WRECKERS OF CIVILISATION: JUST STOP OIL AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PROTEST
Viewed as a general nuisance, (self-)righteous eco-warriors, and even urban terrorists, Just Stop Oil exist in a difficult space between public art and revolutionary protest.
Just Stop Oil is an environmental campaign group that has become notorious for highly disruptive acts of protest that employ the means and medium of art, from the performative ‘die-ins’; anti-flash mobs which fill public spaces with would-be corpses, a projection of future fallout to spraying buildings, aeroplanes and sites of interest with orange paint. Then there are the more intense acts of crsahing sporting events with orange dust and jigsaws, to the zombified road marches, clogging the already heaving arteries of major roads thick with traffic and frustrated motorists, and making a human barrier of slow marchers, orange people, if you will. Funereally passive, and pacifist, they slow life to a deathly crawl (crashing headlong into claims that ambulances and pregnant women are actively prevented from getting through the blockades); elsewhere people glue their hands and faces to gallery walls or roads, all to make people pay attention and engage with the crisis of climate change.
Across this span of messy acting-out Just Stop Oil actions begin to resemble an anarchist art collective; preaching imminent destruction in a nihilistic nosedive, in order to save the human race (and the world). Their methods are as much a revolt against the ineffectual polite society of online petitions, parliamentary questions and broadsheet editorials. Not unlike the derive and detournement practices of the Situationist International in the 1950s which gathered momentum towards the Paris student riots of 1968, the jarring and disruptive protest actions are made to shock us out from the complacency of a tacit audience of spectators forced into becoming active bystanders, although most of us only see or ‘experience’ these events as images repeated through the media and shared across social networks.
While their methods can often seem ironic and invite massive social media scorn and hatred, they have continued to keep the present-day threat of climate-change crisis as current issue, with their actions striking at the heart of our institutional approaches to protecting art and preserving our ‘culture’; combined with the clash of disrupting the citizen’s everyday way of life.
It is easy to write-off Just Stop Oil as harbouring a ‘right-on’ agenda, more ‘hippies trying to save the planet’ but their members take the cause itself deeply seriously. The neat cartoon skull logo whose letters form the word ‘oil’ (you geddit?), edge towards a kind of death-cult but has slowly become iconic, especially when we see protestors in orange tabards, filmed at the point of arrest and hear the now familiar: ‘hello, my name is XXX, I have XX kids’ speech, which has become its own slogan akin to the ‘Beautiful people…’ letters from drop-out teenagers writing home in the bloom of the 1960s counterculture. Perhaps in time these will become warnings from the past, viewed from the imminent present of a collapsed future.
As with the tongue-in-cheek Warholian meta-joke of throwing Heinz (not Campbells!) tomato soup onto the glass cover of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, perhaps it is the implied aggression of chucking stuff to express our anger (albeit at the ‘wrong’ target?) that invites such media scorn and fear-baiting of what Just Stop Oil might do next, even though their performative iconoclasm rarely causes damage to the artworks themselves. At the time of writing, JSO did announce a shift in tactics, a move away from public stunts to more immaediate and effective methods of creatig change, rather than simply highligting the cause or expecting others to make it happen on our behalf. To date Just Stop Oil have largely been aping iconoclastic traditions of art meeting protest, with hundreds of distinguished art educators and critics arguing against the disproportionately harsh prison sentences doled-out to protestors, including a piece in the Arts Newspaper, praising the “victory without damage” impact of JSO’s slow rebellion—but perhaps it is this unwillingness to bite the bullet of pure destruction where Just Stop Oil fall short?
BREAKING GLASS
In May 2024, two women in their eighties were arrested for attempting to crack the glass case surrounding the Magna Carta with a hammer and chisel (if they had broken through, what would they have done next?). Their protest action was dialed-up into the register of political mythos: acting upon their basic freedoms by attacking one of Britain’s cherished institutional artifacts of civil liberties. Dating from 1215, it includes the dictate that no-one is above the law—including the king. They aimed to cut off the nose to spite the nation’s saving face, it’s self-image as democratic state, and as a conscious pushback against a doomed future, performed by older people acting, not out of self-interest, but for the future of their grandchildren.
