JSO protestors throw paint on the glass covering Van Gogh's sunflowers painting.
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  • Open letter

Artists, art workers and historians’ open letter to Judge Hehir

Liberate Tate and Greenpeace are currently collaborating to try and make an intervention in the sentencing of the Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The judge sentencing them on the 27th of September has threatened custodial sentences and recently sent other JSO activists to jail. Phoebe and Anna, the two activists, are both 22 years old. 

Later this month, a  judge will sentence Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland for criminal damage for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Judge Christopher Hehir of Southwark Crown Court told them to be “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison”.

As artists, art workers and art historians, we are concerned by the courts’ defence of a false notion of artistic purity in their judgement and sentencing. Art can be and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon.

Since at least 1900, avant-garde artists have called for or delivered iconoclasm as part of their artistic practice, from the Futurists and Dadaists in the early twentieth century; to Asger Jorn’s ‘modifications’ or Robert Rauschenberg erasing a drawing by De Kooning in the 1950s; to Gustav Metzger, the Gutai Group, Jim Dine, Marta Minujín and many other performance artists in the 1960s; to the rise of 1990s iconoclasts like Alexander Brenner spray-painting a Malevich painting; Jake and Dinos Chapman ‘rectifying’ rare Goya etchings; or the graffiti of Banksy and other street artists of today. The work of all these iconoclasts, often far more physically destructive than the work of JSO, is now venerated in museums around the world. Such iconoclastic works are regularly the subject of state museum exhibitions, including Tate Britain’s Histories of British Iconoclasm in 2013.

It is our expert opinion that it would be incorrect to consider this JSO action, and its social message, as an attack on an artwork from without. Instead, it belongs to the well-established tradition of creative iconoclasm illustrated above. It will inevitably enrich the story and social meaning of Sunflowers; and will be remembered, discussed and valued in itself as a creative and incisive work.

The suffragettes deployed iconoclasm to make their case: in 1914 Mary Wood struck John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James three times with a meat cleaver while shouting “Votes for Women!” It was also a complaint to the Royal Academy on women artists’ representation, decades ahead of the Guerilla Girls, once iconoclastic outsiders, now exhibited globally. Certainly, Plummer and Holland’s protest might have given a nod to art history by using Campbell’s soup instead of Heinz. A year earlier, fellow JSO activists Eben Lazarus and Hannah Hunt glued themselves to Constable’s Haywain, which surely tipped a hat to Peter Kennard’s iconoclastic Haywain With Cruise Missiles.

Artist collective Liberate Tate made unsanctioned performance interventions spilling oil inside Tate galleries to end BP sponsorship. At first the reception was outrage at such iconoclasm, but as the social tide turned the group’s artworks were featured in Tate’s archive. 

Crucially, Plummer and Holland knew the painting was protected from the soup by a solid pane of glass when they threw the red-orange missive, making a Pollock-esque splatter across the mustard yellow, drooping blooms. Their iconoclasm was temporary, a sight to behold to make their protest.

Vincent van Gogh painted Sunflowers just months before cutting off his own ear in self-punishment after an argument with fellow painter Paul Gaugin. On September the 27th, Judge Hehir should refrain from punishing Plummer and Holland with custodial sentences for upholding a centuries’ old tradition of calling on our social conscience through art.

Signatories

Artists

Fiona Banner

Love Ssega

Juliet Stevenson, Actor

Peter Kennard

Cat Picton-Phillipps

KennardPhillipps

Tania Bruguera

Monique Roffey, Author

Daniel Lismore

Jonathan Barnbrook

Dan Harvey, Ackroyd & Harvey

Hayley Newman

Harun Morrison

Darren Cullen, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives

Pedro Inoue

Ricardo Dominguez

Cressida Brown, Theatre Director

As well as…

Adam Bridgland

Adele Jordan

Aidan Jolly

Alejandro Martínez

Alex Hetherington

Alex Kelly

Amanda Beardsmore

Andrea Rollefson, Not An Alternative

Andrew Simms, New Weather Institute

Andrew Smith, Revolting Artists

Angharad Bache

Anna Gillespie

Anne Caron-Delion

Anne Langfords

Beccy McCray

Beka Economopoulos, The Natural History Museum (US)

