As a vandalised artist, I don’t support the Warhol activists but I get why they did it

There’s clearly two sides to this story. As an artist, I was unhappy to see young activists attacking Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans in the National Gallery of Australia on Wednesday.

Yet I, too, am an activist. And as an activist, I understand the anger that motivated the attack. I am, like the NGA vandals, angry at government and corporate inaction on climate change. And I’m very sad it has come to this.

Protesters glue themselves to Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans at the National Gallery of Australia. Credit: Twitter @stopffsubsidies

And another thing: I am an artist who is no stranger to having his works vandalised. I painted the Not Welcome to Bondi mural in 2019. Among many paintings on the Bondi promenade wall, it depicted 24 heavily armed Australian Border Force officers. It was a comment on the draconian treatment of refugees under the Morrison government. Those 24 figures represented the 24 deaths in offshore detention under that government.

My work was quickly politicised by the local Liberal member, who was no doubt angered that the Labor/Greens coalition controlling Waverley Council had given me, perhaps unwisely, permission to “paint whatever you want”.

The furore became national news, then international. A friend messaged to say I was on the news in Athens. The local council voted to keep the mural intact, only for it to be destroyed the next morning by a masked vigilante. My mural – however unintentionally – divided the country, and started a national discussion, though it is important to note that it was the creation of the artwork that spoke to people, not the destruction of it.

Between 2018 and 2019, I travelled to Syria three times during the height of the conflict, spending time in Aleppo and Palmyra. The destruction I most noted, perpetrated by Islamic State, was that of all artefacts predating the birth of Mohammad – thousands of years of history, sculpture, paintings, architecture, wiped out of existence, never to be replaced. It recalled the Taliban destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.

I am by no means comparing the NGA protesters to Islamic State or the Taliban. Their actions at the NGA were selfish, yet on a scale that includes beheading of innocents, attempting to damage a bunch of artworks to raise awareness about a planetary emergency is pretty tame, no matter how treasured, and no matter that Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for $US195 million in May.

Society should be breathing a collective sigh of relief that civil disobedience is the chosen modus operandi of the young people who are carrying out these attacks. This is the other side to the story. It concerns the same young people whose future has been placed in jeopardy by government inaction and the corporate greed of capitalism, an economic system well symbolised by the likely price tag on Warhol’s pop art.

If only the outrage machine could kick into overdrive so readily about the destruction of the environment, endangered animal habitats and the exploitation of natural resources as it does about a bunch of screenprints made 60 years ago by a dead American. If only. Maybe the world would be a better place.

Sorry it’s come to this: the artist Luke Cornish.

Perhaps this is the point the protesters were trying to make. I don’t agree with them damaging these artworks, but I understand why they did it. Is it really so hard to create a reality where people don’t feel the need to do this?

Luke Cornish is a Sydney artist.

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