Women artists
It's difficult to realise that half a century ago
have never gotten the serious attention
and certainly not the serious money that male artists do.
a woman was not even a person.
It took quite a long struggle by some very determined women to change this.
Hundreds of years ago in Europe, kings and queens told us what art was
and we're stuck with that.
Now that the world aspires to democracy, why should
billionaires and oligarchs define what our visual culture is?
Isn't that backward?
What's very good about our image, is that when you look at our masks, you think of
what we stand for, and we stand for the conscience of the art world.
And we feel
that there there is under-representation of women and minorities.
In 1984
the Museum of Modern Art had a big exhibition.
Out of close to 200 artists
in the show, there were only 17 women and even fewer artists of colour.
And it occurred to some of us that the art world was basically a white male place
and no one asked why?
And they'd say 'well, if there are no women, there are no artists of colour
it just means they're not making work that's good enough', and we knew
that was a tired excuse.
There was a protest, you know placards and chanting
in a picket line.
The only thing that we accomplished was to anger visitors to
the museum.
We noticed it didn't work. Everyone was willing to excuse the art world, so we
decided that day that we had to figure out a way to make people care.
There was discrimination right in front of people's noses but they didn't see it.
The thing is when you tell people the system is unfair they don't really
believe you, but when you show them the numbers there's nothing they can say to
counteract that.
We started to name names in the art world. Lists of galleries and
museums that didn't show women and critics that didn't write about women.
We would go after every cross section of the art world.
Everyone was passing the buck to someone else.
The white male artist said 'I can't
tell my gallery what to show' and the gallery said 'I can't show women because
their work doesn't sell' and then collectors would say 'well, I can't buy
women or artists of colour because I don't see them.'
We were just angry.
If art is a record of culture, and the art doesn't look like the culture, and
the art is told only through the works of white males, that's basically what it is:
It's the history of patriarchy, not the history of who we are.
We figured out
this formula that if you make people laugh, if you put people on the spot and
if you use information, you can actually change people's minds. And the only thing
you can do to a system that oppresses you is to make fun of it, and we did it
by being provocative.
The Guerrilla Girls, who call themselves
the conscience of the art world
have plastered their answer all over town.
It was a lot of fun, especially when you're anonymous and you wear gorilla masks.
Everyone can own a poster of ours. We want to talk in a way that people can
digest easily and we want to produce something that everybody can be part of.
I'd be happier to know that we have posters in millions of college dorm
rooms, then hanging over the couch of some billionaire art collector.
We are outsiders. We will always point at what's happening at institutions and critique
that.
A lot of people ask us, you know, like,' oh you're criticising the museum's
but then we can see your work at institutions', and actually it makes total
sense to us because we love to criticize an institution right on its own walls.
That's really fun. There's many ways to bring about change.
Art is not accessible
to the masses. We travel all around the world and our main message is to
question what you're seeing, don't just accept what you see at institutions, you
have to think about what's not being shown, why that thing is being shown, how
did it get there? To actually critically engage with the work and ask the larger
questions. What might not be in this museum? So for example, for our 30th
anniversary we revisited, 'how many women had one person exhibitions at
New York City museums?' In 1985 it was zero, zero, one, zero, and in 2015 it was one, one, two, one.
That's the progress, which is, you know, a little depressing.
What has changed? So, in 1985, when we said 'the art world', there was systemic
problems, everyone was like, 'no, if women and artists of colour were making art
that was as good as white men it would be at these institutions'. No one would
say that now. And numbers will always take a while to catch up, but the fact
that thinking has changed is encouraging. Artists are really at the forefront of
the resistance. Artists have to think politically while they make their art
and think of alternative ways to live, and to do their work and to survive.