On October 14th, 2022, climate activists from the advocacy group Just Stop Oil threw a can of tomato soup on Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” After two years in legal limbo, they were handed down a two-year prison sentence only last month. A widely circulated video shows the initial shock of the passerby at London’s National Gallery: after several screams, a man calls for security, as the crowd eventually settles into worried murmuring. Beneath the video—in between the cherry-picked Van Gogh quotes, the impassioned debates about 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionism, and the less-than-charitable discussions about the activists’ choice of hair dye—a rare moment of unanimity reigned in the YouTube replies. How dare these activists vandalize this priceless artwork, that beautiful expression of Van Gogh’s genius? The resulting media outcry has been a barely-more articulate reformulation of these initial shocked reactions, as prominent figures from the culture industry take turns to wag their finger at such a seemingly juvenile stunt. As one typical op-ed admonishes, “Throwing Soup at Paintings Won’t Save the Planet.” Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic at New York Magazine, even proclaimed in a tweet that these young activists were “Taliban-like” in their “sick certitude & imperious self-righteousness.”
All aesthete histrionics aside, Saltz’s analogy to Islamist terror groups is of interest. If one were to only have skimmed the headlines and the comments, the near-instinctual consensus which emerged in the wake of the vandalism echoes the organic solidarity which coheres after a significant terrorist attack. Like the aftermath of any attack, certain facts have been lost in the midst of the media circus. To be clear: this was an environmental action with a measured, strategic understanding of means and ends. Just Stop Oil sought an expanded media spotlight on Britain’s expansion of oil and gas licenses in the North Sea, which has been roundly critiqued as unsustainable by environmentalists and scientists. The Van Gogh was chosen precisely for its potential to generate headlines, and was itself unharmed, as the painting was protected by a glass panel. And the gamble has paid off: this viral moment has given Stop Oil the leverage it needed to publicize this issue in several leading media outlets. But like an aesthetic 9/11, these environmental activists have also inadvertently triggered the ideological nerve-center of contemporary Western culture, summoning a heretofore unconscious united front in defense of a certain hegemonic aesthetics, making strange bedfellows of pearl-clutching high society art critics and lumpenproletariat internet commentators alike. In his same tweet, Saltz declares that this climate action demonstrates an “implied hatred of any other idea of beauty.” What, then, is this “other idea of beauty” that our activists have so outrageously profaned?
In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger worries aloud whether “art” might be “just a word to which nothing real any longer corresponds.” Heidegger’s central concern is that in modernity, art has been captured and violently reinterpreted by what he calls “aestheticism.” This reinterpretation posits a new understanding of the art object, and new relations that these objects are to have with artists and viewers of art. Aestheticism rewrites the artwork as “the product of the genius of the self-sovereign subject.” The reception of Van Gogh in the tradition of art history is a perfect example: by and large, the scholarship has canonized him as the very archetype of the tortured genius, whose profound, emotional subjectivity is expressed on the canvas through his signature application of vivid color and emphatic brushstrokes. When this notion of genius trickles down into mass culture, the appropriate comportment of the viewer of the artwork is reduced to an impotent aesthetic experience. Museum-goers increasingly understand their visits as an opportunity to go beyond the prescribed bounds of their subjectivity through the rarefied experience of an external art object, to which the genius has conferred some life-enriching meaning. If, as Heidegger argues, this aesthetic subject-object schema has become the dominant understanding of art in modernity, then it is little wonder that Stop Oil incurred the wrath of high- and low-brow critics alike. Any act of aesthetic vandalism endangers not only an irreplaceable product of artistic genius, but even more importantly endangers their own continued access to this congelation of creative energy. The critiques of Stop Oil belie a shared understanding of “Sunflowers” as merely an instance of Van Gogh’s aesthetic expression.
It is scarcely conceivable nowadays to approach great artists without the category of genius, and to evaluate art as anything but a rarefied aesthetic experience. Put bluntly, the points which Heidegger makes about art seem so obvious to the point of banality. What, then, is the problem with aestheticism? Art as aestheticism carries with it the greater problem of ontology, of how objects and things become intelligible to human beings, or in other words, the very question of Being to which Heidegger dedicated his entire philosophical project. Broadly put, after the publication of his monumental Being and Time, Heidegger began to take an increasing interest in history, and particularly the history of ontology. His general claim was that different periods in the Western philosophical tradition each operated with different historical understandings of what kinds of beings there were, and how beings operated. Modernity occupies a particularly fraught place in this philosophical history; under its auspices, a pathological ontology begins to infect all of modern social life. Heidegger sees the increasing separation of subject and object within aestheticism as representative of our understanding of Being in the modern age. Here, values and norms retreat into the interior spaces of atomistic subjects, while the world is revealed as a bare, meaningless assemblage of objects. Human beings can only traverse this chasm between subject and object through strategies of control and dominance. Every object is to be rationalized by modern science, ordered and planned by technology, and commodified by the dictates of the market. Yet subjects, too, are hardly exempt from this process: Heidegger’s favorite example is the proliferation of human resource departments which treat their employees as so much orderable resources. This understanding of the object also has further implications for art, as aestheticism decomposes artworks into rationalized, ordered, commodified things; they become mere “objects of the art business,” and “are shipped like coal from the Ruhr or logs from the Black Forest.”1 But Heidegger’s greatest worry is that there is no alternative. Modern ontology and its correlate in aestheticism is “a conceptual mechanism that nothing can resist.” Having muscled aside any other possible way of understanding Being, this ontology not only dominates contemporary social life, but even rewrites history as just a prelude to the modern subject-object relation.
