The ultimate form of political protest is murder. I only need to instance Julius Caesar and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand for the point to be made. England was a murderous place before the Conquest. But in England since the Conquest (apart from Becket, a few Kings and a few Statesmen) there have not been many grand political assassinations. Riot was much more common, especially when murder went out of fashion after the Civil War. In the early eighteenth century, defenders of the old order burnt chapels, and in the late eighteenth century, they burnt Joseph Priestley’s house. In the 1810s, the Luddites broke machines, as did the Captain Swing rioters in the 1830s. Note: until this point all riots tended to be about the restoration of original rights, or a defence of traditional England. But afterwards rioting became the province of the progressives. In 1866, Reformers broke the railings of Hyde Park. In 1886, Socialists smashed the windows of the Carlton Club. This protest was violent but occasional. But then the Suffragettes introduced a more persistent and shocking form of protest, horsewhipping Winston Churchill, throwing bombs, inventing letter bombs, setting fire to postboxes, burning houses and, in the case of Emily Davison, throwing herself in front of a horse at the Derby in 1913.
Peaceful protest, by contrast, was not common in our history until it was theorised by Tolstoy, enacted by Gandhi in India and brought into the West in the form of the ‘sit-in’, invented by Civil Rights protestors in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The ‘occupation’ of buildings was common in 1960s protests in Paris, London and New York. Then there was Greenham Common. Then there was Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then there was the Arab spring, and the Occupy movement.
But it is in the last five or six years that we have seen the emergence of a wholly new tactic of protest. We should probably call this ‘stunt protest’. On some of his albums Frank Zappa credited the young Steve Vai as playing not ‘guitar’ but ‘stunt guitar’. Instead of a relatively predictable run of blues notes, Vai offered the musical equivalent of orange powder or soup thrown over a Zappa song. Anyone who knows Vai will know what I mean: widdle-waddle-woo-[whammy bar down]-weurgghnn-growl-wah-wah-wah-[faster]-widdle-dee-widdle-dee-widdle-dee-waaeaghaaeagh!
Stunt protest does not involve bullets, bombs or burning, or the smashing of windows. It involves on its aggressive side: spades, rope and hammer and chisel (only statues are murdered); on its passive side: glue, high-vis jackets, masks and tents; and on its wah-wah-pedal baby-squeal side: paint, soup, powder and hectoring speeches recorded on shaky cameras. It probably owes something to Pussy Riot and Pride.
Everyone will remember all the following events but I list them so we can see the rise of stunt protest in sequence. It is all fairly recent. The chief exponents of stunt protest, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, have only existed since 2018 and 2022 respectively.
In October 2019, Extinction Rebellion protestors climbed on Tube trains. ‘When they were up they were up, but when they were down they were down…’
In February 2020, Extinction Rebellion protestors dug a lot of holes in the lawn outside Trinity College, Cambridge, near the tree associated with Newton’s apple, perhaps to offer an adjustment to his gravitational theory.
Colston’s statue was thrown in the sea in June 2020.
But the real novelties came more recently, with the use of glue.
In the summer of 2022, five members of Just Stop Oil glued themselves to a copy of The Last Supper in the Royal Academy, London; and two others glued their hands to the frame of the Hay Wain in the National Gallery, London. Glue was used by protestors when blocking roads, but it seemed more of a statement when used on works of art, especially when it was combined with the sort of thing one might throw at Nigel Farage.
Perhaps inspired by a protestor who threw cake on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in May 2022, two Just Stop Oil protestors in October of the same year threw a can of tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, before gluing themselves to the frame: one of them delivered a scripted speech, and the other held up the soup can as if it was a work of art: Van Gogh’s Heinz rather than Warhol’s Campbell’s.
A week or so later two, German Letzte Generation protestors threw mashed potato over Manet’s Les Meules in Potsdam.
In October 2022, the Bank of England, the Home Office and the MI5 building were sprayed orange.
In the same month, a man glued his head to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in the Hague, while his friend threw soup over him and then glued his own hand to the wall, before making yet another speech.
In April 2023, a Just Stop Oil protestor climbed onto a snooker table during the World Championship held at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and exploded a packet of orange powder over the table and balls, damaging the baize – he was convicted only a few days ago.
Also in April, a German, wearing a mask, glued himself to a road in Berlin using a mixture of glue and sand forming a mixture so potent that part of the road had to be removed along with his hand.
In July 2023, Scottish protestors from This is Rigged (an offshoot of Just Stop Oil – shades of the People’s Front of Judea here) used concrete as well as glue to fix themselves to the road.
There were many other incidents involving the disruption of sporting events or even George Osborne’s marriage, using orange paint, orange jigsaw pieces and orange confetti.
In September 2023, Extinction Rebellion protestors poured black paint (or ‘fake oil’) over the steps of the Labour headquarters in London, and let off smoke grenades.
In December 2023, Extinction Rebellion protestors dyed the water green in the Grand Canal near the Rialto bridge.
In March 2024, a pro-Palestinian protestor wearing a mask sprayed and slashed a painting of Lord Balfour in Trinity College.
Finally, and most pathetically, on May 10th, 2024, two extremely respectable and dignified old ladies went into the British Library and chipped at the glass box in which the Magna Carta is stored with a hammer and chisel, before gluing themselves to the display. One lady was a retired teacher, the other an Anglican priest.
Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism. Well, perhaps, stunt is, if not the highest, then certainly the latest form of protest. The tricky and tedious old sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the phrase ‘symbolic violence’ a lot: and I can think of no better example of what he meant than this sort of late Duchamp or Warhol type of act where the protestor deliberately, like the Sacristan in the Ingoldsby Legends, “says no word to indicate a doubt, / But puts his thumb unto his nose and spreads his fingers out”. Though, oddly, these protestors often then go on to indulge in Thunberg-esque sermonising that would have embarrassed the Sacristan.
The only amusing thing about all this is the April Fool’s Joke this year, when Just Stop Oil announced a corporate partnership with Gorilla Glue. That one has to be savoured: they do have a sense of humour. But it is odd, this revel or frivol, when combined with incoherent and extremely censorious moral hectoration. Let’s hear the opening lines of the pink-haired, dead-eyed speech, as the soup ran down the painting:
What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people? The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable to millions of cold, hungry families. They can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup.
It is very odd, this stunt protest: odd because of the caverning, yawning gap between the tik-tokish and token-ish silliness of the stunts, and the eye-watering sublimity and unjuxtaposability of the moral mountain ranges these moral mice squeak about, as the glue begins to harden on their sensitive skin.
Stunt protest is in fact very much like contemporary art: incomprehensible, until one reads the explanation on the label. If only the protestors would take their hammer, chisels and glue to the exhibits in Tate Modern.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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