People are afraid for these thin veneers of protective glass and overly-polite respect for boundaries which the British are so well known for, to be broken, again a shattering of civic pride and national idenity. These are tacti behaviours and heuristic limits meant to enshrine the safeguarding of culture form social chaos and preservation of the future—where there actions simplu highlight inconvenient truths we don’t want to talk about—admit that the house we live in is already burning down around us, just as the floodwaters are rising about our feet.
The polarizing impact of Just Stop Oil actions invite passionately violent responses in return, from savage social media commentary that laughs at protestor’s broken bones and excessive use of police force with a “lock em all up and throw away the key” attitude, to motorists ripping-up banners, assaulting protestors or even shoving them out of the way with their car—a potent symbol of the human death of affect that would make J. G. Ballard horrifically proud.
THE SILENT ALARM
In June 2024, Just Stop Oil sprayed the megalithic stones of Stonehenge with orange cornstarch, with the demand that the UK government end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. The action at Stonehenge has drawn accusations of cultural vandalism and criminal damage (including potential harm to rare lichens). The attack on British heritage was seen by some as an “own goal” but around the same time, Just Stop Oil also spray-painted several private jets, causing an estimated £52,000 of damage. Where the Stonehenge attack was more press worthy, in targeting highly-polluting vehicles of the wealthy, Just Stop Oil truly struck at the heart of the problem: marking the divide between sanctity of public spaces and private property of the rich who aim to remain insulated from the full impact of climate collapse by their wealth and status.
With a general election at stake on 5 July 2024, the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer condemned the Stonehenge attack. An establishment figure, Starmer’s hand was somewhat forced to express appropriate levels of outrage at the supposed desecration of a beloved iconic monument, well known for its magnetic attraction of people seeking to live off-grid and outside of normative modes of civilisation, from paganism to free travellers; it was a peformative knee-jerk response spoken in the name of ‘ordinary working people’, while neatly ignoring any environmental context as Starmer so desperately sought to chase popular opinion, and further garner votes from the far-right citizenry away from Reform ( a ‘plan’ that will never, ever work). Stonehenge is an international symbol of the prehistoric era, when the distant relatives of homo-sapiens were routinely wiped out by successive ice ages and the flash floods that followed, an ironic legacy that Starmer could not afford to entertain.
While the call for direct pressure on polluting industries through political reform carries some weight, Just Stop Oil’s greatest power lies in highlighting individual responsibility as running parallel to corporate accountability—forcing us all into an accelerated confrontation with the existential crisis of man-made climate change, encouraging personal investment in solidarity.
It is easy to laugh at the feeble splashes of orange paint and the weak syntax of the determinist slogan ‘Just Stop Oil’. It suggests a vagueness around some direct (achievable) goal, as if it were so simple to suddenly end the world’s use and abuse of petro-chemical products found in everything from make-up, plastics, clothes and fuel. By its nature, civilisation is a relentless and all-consuming engine fuelled, in part, by capitalist-driven demand, the enemy is literally everywhere, and it is us. As pointed out numerous times by journalist, George Monbiot, stopping the clock on climate change demands more like a year-zero social reform beyond separating our recycling, avoiding plastic cotton buds or buying local, organic —although he has restated the adoption of veganism and abandoning air travel, as an active trigger against further bio-pollution.
But a continued lack of practical response from the political establishment encourages a steady escalation of actions–driven like a doomsday clock–demanding more serious acts of sabotage with no respect for the boundaries between work, travel and pay; between deep culture and casual leisure. This manages to outrage, offend and anger everyone, from parliamentarians, art-lovers and the new class cliche of ‘Nuneaton-white van man-turned-Twitter warrior’ in the process.
