They are funny, they are witty, they fight discrimination. They are the Guerrilla Girls and yes, they are awesome.
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of women artists formed in the mid 1980s. They consist of women professionals who challenge the discrimination against women in art galleries, museums, and art criticism. Through the use of posters, the group began to raise awareness about the significant amount of discrimination against women in the art world. The posters put it simply and honestly: women artists are not equally represented in the art world (along with many other facets of society including politics, film and culture) where racism and sexism is rampant. Incognito the Guerrilla Girls posted their “‘public service announcements’ as [they] called them,…up and down the streets of SoHo and the East Village in New York City, neighborhoods in which artists lived and exhibited their work” (Lustig). The posters target specific art museums or artists and point out the blatant discrimination happening in museums and exhibitions.
Most interestingly about the girls, they wear actual gorilla masks (hence the name). According to the Guerilla Girls, “we wear gorilla masks to keep the focus on the issues rather than our personalities” (The Guerilla Girls, 7). The masks also provide a sense of anonymity and allow the women to be the “feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger” (The Guerrilla Girls, 7). Through their anonymity they represent a group of feminists fighting earnestly for equality in the realm of art and artists. They also use a significant amount of humor in their efforts, which has proven to be extremely effective while simultaneously proving that feminists really can be funny. This excerpt is from the Guerrilla Girls at a national convention at the College Art Association in 1986:
I’m a Guerrilla Girl and I’m not incensed that the Museum of Modern Art showed only 13 women of the 169 artists in the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture show or that the Carnegie International (Pittsburg) had only four out of 42. I know these figures occurred by chance. There was no sexism, conscious or unconscious, at work.
I’m a Guerrilla Girl and I think that the art world is perfect and I would never think of complaining about any of the wonderful people in it. After all, women artists make fully one whole third of what male artists make, so what’s there to be mad about? I mean, it’s not nice to get angry. I wouldn’t dream about getting angry. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to listen to this. (Lustig)
Since their beginnings, the Guerrilla Girls have posted several posters each year, published books, appeared in conferences and conventions, performed on a variety of stages and continued to fight discrimination. Nevertheless, their tactics are quite aggressive. Personally, I feel this works both for and against them. Because their posters are so very forthright and clear, it slaps people in the face and gets them thinking. It creates accountability in both museums as well as artists and forces those involved to look at facts of discrimination. However, it also has the potential to create a backlash against the Guerrilla Girls themselves and create tokenism within exhibitions (to which the Guerrilla Girls, of course, made a poster to point out). Some critics have even looked to their masks as taking on “unintended racial assumptions…[and] had become a projections of racist fantasies and a perpetuation of the sexual allure of the veiled woman” (Lustig).
What do you think about the Guerrilla Girls? Do their tactics seem fitting for their activism? And how do you feel about their overall message?
Lustig, Suzanne. "How and Why Did the Guerrilla Girls Alter the Art World Establishment in New York City, 1985-1995?." (2002): n. pag. Web.
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