Fragile and indestructible Van Gogh

On Friday, October 14, at the National Gallery in London, two members of an English conservation association hurled cans of tomato soup at one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series, painted between 1888 and 1889. The painting was protected through a glass that prevented the work from being damaged. The purpose was to attract attention and reject the concessions of the British Government for the extraction of oil and gas. The intention to destroy works of art is not new, from psychopaths with personal traumas to fanatics like the Taliban, who demolished the Bamiyan Buddhas with cannon shots, more than 1,500 years old. There is also no shortage of tourists who pretend to take selfies or stumble and knock over ancient vases.

Much has been written about the aestheticization of politics in the 20th and 21st century. Art, its most direct enchanting procedures and its prestige have been used to gain supporters for a certain idea. Faced with this, we must bear in mind iconoclasm, a reaction against the possible worship of images. Its Greek etymology, eikonoklasmos, means ‘split or break images’. In the Catholic tradition, it has been insisted that figures and images are not idolized, but that they are bridges or means to meditate. Moses was the most famous iconoclast, and one of the most enraged: after returning from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the law, he saw that his people had made a golden calf. He broke the boards, took the calf, melted it down, reduced it to powder, sprinkled this powder in water and ordered them to drink it. It is literally in the 32nd chapter of Exodus.

Iconoclasm attacks something that opposes the aggressor in ideology and belief. But what happened days ago has a difference. The attack on statues of former Spanish dictators, kings or conquerors, which is common in Latin America, projects criticism and an induced hatred that in many cases is laughable, vain or bland as soon as the iconoclast’s links with the destroyed piece are analyzed. or assaulted. In the case of Van Gogh’s painting, there is no link, no nexus, not even a relationship forced by ideological compliments.. Any. The only reason was to attack an artistic work because it would draw international attention to an environmental cause. The first was achieved; I doubt they have achieved anything on climate change. Yes, there is an indirect consequence: Van Gogh will continue to trade even higher. We must not forget the scandal that was in 1987 when one of the paintings in that series was sold for 39.9 million dollars to a Japanese billionaire and is exhibited at the Sompo Museum in Tokyo.

Activists throw tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s work in London

The essayist Carlos Granés has written extensively on the relationship between plastic arts and politics. in his book Savages of a new era He remembered what happened in 2018, when a Banksy piece was auctioned at Sotheby’s: girl with balloon. At the moment the bidding was opened with an offer of more than one million dollars, in front of everyone’s view the work was shredded by a secret mechanism within the framework devised by Banksy himself. They wanted to see it as a criticism of the mercantilism of art and a position taken by the artists themselves against that system. Granés is wary of that apparent speech: “It was not a criticism of anything; it was something else. A drill: I destroy but I don’t destroy, I make fun of the market but I don’t make fun of it”. Now we could paraphrase it: I am active but I am not active, I call the world’s attention but what I do is call attention to the value of art. The most evident of this apparent performance activist is that he lacks imagination and has to put himself at the feet (as they did in the museum) of what is still important: art. In one of the proclamations during the attack, they said that caring for life is more important than caring for works of art. Of course, it is obvious, but demagogic, as always happens with mediocrity without imagination or talent that goes after quick returns with the coarse resource of elevating itself as the spokesperson for an offended feeling, for which a tweet is enough, a paint or soup jar (Heinz brand, like the one used in the National Gallery bombing, which has also given happy soup entrepreneurs free publicity).

‘Imagine Van Gogh’: in a space of 1,600 square meters the pavilion will be built for the exhibition that arrives in Ecuador in October

Two environmental activists stick to a painting in the National Gallery in London

And Van Gogh? The painter was never commercially successful. He barely survived, to the point that those sunflowers were painted to decorate the room where he was going to receive a visiting friend of his. For him, art was something appreciated, as much or more than a plate of food. Falling into this dichotomy between art or life is not understanding that, for artists and certain lucid people from societies of all times and cultures, the arts, literature, poetry and other manifestations do have enormous value: they complement that plate of food that is alluded to and open life to a possible future. On these same days, an immersive video art installation is presented in Ecuador, Imagine Van Gogh, which allows us to get closer to the painter’s works thanks to a technology by the photographer and filmmaker Albert Plécy, captured by the artistic directors Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron. Hopefully it will encourage someone among the public to cross half the world to the first museum where they can approach an original by Van Gogh and observe that lively, thick palette, as if it were painted at that very moment and that seems to come out of the canvas, charged with the life that Van Gogh gave to art, so light and fragile, but much more enduring than cheap demagoguery that lacks imagination and talent that wants to destroy to attract attention. (EITHER)