XR’s messages matter — their silly stunts don’t

You have a political message you’d like to get across. Good for you! Please choose from one of the following delivery options: a) big, yellow, 30ft letters you can read from space; b) a Titanic-themed dinner party on a beach; c) a croquet game in Cambridge in which an inflatable earth is punted around a college lawn; d) a giant, lurid pink boat.

If you selected anything other than a), congratulations, you are Extinction Rebellion, the planet-spanning network of environmental activists who kicked off their own September Revolution with a massive “rebel gathering” in Parliament Square yesterday. And yes, you have an image problem.

In a year of protest, images that strike to the heart of matters stay with you. Artists with rollers painted Black Lives Matter on a Washington DC street in bright yellow letters that spanned the entire tarmac. They rolled out the message out across North America, rewriting cityscapes street by street, putting issues of police brutality and institutional racism quite literally on the map. The Baby Trump balloon, closer to home, works because it pricks an inflated ego and rises above the hubbub. By contrast, Extinction Rebellion’s croquet squad simply don’t cut it.

Putting aside the “mostly white, mostly middle class” moniker that (not unreasonably) has stuck to XR like a superglued septuagenarian since its rush-hour stunt on a Canning Town Tube carriage last October — the two aren’t disconnected. “Die-ins” by protesters dressed as bees, silent discos in Trafalgar Square and an eerie brigade of red-robed, chalk-faced “living statues” are fun street theatre, ephemeral sideshows, or gimmicks. That’s frustrating because XR’s ambitions are serious: in July, the Committee on Climate Change put the UK on notice to prep for a possible 4C rise in global temperatures by 2100. All the world’s a stage, but you need to act like a big player.

XR’s chief failure has been their inability to depict the climate devastation peacefully but powerfully. They’re at risk of seeming silly without substance. It’s not like it can’t be done: think back to Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing’s Ice Watch — 24 blocks of ice, in front of Tate Modern — for an example of how to capture imaginations.

We get our most basic orientation in the world with our eyes, which makes images extraordinarily powerful. By all means be brash, be bonkers, XR. But be brilliant too — or risk losing the crowd’s attention.