jailing for criminal damage and trespass, no one has seriously attempted to answer their question.
Is art really worth more than life? To compare human life with a painting is ridiculous. And yet, the painting – which is behind glass and was not damaged in the protest – is worth an estimated €90 million. Plummer and Holland were also drawing attention to the fact that we don’t even notice what is important about either life or art.
The symbolism of their protest highlighted something important about the way that art is taken for granted and seen as a stable backdrop to civilisation; our confidence that the Sunflowers will always be hanging on a gallery wall somewhere, and that our descendants will be able queue up patiently to see it and then, having consumed their quota of highbrow culture, move on to the next thing. A civilisation without art is unimaginable: it goes where we go, and adorns caves, museums, ordinary homes and palaces. It is worn, sung, woven, painted, recited and danced wherever humans have ever been. As humanity’s oldest companion, art probably knows us better than we know ourselves.
But we are ignoring a catastrophe that threatens both. In this context, could a generous splattering of tomato soup be seen as a small inconvenience to make us sit up and pay attention?
Art in all its forms has been central to our emerging awareness of our relationship with this beautiful, broken world and its many and diverse inhabitants.
Artists use imagery, sound, installations, rubbish, conversation (like Sharing the Oyster, an intergenerational dialogue between experienced oyster fishermen and school-aged children from the Clarinbridge area) and even smells (see Distillation, Luke Casserly’s journey into the Irish bog landscape through scent) to evoke a sense of connectedness, kinship and nostalgia for a dying world. If you were to read nothing about ecological devastation, and only experienced artistic renderings of this reality, you would probably get all the education you need to understand what is happening, what it might mean for us, and how we might respond. As the writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh put it at a DCU climate change conference last month, art allows us to speak truth in a world of falsity.
Having said that, art does not need to make anything happen for it to be worthwhile. While many artists have experimented with imagery of sea-level rise (including Línte na Farraige, a visual light installation by Finnish artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta) or created Postcards from the Future (such as the 2010 exhibit at the Museum of London) to convey the urgency of climate change, art that is purely propagandistic or didactic tends to have limited traction with either the public or art critics.
Even in a climate-changing world, art is still a search for the sublime. Photographer Edward Burtynsky‘s series Oil is a meditation on industrial and devastated landscapes that is awe-inspiring and oddly beautiful. Artist Deirdre O’Mahony, in a newly commissioned film to accompany her series Between A Rock And A Hard Place in the Carlow Visual centre for contemporary art, discusses how in her early years as an artist, students were “taught” to paint. Later on, they were encouraged to find a subject, or told there was no subject, after all. It took her decades of practice and inquiry to find a subject, only to discover it was what was all around her. She has since produced artworks inspired by the Burren landscape that encourage people to see its eclectic and fossilised features in new ways that somehow remind us of our own humanity, vulnerability and interconnectedness with all living things.
In The Model Plot, O’Mahony is collaborating with Imma, the Loy Association and horticulture students in a sculptural planting experiment to highlight how the potato ridge can be viewed as a source of heritage, food security and collective knowledge.
Art can communicate messages that are hard to hear, or that we don’t want to hear. Ireland’s basic income scheme for artists is the very least that the Government should be funding to support creative practice that deepens our collective understanding of our world. If you are not convinced of art’s ability to capture our human vulnerability with indignation at a time when human rights are being violated without consequences, go see the exhibition of renowned Irish artist Brian Maguire that is in the Hugh Lane until May 18th. Art is not more important than life, but if we paid it more attention, it might save lives.
Brian Maguire’s exhibition, La grande illusion, runs until May 18th at the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Parnell Square, Dublin
