Acting Out: A Symptomological Analysis of Art and Activism

In October 2022 Just Stop Oil activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery in London. As they glued themselves to the wall, they asked spectators, ‘What is worth more, art or life? … Are you concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?’ The National Gallery quickly confirmed that the painting was unharmed. Nevertheless, many were dismayed by this apparently iconoclastic protest. Protests of this kind have coincided with increased policing of non-violent civil disobedience. In conjunction with impending climate catastrophe that demands increasingly radical attention and change, one might be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s proclamation that ‘we lack resistance to the present’ (1994: 108). However, the pessimism associated with this claim is at odds with Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmative ethics of becoming. As such, this article argues that underpinning Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of the term ‘resistance’ is a notion of health as an aptitude to simultaneously prepare for and to enact change. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of symptomology, this article proposes that activism is in some sense artistic – a means of creative resistance. The soup-throwers diagnose the State’s refusal to undertake the drastic change necessary to stave off the irreversible harms of climate change as a symptom of social illness and, in so doing, create a new space that opens a potential multiplicity of possible futures.