Una Mullally: At least the activists ‘desecrating’ art works are doing something. What are you doing?

The Sunday before last, I sat in a theatre in New York for the closing film of the LGBTQ+ film festival, NewFest. The screening was of All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, by Laura Poitras.

It’s a documentary about the artist Nan Goldin, the renowned American photographer whose work changed photography forever, who turned documenting her friends’ lives into an intimate, beautiful, radical art form, who created an invaluable archive of LGBTQ+ subculture, of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and of her own experience of and response to addiction.

Goldin has led a remarkable life, but in 2017 it took a new turn, when she established PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an activist and advocacy group targeting the Sackler Family and their company Purdue Pharma, who created, marketed, and pushed the monstrous drug, OxyContin, a devastating driver of the opioid epidemic in the United States.

Right now, we’re seeing climate activists condemned for using the art world in another way, launching spectacles of desecration on art works

Poitras introduced the film alongside two PAIN activists, Megan Kapler and Harry Cullen. Cullen reminded the audience that PAIN was not a big group. The lineage of activism they were continuing was inspired by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a group that continues to inspire activists globally, thanks to its practical, nimble, creative, and urgent traits, so brilliantly documented in Sarah Schulman’s recent oral history of the organisation, Let the Record Show.

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Goldin did what any nimble activist does. She focused on what she could do in her immediate orbit to address the opioid crisis and to contribute to an attempt to take the Sackler family down. This primarily orientated around the art world, where Goldin is a hugely respected figure. Her work is held in collections at the Guggenheim, the Met, MoMA, the Tate, and so on. She honed in on galleries where she knew her name and work had leverage, from the Louvre to the V&A. This was relevant because of how the Sackler family art-washed the devastating impact of the drugs that made them incredibly rich, with funding, donated artworks, entire wings of galleries and grants, all giving the Sackler name a stature that deflected from their actual legacy, the lives destroyed by their drugs. Anyone who has read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, or watched the television series Dopesick, will be familiar with the horrors the Sacklers’ business visited upon the world, and the incredible wealth the family made.

PAIN was DIY, using direct action, creative protest, and attention-grabbing demonstrations in a mode familiar to anyone who has participated in direct action and grassroots activism. The documentary is incredible. On November 18th, it’s showing at the Cork International Film Festival.

What this film, and Goldin and her comrades’ actions, reminds us of, is the potency of protest. It reminds us that the frustration people sometimes feel when there isn’t mass protest is misplaced, because successful activism is not necessarily about numbers, it’s about commitment, passion, clarity, and action.

PAIN, ACT UP, Extinction Rebellion, the Repeal movement, and so recent, dynamic modes of activism and protest teach us that there is no one way

Right now, we’re seeing climate activists condemned for using the art world in another way, launching spectacles of desecration on art works (which aren’t actually being damaged) to condemn the insane profits oil and fossil fuel companies are making at the cost of the future of the planet and every living entity that calls it home.

I don’t know how successful this will be, whether it’s the “best” form of protest, or whether it will bring people on board. But at least they’re doing something. I don’t see how anyone given to policing or criticising a form of protest thinks they’re in any position to do so if they themselves aren’t putting their bodies on the line, aren’t willing to get arrested, or aren’t committed to a cause.

It’s pretty obvious that the Just Stop Oil protesters are passionate, that their cause is righteous, and that they are fighting on behalf of the planet and humanity. How people choose to do protest this will increase in its diversity, and in its shades of radicalism over the coming years. We are going to see more and more direct actions, more sit ins, more marches, more riots, more diverse modes of protest to take down the exploitative industries and dawdling governments who have far more control when it comes to the climate crisis than the individual does. And along the way, we’ll hear the same tired arguments about things “backfiring” or “hurting their own cause” that we always here from people too apathetic to go out and do something themselves.

Activism isn’t a monolith, it is a patchwork. It succeeds when people come at things in many different ways, and use whatever is in front of them and around them to take their action and make their point. If one thinks a protester is doing something incorrectly, it’s always good to ask oneself, “well, what am I doing?”

PAIN, ACT UP, Extinction Rebellion, the Repeal movement, and so recent, dynamic modes of activism and protest teach us that there is no one way, but there are small groups of people, who can become big groups, who like Goldin herself, can change the world. If people sit that out, then they’re hardly in a position to dictate how it should be.