Ben Norris

Benji Bailes

Beth Stephens

Bogna Stefańska, Office for Postartistic Services

Bridget Ely

Chloe Massey

Chloe Naldrett, Sustainable Entertainment

Chrissy Kelly

Chuck Elliott

Dan Rawlings

Darren Sutton, Liberate Tate

Dave Waldman

David Cross

Doublewhy_y

Dr JC Niala

Dr. Gerard R. Rutteman, alias Drager Meurtant

Ellie Harrison

Emmer Winder

Euan Roberts

Eva Stauffer

Gaby Solly

Gaelle Vallee-Tourangeau

Guy Denning

Hannah Davey

Harry Josephine Giles

Helen Perkins

How To Catch a Pig, Bands Boycott Barclays

Imogen Knight

Isa Suarez

James Marriott, Platform

James Mernagh

Jane Lawson

Jane Morris

Jane Trowell

Jay Jordan, Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Jenny Peevers

John Churchill, Inspiral London

Kati Inskip-Codogno

Kirsten Foster

Laura Buckle

Laura Phillips

Lee Lyford

Leila Mimmack

Linda Goodacre

Lisa Remers

Liv Wynter

Lucy Bradley

Lucy Ellinson

Lucy Reeves Khan

Lynn Pilling

Malu Halasa

Mariele Neudecker

Matthew James Holman

Mel Evans

Michael Hrebeniak, New School of the Anthropocene

Michelle Tylicki

Millie Barker

Miranda Shaw

Natasha Pavey

Nicole Mollett

Nina Stevenson

Paul Burgess

Paul Skelton

Penny Southgate

Phil Barton

Rachel Gomme

Rachel Steele

Ramón Salgado-Touzón

Sarah Blowers

Sean Foley

Sheena Calvert

Simon Holliday

Sophie Austin

Sophie Holland

Stefan Szczelkun

Steffan Donnelly

Youngsook Choi

Zoe Svendsen, Metis Arts

Curators

Anna-Maria Nabirye Manyhisa, Director, Afri-Co-Lab

Anthony Roberts, Director, Colchester Arts Centre

Martine Rouleau

Marianna Dobkowska 

Dr Sarah Demelo, Curator (ESCALA, Art and Special Collections), University of Essex

Stef Dickers, Special Collections Manager, The Bishopsgate Institute

Steph Warren, Gallerist, Stella Dore

Art historians and academics

Dr Gary Anderson, Head of Creative And Performing Arts, Liverpool Hope University

Dr David Cross, Reader, Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts

Dr Anthony Faramelli, Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths

Dr Terence Flaxton, Professor of Cinematography, University of the West of England

Dr Janna Graham, Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths

Dr Gavin Grindon, Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries, QMUL

Dr. Susan Kelly, Senior Lecturer Fine Art Goldsmiths

Dr Matt Lodder, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory, University of Essex

Dr. Steve Lyons, Research Director, The Natural History Museum

Dr Emma Mahony, Head of BA Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Dr. Nadja Millner-Larsen, Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, NYU

Dr Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor and chair, Dept. of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU

Dr David AJ Murrieta Flores, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Dr Amitabh Rai, Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organisation, QMUL

Dr Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Professor in Political Aesthetics, University of Copenhagen

Dr Paula Serafini, Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries, QMUL

Dr Stevphen Shukaitis, Reader, Reader, EBS – Management and Marketing, University of Essex

Dr. Abigail Susik, Associate Professor of Art History, Willamette University, USA

Dr Kuba Szreder, Lecturer in Art Theory, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw

Sarah Temple, Course Leader Professional Studies, London College of Communication