We are in London today-- at Tate Modern--
to meet up with the Guerrilla Girls,
who are currently operating a complaints department within
the Tate Exchange space in the new Switch House building that
opened this past summer.
The Guerrilla Girls have invited the public
to come join them in the gallery and post complaints
about art, politics, culture, or anything you might care about.
And the Guerrilla Girls are experts at complaining.
They are an anonymous group of women artists who--
since 1985-- have served valiantly
as the conscience of the art world,
using a wide variety of tactics to question and disrupt
art world practices, and to expose sexism, racism,
and corruption in our culture at large.
They are also here in London revisiting their 1986 poster
"It's Even Worse in Europe" with a new display
at the Whitechapel Gallery based on questionnaires
they sent to museum directors across Europe.
They asked them about their representation of artists
who are female, gender nonconforming,
or from places other than North America or Europe.
And the project aggregates these responses and shares
new and revealing statistics.
Playing upon the word guerrilla, as in freedom fighter,
and gorilla, the animal, the group members
wear masks when in public, each choosing
the name of a dead woman artist as a pseudonym.
Today we're sitting down with Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz,
who are gonna talk with us a bit about the art of complaining
and prompt us to find our own ways to question
the worlds around us.
Hi.
We're the Guerrilla Girls.
And this is your art assignment.
All right, so maybe, basically, a lot of us
were complainers, but mostly because we
saw so much injustice in politics, of course, but also
in our own little world of the art world in New York City,
where we were artists.
And we saw no opportunities for women artists and artists
of color.
And everyone was pretending that everything was OK.
So we got this idea-- let's do something about it,
and let's use some new media savvy techniques
to break through people's ideas that whatever they see
in galleries and museums is the best-- which
we knew so many great artists who weren't getting anywhere.
So we decided to blame one group after another.
We had this idea to do a new kind of political poster.
We had a meeting in Frida's loft of a bunch of colleagues
and friends, named ourselves the Guerrilla Girls,
passed the hat around to pay to print the first posters,
and the Guerrilla Girls were born.
It's more than pointing your finger at something
and saying this is bad.
We have to figure out a way to change
people's minds about things.
And we discovered that statistics
do that, outrageous statements, and, in the end, humor.
If you can make someone who disagrees with you laugh,
well, you kind of have a hook, you know, in their brain.
And once you're there, you just have an opportunity
to change their minds.
Your assignment is to think of something you really
want to complain about.
Then communicate your message in some unique, creative way.
So John, I really think that you should just sit and listen
for this one.
Yeah, no, I agree.
So if we think back through art history,
we can really see a lot of art as various forms
of complaining.
You can think about abstraction as a way that artists
are complaining about the way things
had been represented in the past.
And, you know, complaining is really protest,
and then that widens our consideration
to all sorts of art-- historical painting-- that
thinks about war or inequities.
But in thinking about what moment in history
we're going to talk about here, I
couldn't help but realize that I had a very handy resource
for this-- the Guerrilla Girl's own book-- the "Bedside
Companion to the History of Western Art."
And I'd love to just read you the beginning.
It says, "Forget the stale, male, pale, Yale textbooks,
this is Art Herstory 101!"
And I've actually selected one of the moments
in art history-- or art herstory--
for us to talk about today-- from the Middle Ages.
At the age of 25, Christine de Pizan
found herself widowed with kids and a mother to support.
She had been allowed an education--
a rarity in medieval France-- and became a copyist and writer
to support her family.
She achieved renown for her ballads, poems, and allegories,
as well as her vociferous objection
to the popular 13th century poem, "The Romance
of the Rose," which depicts women as wanton and immoral
seductress.
She countered with her 1405 allegory "The City of Ladies,"
in which three women, personifying reason, rectitude,
and justice, describe an entire city populated
by strong, virtuous women throughout history.
Told entirely by women and about women,
her story used fashionable tropes and techniques
to counter the prevailing narrative of women
as illogical and inferior.
Rooted in Christian morality, her work
got away with its harsh critique of patriarchal society
and highlighted women for their skills
in discourse and peacemaking.
Like De Pizan, the Guerrilla Girls
have found their own [INAUDIBLE] way
of complaining in their time.
The question is, what's your way in your time?
And how will you use the culture of now
to voice your dissatisfaction and dissent?
All right, so everyone's always
said to the Guerrilla Girls, you're
just a bunch of complainers.
So when we were invited to do this--
some kind of interactive residency project at Tate,
it suddenly seemed like a really great idea--
why not let everyone else complain?
You know, we are complainers.
We consider ourselves, you know, creative,
kind of unique complainers, but it is what we do.
And everyone has complaints, so we've
invited anyone who wants to come to bring
their complaints in, make their complaints,
put 'em on the board.
And it took about one day for all the places
we have to put them to be filled up.
And every day people are coming with more things
that they just have to get off their chest.
FRIDA KAHLO: It's kind of a riff off the old idea of complaints
departments in department stores-- in a way,
it allowed the consumers to sort of complain.
Well, we're allowing, you know, the audience of this museum
to-- instead of come and be passive-- to actually
come and think critically about what they've seen,
about what bothers them, and to really think about,
you know, how a lot of art comes out of complaints,
comes out of a very strong reaction to the world.
You can't really think of a complaint as one thing,
one time in a vacuum.
One thing we've learned is that if you do one thing,
put it out there, if it works-- you know, you do one thing,
you put it out there, if it works, you do another--
and if it doesn't, you do another.
So this is true for all of us.
You can't expect one thing to make a difference,
but if you keep doing it and keep chipping away, over time
you can make a difference.
Obviously, you know, we have a unique way
of trying to find a new idea about an issue,
combining it with some weird things that don't really
belong there, so you wind up thinking
about it in a different way.
But there's so many ways to comp-- I mean,
try to stop people from complaining.
It's great to brainstorm with other people,
identify a target, realize that you probably can't deal
with a huge issue all at once.
You can only deal with some small aspect of it.
And then to think about who your target audience is-- what
would-- you know, what would catch their attention, what
would change their mind, and, you know,
what components would change their mind?
Usually information is a real-- you kn know, is a help.
And if you can twist something around,
you know-- you know, you put out an outrageous headline,
you back it up, and you try to do it in a way
that you've never seen before.
And then try it out on other people.
Make sure that, you know, you're just not convincing yourself.
You know, let other people test drive it, say, what does this
communicate to you?
Cause sometimes being angry and complaining
is a good place to start, but it's not a great place to end.
You have to craft your message.
And I think reading the other complaints,
looking at their complaints, thinking about what they
complained about is-- is going to have an effect.
It's had an effect on me, and I've
been complaining for years.
[MUSIC PLAYING]