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

As well as…

Curators

Art historians and academics