Despite this totalizing narrative, Heidegger thinks that a truer experience of art could form the beginnings of a redemptive postmodern ontology. This experience begins not from the aesthetic striving for meaning-laden experiences, but from letting the artwork disclose its truth on its own terms by simply describing what we see. Heidegger’s analysis begins, appropriately enough, from another famous Van Gogh painting depicting a pair of worn peasant shoes. Through a careful adjustment to the presence of the painting, “the artwork let us know what the shoes, in truth, are.” For the farmer who wore these shoes, one can begin to intuit a radically different relation to Being than the one imposed by late modern aestheticism; here, no stark subject-object division is present. Rather, a different relation takes hold; when we wear shoes in our daily lives, we treat them as practical items, not as objects which stand against us in stark exteriority. The peasant’s shoes “are all the more genuinely so the less the peasant woman thinks of her shoes while she is working, or even looks at them, or is aware of them in any way at all. This is how the shoes actually serve;” and in this simple working, Heidegger cryptically concludes that the shoes “belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman.”
Earth and world are two central categories for understanding Heidegger’s strategy for founding the possibilities of a post-aesthetic art. Elsewhere in Origin, he notes that something fundamental has been lost when Greek sculptures have been wrenched away from their particular social and historical contexts to be exhibited in a contemporary gallery. Even outside the doors of the museum, a marble temple cannot impart to us moderns the significance it had once held for the Greeks. In other words, these works have lost their “world;” their capacity to structure and gather the totality of meanings for an entire epoch of a particular civilization. World is grounded upon “earth,” a horizon of indefinite meanings that provides the possibility of art, but at the same time resists being wholly intelligible. Here, one could think of the apocryphal quote attributed to Michelangelo, who saw the angel in the marble and carved until he was set free. The indefinite, uncarved marble provides a range of possible forms, out of which the sculptor reveals a meaningful work. For Heidegger, then, the world of structured cultural meanings is in a continual, productive tension with the earth which simultaneously provides and occludes the possibility for imparting the foundational values of a tradition. When successful, these artworks “transform all familiar relations to world and earth,” negotiating this ontological tension by seizing the emerging possibilities for cultural truths from earth and clarifying their newfound significance for our cultural world. Properly understood, art has an essential relation to truth, as it organizes the implicit valuations of what is meaningful for a culture, and reflects these meanings back to the wider community. Hence Heidegger dignifies art as a site of resistance to modern ontology.
The peasant woman, who wears her garments in a lived, practical manner, already treats her shoes as a dissonant unity of earth and world. For her, the shoes have a concrete place and meaning in the context of her way of life. There is, of course, the justified temptation to impart upon Heidegger a romantic conservative nostalgia for the lost world of the German peasant. But he understands that this world, like that of the Greeks, is past; the cultural structures which once gave life to a set of historically-bounded meanings to the peasant shoes are long gone. What remains for us is Van Gogh’s painting. The presence of world and earth is disclosed not only to the peasant through her shoes, but for us through the artwork. Here, Heidegger is interested not only in the subject-matter of the painting, but in Van Gogh’s depiction of the background. He draws attention to the peculiar nature of the negative space surrounding the shoe; it is “empty and unused,” and that there “is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes,” just “peasant shoes and nothing more.” Why focus on mere “undefined space?” Careful examination of the painting reveals amorphous, partially rendered shapes struggling to emerge from the background, particularly surrounding the shadows beneath the shoes. This tension between foreground and an inchoate background is a central motif for Heidegger’s interpretation of other modernist painters such as Klee and Cézanne. By reenacting the tension between emergence and concealment, between revealing and withdrawal upon the work, this seemingly innocuous depiction of peasant shoes portrays the fundamental truth of art as a dynamic tension between world and earth. The historical truth which emerges from the Van Gogh is a making-explicit of both our dire condition and the possibility of its transcendence. We cannot but perceive the peasant shoes as the disconcerting reminder of a bygone historical period, before the totalization of modern Being. But in the tension between background and foreground in his painting, Van Gogh presents the possibility of overcoming modernity by becoming aware of new ontological possibilities through contemplative observation.
One of Heidegger’s most frequent remarks is that art is the happening of truth. What if, for a moment, we were to bracket the aestheticism presupposed by art critics and internet commentators alike, and view Stop Oil’s protest less as a tantrum and more as observing what it simply is: a rare invitation for genuine reflection upon art—indeed, as a happening of truth?
