London — Room 34 of the National Gallery in London will be on Monday afternoon at JMW Turner’s “Fighting Temerer“The warship is towed to the breaker’s yard, and George Stubbs’s”Whistlejacket“A huge picture of a horse breeding towards the sky.
Suddenly, two visitors broke their pious mood. At 2:15 pm, music student Eben Lazarus, 22, pulled out three posters from the tube. Then, with the help of psychology student Hannah Hunt (23), he said John Constable’s “Hay WainA famous 19th-century painting that transforms its idyllic landscape into one with planes, fire-torn trees, and rusty cars.
The couple then took off their jackets, showed them a T-shirt with the slogan “Just Stop Oil,” glued it to the frame of the picture, and shouted for the need to tackle climate change. “Art is important,” Lazaro said, with his voice booming around the gallery. But “condemning the future we cannot live in was less important than the lives of my brothers and all generations.”
A group at a nearby school was in the process of discussing another painting. The teacher, Claire McDonnell, didn’t seem to be upset. “Oh, I think it’s a protest against climate change,” she said. “looks fun!”
For the past four years, devastating climate protesters have seen a routine phenomenon in Britain after the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, a group of activists who see large-scale nonviolent protests as the most effective way to ensure change. became. Some of its members are pleased to be arrested for using their trials to talk about climate issues.
In 2019, hundreds of supporters repeatedly occupied the roads and bridges around the British Parliament, effectively closing that part of the capital.
Last year, a related group, Insulate Britain, started. Occupy the highwayThis year we have just stop oil Blocked fuel depot And on weekends I ran on a track at the British Grand PrixMajor motorsport events.
Last week’s event isn’t the first time the museum here has faced political protests, but it suggests that protesters now see art as a useful prop. In 1914, suffrage Mary Richardson hid a hatchet in a muff and stepped into the National Gallery, slashing Velázquez’s nude in protest of Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment. More recently, the British Museum, Science Museum, and Tate Museum Group have been fighting theatrical protests condemning the acceptance of support from oil companies. (BP ended sponsorship at the Tate Museum in 2016.) But activists who stick to works of art are a new tactic.
In a telephone interview, Sara Piccard, a lecturer at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in France, who studied Extinction Rebellion and its sect, said the museum itself was not a very targeted means of promotion. The group’s “overall strategy” is to take action that attracts the attention of the news media, “then move on to the next thing that creates sparks,” she said.
At last week’s event Just Stop Oil said Some paintings were chosen for specific reasons, such as highlighting their importance and issues related to climate change.
Picard may say that protesters have a reason to target a particular painting, but because “the whole point is destructive” to generate a debate about what they consider to be an existential crisis. He said their choice was almost “irrelevant.” Picard added that events in Britain could be mimicked elsewhere, as French protesters had previously mimicked British behavior.
At the Louvre Museum in Paris in May, a man who smeared something that looked like a cake on the glass protecting the Mona Lisa shouted that he was acting against “people destroying the planet.” ..
In a telephone interview, Just Stop Oil spokeswoman Mel Carrington said targeting museums is a way to “put psychological pressure on the government” through publicity. Van Gogh’s protests were in the news all over the world, but her previous actions at her oil terminal weren’t, she said. Carrington said protesters don’t care if people hate their actions. They weren’t trying to win their friends.
None of the paintings seem to be damaged. A spokesman for the National Gallery said in an email statement that the Constable landscape “had minor damage to the frame and some confusion on the surface of the painting’s varnish.” I returned to the exhibition on Tuesday.
In a telephone interview, art restorer Simon Gillespie said the solvent could dissolve the glue used by opponents on the frame. “I’m grateful they didn’t choose to glue it to the oil paint film, because it’s very difficult to get it back,” he added.
He said that putting pressure on the painting to put up a poster could also cause damage, but the protesters seemed to have worked to limit the harm. “They have paid respect,” he said.
When Extinction Rebellion came out in 2018, it was widely sympathetic in the UK, where environmental concerns have long been on the public agenda. Still, the group’s destructive tactics have been annoying to many since then. In a recent survey by polling agency YouGovAbout 15% of the respondents said they supported the group and 45% disagreed.
Nadine Dorries, Minister of Culture, UK, I wrote in a tweet This week, the painting protesters were “helping nothing but their selfish ego” and “seekers of caution.”
Two National Gallery protesters were arrested on Monday. The Metropolitan Police Department said in an email Wednesday that it had been conditionally released until further inquiries were received.
At the museum on Monday after the protest, nine visitors said in an interview that they did not support painting targeting. Luciana Petzzotti, 65, a retired teacher from Italy, said she was interested in climate change and she supported the protest, but she said, “Why does it bother art?”
However, at least one young man in the crowd who visited supported it. Emma Baconnet, an art student from Lyon, France, said it was “very important” for climate change protesters to be provocative to hear their message. “Sometimes it’s a little too much,” she said. “But just because we speak, the government doesn’t listen.”