On September 27 2024, when two Van Gogh Sunflower paintings were ‘double-souped’, after cleaning, entering into a vicious cycle where the repetition of protest actions invite the same angry response, suggesting neither the group’s tactics or public opinion are drastically changed. Sometimes the ‘message’ or meaning of Just Stop Oil’s actions is simply unclear or lost in media frenzy. Even as activist Phoebe Plummer shouted: ““What is worth more, art or life?” (she’s not the first to ask) when chucking soup at famous paintings, this could easily be misconstrued as revolt against art/beauty/love, let alone a regurgitation of the common-sense claim that pollution and environmental collapse are bad for everyone, just not all at the same time.
To acknowledge Just Stop Oil’s stark warnings in good faith is to stare into the dizzying and despairing abyss of a non-future, accepting the possibility that we are even now, too late to halt our own extinction, and are simply living through the illusion of time. We are faced with the choice of censoring, attacking, punishing – or even ignoring out of existence—Just Stop Oil, or joining them. This is Pascal’s wager dragged into existential crisis—sustainability demands compromises to our current way of life, even though this might create a better, more enjoyable environment in the present.
THE WORLD WON’T LISTEN
The strongest backlash against Just Stop Oil comes from the fact that people simply don’t want to be told what to do. Not only are Just Stop Oil wreckers of culture and tradition, they are also ruiners of the present; “liberal metropolitan elitist” do-gooders who mess up our journeys and want to restrict our freedom of access to polluting cars, cheap flights abroad and the easy option of burning trees, fossil fuels and other stuff. Like the speed safety cameras targeted by so-called ‘blade runners’, there is resistance to ideas that seem to limit the notion of absolute liberty; the freedom to do what one wants, all of the time (and to hell with the consequences).
Spiralling from a public nuisance to a new enemy within, the outlaw status of Just Stop Oil is comparable to anti-rascism movements, the CND and (ironically) striking miners in the 1970s and 80s. As their disruptive actions are increasingly compared to those of a terrorist organisation, particularly when their acts of civil disobedience are perceived to be a threat to public safety. Testament to this, a meeting proposing to block the M25 eight-lane London orbital motorway, saw one ‘conspirator’ sentenced to five years in prison—and a prison sentence of up to two years for soup-thrower Phoebe Plummer —while every day criminals and police officers are given much lighter, or even suspended, sentences for violent sexual assaults. Combined with the steady rise of anti-protest legislation, drawing upon the Terrorism Act of 2000, we continue to see civil liberties of the right to act-out in public and organise peaceful and principled protests, as with ongoing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, these civil liberties continue to eroded by special powers in dubious applications of the law. Many of these convictions against JSO protestors and planners are often overturned, sentences cut or even won on appeal, though not without people being put in jail for a time, having their lives disrupted, simply for making a statement, in the flesh, and persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, because of their message as much as their methods.
By way of contrast, it was only under the Seventies wave of feminist artists and academic and into the late 20th century that we truly began to celebrate The Suffragettes movement. In their direct action campaigns calling for ‘equality’ and the more explicit demand of women’s right to vote, progressed from scandalous gatecrashing, pamphleteering, window smashing, bomb plots and the ultimate sacrifice of Emeline Pankhurst throwing herself under the King’s horse, they emerged as enemies of the state but champions of the people (all people). Now their struggle is somewhat neutered by genteel exhibitions and absorbed into new iconography of generic merchandise, where revolutionary acts are reduced to an instagram soundbite or mass-reproduced T-shirts, pin-badges and tea towels. We conveniently forget that it was only through the growing intensity of the Suffragettes actions that forced the world to take notice and drive forward parliamentary reform.
LOUDER THAN BOMBS
The title of this piece refers to Throbbing Gristle - a ‘band’ established to deconstruct traditional forms of music, that was itself born out of the radically confrontational 'COUM Transmissions' art collective. Centred around the performance duo of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge, their 1976 show Prostitution at the London ICA consisted of explicit photographs, rusty knives, syringes, bloodied hair, and used sanitary towels. It presented a skewed image of capitalist power dynamics between spectator and voyeur and subverted gallery establishment standards, albeit backed-up by an Arts Council grant. This prompted a question in the House of Commons, from Conservative Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn in 1976, branding COUM as “wreckers of civilisation”. In terms of impact and outrage, Just Stop Oil employs a similar revolt against the fragile ego of artistic tradition and conservative cultural guardians—motivated not by an extremist art-for-art’s sake attitude— but by a ruthless fight for survival.
