November 20, 2005
GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST:
The Guerrilla Girls go ape at art-world sexism.
Hollywood is next, says Stephen Armstrong
For a moment, it was like a pulp-fiction novel. The taxi dropped me off in
Culver City, downtown LA. The guy in the diner gave me directions. When I
reached the black awning, I dialled her number, a door swung open and she
appeared at the end of the hall. I watched her through the plate glass. She
was dressed all in black — knee-length boots, fishnets and a cocktail dress
that rippled as she sashayed across the foyer. There was just one thing. Raymond
Chandler heroines almost never wear gorilla masks.
Kathe Kollwitz is a founder member of the Guerrilla Girls, a shadowy group
of renegade artists operating on the fringes of the American art scene. Kollwitz
isn’t her real name: the original was a sculptor and lithographer who worked
in Berlin in the first half of the 20th century, a social activist as well
as an artist. Her Guerrilla Girl namesake is part of a collective that was
founded in 1985, and this week arrives in the UK, hoping to raise hackles
here.
“We were a bunch of women artists living in New York, and in 1984, the Museum
of Modern Art opened a new building with an exhibition titled An International
Survey of Painting and Sculpture,” Kollwitz explains. “It was supposed to
be a summary of the most significant contemporary art in the world, and of
169 artists in the show, only 13 were women. So a group called the Women’s
Caucus for Art organised a demonstration. A couple of us went along and saw
the picket line outside the museum, and we were shocked it had no effect on
people going in. They just thought: ‘If the museum thinks it’s good, it’s
good — if they don’t, it ain’t.’ We knew that couldn’t be true.”
An unspecified number of these artists (“We never say how many, it changes
over the years”) decided conventional protest wasn’t the answer. They created
two posters listing the names of galleries that showed no women artists and,
more controversially, the names of male artists who allowed their work to
be shown in those galleries. They put them up in the middle of the night,
all over New York, and the art world went haywire.
“The people we fingered were really angry,” Kollwitz smiles behind her mask.
“The artists used to blame the galleries, the galleries would blame the critics,
the critics would blame the curators, the curators would blame the collectors
... so we went after all of them.”
Letters to collectors were softer: “It’s come to our attention that your collection
doesn’t contain enough art by women. We know you feel terrible about this,
and will rectify the situation immediately. All our love, the Guerrilla Girls.”
The resulting media furore led to the masks. “We wanted to be anonymous for
self-serving interests,” Kollwitz admits. “The art world is small, and we
figured being known as a Guerrilla Girl would damage our careers. We gave
interviews in ski masks until one of the girls, who was a bad speller, wrote
our name as the Gorilla Girls. That’s when we saw the light.”
Ironically, the Girls’ work has now been embraced by the art world. They are
coming to the UK for an exhibition, in London, of work by mainly women artists
— including Tracey Emin and Stella Vine — organised by Amnesty International
as part of its campaign on violence against women. Their arrival coincides,
moreover, with a Tate Modern announcement that it has purchased 30 Guerrilla
Girls works and plans to include them in the rehang of its collection next
May. The Girls even had an installation at this year’s Venice Biennale.
“It is kind of confusing for us troublemakers to be inside rather than outside,”
Kollwitz admits. “We’ve decided to go along with it because we think it’s
great to have our work in a museum, with a different message than you’d normally
get. There’s a risk in having rebellion thought of as just another commodity.
But, for now, having our work in institutions — which some of us still want
to blow up — seems like a good idea.”
Kollwitz acknowledges a shift in the art world. “Things have definitely improved
at the entry level. In the 1980s, women artists just weren’t taken seriously.
Now we are. But as you go up and up through the system, you see that women
fall off. Ten years ago, we did a poster, ‘Do women have to be naked to get
into the Met Museum?’, highlighting the fact that 5% of the artists in the
modern-art sections were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. We went
back a year ago, and the numbers were 3% and 83%.”
Nonetheless, the heat is off the art world for now. The Guerrilla Girls have
turned their attention to Hollywood, taking huge billboards on Sunset Boulevard
during Oscars month to point out that only 4% of film directors are women,
and 92.8% of the writing awards have gone to men. “Hollywood now is where
the art world was 20 years ago. Bus companies have more liberal hiring policies.
“If we’ve proved anything, it’s that if you do one little thing at a time,
it does add up to something worthwhile. But also, part of the reason for our
success and long- evity is that it’s fun. We’ve figured out a way to make
talking about all the horrible things in the world fun. And, as much as we
wish the world was perfect, it’s still fun to live this way.”
The Guerrilla Girls’ workshop is at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, SE1,
on Saturday; Amnesty’s Imagine a World show is at the same venue from Friday
until December 11. For more details, visit www.amnesty.org.uk or www.guerrillagirls.com