In response to these protests, ninety-two museum directors signed a statement through the International Council of Museums stating that the activists “severely underestimate the fragility of these irreplaceable objects, which must be preserved as part of our world cultural heritage.” But it is aestheticism itself that has made the artwork fragile, having reduced these artworks into mere objecthood. Separated from their world, totally denuded of their original cultural significance, these artworks have a tenuous connection at best to “world cultural heritage” within the sepulchre of the art gallery. In this context, Just Stop Oil radically destabilizes the ontological presuppositions of aestheticism. When operating with these presuppositions, the historically-particular character of this ontology is forgotten, as past modes of Being are subsumed within this universal conceptual schema. The question as to whether art can regain the role it once enjoyed, as the arbiter of the values and traditions of cultural life, is not even considered. But it is precisely this environmental protest which again poses this question of the historical role of the artwork. With their action, the activists have pitilessly torn the artwork away from the enforced sterility of the market and the connoisseur. Beneath the long-calcified notions of art as a repository for aesthetic genius, the mass public outcry which has emerged since the protest shows that art can still be an organizing force in our cultural world. This reconsecration of the painting as a nexus between art, politics, and social life was precisely the understanding of the artwork which Heidegger wished to revive. The discourse which has arisen from their action, despite largely following the dictates of aestheticism, forces the art critic to once again face those truly historical questions that upon first glance always have a naive, yet solemn character: How ought art and life coexist? What works should be preserved? What meanings do these works have for us, today?
Just Stop Oil has also been criticized for their arbitrary choice to single out the artwork as an object of protest. There is no reason to deface a Van Gogh when the real locus of ecological destruction is taking place up in the Arctic or high in the stratosphere. Hence these activists appear at best misguided, at worst attention-seeking. But it is the critics who are misguided. As Heidegger frequently emphasizes, the ontology which permeates modern life is totalizing and inescapable. Every object is revealed as a calculable, orderable, and commodifiable thing. Neither the artwork nor the natural world can escape this reconfiguration of Being. In fact, another one of Heidegger’s famous examples of this pathological tendency was the way in which the hydroelectric plant transformed the Rhine from the subject of Höderlin’s poetry to an energy source to be commanded and stockpiled. By enacting their protest at the convergence of nature and art, the activists draw our attention to the way in which both domains have been assimilated by a universal modern ontology.
Only the work itself remains to be discussed. If one follows Heidegger in letting Van Gogh’s painting disclose its truth, then it must simply be perceived apart from the metaphysical presuppositions of aestheticism. Nothing would seem easier than to perceive an artwork as it is. “Or is it,” as Heidegger writes, “rather that this task brings us to what is the most difficult, particularly when such an intention—to allow a being to be as it is—is the opposite of that indifference which turns its back on beings in favour of an unexamined concept of being?” Today, the possibility of an unadulterated seeing is even more difficult than it was for Heidegger, as it is precisely this unexamined concept of being which is hegemonic. A Van Gogh can no longer reveal the truth which it may have once disclosed to us. Art history tells us he can only be understood as an aesthetic genius. Art dealers transform his works into wealth deposits for the ultrarich. Art markets mechanically reproduce the likenesses of his pieces into NFTs, phone cases, and face masks. Van Gogh has become ubiquitous, wholly captured by aestheticism, nowhere because he is everywhere. All the trends of rationalization, commodification and banalization which Heidegger associated with modernity have only intensified, leaving the viewer in the London’s National Gallery no other interpretive categories save for the aesthetic. And yet.
From out of the obscured glass the now-indistinct shapes of the sunflowers stare forth. The orange field preserves the figures from our prying eyes, withdrawing the sunflowers behind a wall of color. The flowers return to dwell within the earth and find protection in the world briefly summoned by the act of resistance. For a moment, before the immediate reimposition of aesthetic thought, “Sunflowers” was seen apart from the tired formulas of aesthetic genius or the valuations of global commodity chains. The shock which the museum-goers felt was precisely this rearticulation of the truth of the artwork. The act of vandalism achieves a radical defamiliarization, as the commodified Van Gogh disappears beneath the viscous layer of soup upon glass. Our vision is freed from the accumulation of banalities and art-historical interpretations dictating what we ought to see. It is natural to feel shock, revulsion, disgust; or better yet, to react uncomfortably to a thing which does not yet have a name. Like an amputation, the death throes of a familiar yet moribund aestheticism is a necessary but painful experience. We are forced to grapple with the defaced painting in its disclosure of truth; as an unfamiliar being standing in an open, still-undefined ontology of art. Heidegger once wrote that “preservation of the work means: standing within the openness of beings that happens in the work.” Modern ontology has all but sealed this openness to beings. Perhaps only by vandalizing the work can its ultimate truth be preserved.
- Significant here is the note of barely-suppressed panic in the news articles that these priceless (note: multimillion-dollar) artworks remained undamaged despite the soup. ↩︎