The journalist Marina Hyde recently branded the author protest group, Fossil Free Books as “wreckers” of literature. A 600-strong author presure group who petition writer organisations such as the Society Of Authors and enact festival boycotts saw investment firm Baillie Gifford’s ‘forced’ to withdraw funding from several major UK literary events, because of their perceived stance on environmental issues. Although only 2% of the firm’s wealth is invested in fossil fuels, this stake is nonetheless valued at $2.5bn, carrying with it the weight of capital before principle. Hyde sees the damage done to the polite and precarious end of the more middle-class literary scene as far outweighing any political gains. She argues for a separation between art and politics (and big money); shielding it from the pressures and harsh realities of social context. In this, she confirms the short-term, human-chauvinism of the insulated life looking down from high windows while the world burns below.
The hollow preciousness of defending traditional art from Theodore Roszak’s countercultural icons, the “drunken and incensed” centaurs in the garden, has splintered into a slavish, monocultural perspective of art. Social media accounts such as @ CultureCritic promote a narrow perspective of ‘traditional’ Greek and Roman aesthetic values of symmetry and beauty, holding Western culture above all other forms, suggesting a white anglo-european ethnic superiority. Where some might see the centaurs of Just Stop Oil as riotous vandals, others see them as rebels against orthodoxy. In the original myth the centaurs are confronted and turned back by Apollo, god of knowledge, light and reason, maintaining the dominant order of the status quo.
But new points of friction have emerged in this debate; differentiating protest groups like Just Stop Oil ‘pretending’ to attack famous artworks safely behind glass, and far-right groups damaging artworks they find morally or aesthetically objectionable. The uptick in statues and paintings defaced by far-right groups, including the symbolic beheading of a ‘heretical’ statue depicting the Virgin Mary giving birth, looking to make a political statement from aesthetic disagreement, shows them trying to reshape the present into the values of the past. This assault on a diverse critical culture borrows the black and white optics of the Nazis. While they painted themselves into the bloodline of a heroic (and homoerotic) warrior race, their attack on modern art, deemed as decadent, reductive and artless, erased the nuance of the individual into a numb body politic. It is the same confusion of taste with morality that engenders hardlines of good and bad art, where tradition and conformity invites praise and protection; while forms of innovation, dissent and resistance demands suppression and erasure.
The ‘anti-art’ actions of Just Stop Oil have tested the limits of our nostalgic attachment to culture, going beyond ‘knowing what I like’, let alone why, there is a blind defence of tradition over the safeguarding of a sustainable human future on earth. Just Stop Oil warn against a cycle of environmental disasters, in which the financial, political and even artistic value of great works of culture will be divorced from the new nasty brutish and short reality that we see in the extremely bleak vision of films like 1986’s Threads and 2008’s The Road It becomes the threat of the musician-led campaign ‘No Art On A Dead Planet’ slogan. ‘Like something out of a horror film’ it doesn’t take much to imagine the apocalyptic cliches of vacant cities, now overgrown ruins gridlocked by abandoned rusting cars; while the uber rich hide underground in their bunkers, in a scenario approximating The End. Some of the great artworks persist as relics of a relegated anthropocene past, its human chauvinism face to face to with extinction, there will be no-one left alive to look, see or feel anything of the last dying art.
FIND OUT MORE
Just Stop Oil is a nonviolent civil resistance group in the UK. In 2022 we started taking action to demand the UK Government stop licensing all new oil, gas and coal projects. We have won on this . Civil resistance works.
Just Stop Oil ended it’s street campaign in 2025, whilst we continue our resistance in the courts and prisons.
A new revolutionary direct action campaign is coming. Help us build what’s next.
https://juststopoil.org/genocide/
Image Credits - Courtesy of Just Stop Oil