Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Alhóndiga Cultural and Leisure Centre in Bilbao is showing until the 6th of January the exhibition Guerrilla Girls 1985-2013.
It is the first retrospective exhibition in the world showing their complete works.
A poster specially created for this exhibition raises a question which is also a declaration of principles.
Why do Guerrilla Girls rave about art, cinema, politics and pop culture?
And they invite us to discover the answer.
We started in 1985 sneaking around the streets of New York City, putting up posters
that told the story of the low, low number of women artists in galleries and museums.
Guerrilla Girls is a feminist art collective born in New York in 1984.
They use guerrilla tactics to promote the presence of women in art.
In this cross between art and feminism they keep anonymity with 2 distinctive features.
They wear gorilla masks in their works and public appearances
and they use names of dead distinguished women to rescue them from oblivion.
This allows them total freedom to express their opinions and it is an eye-catcher for media.
The gorilla masks came to us by accident. We needed a disguise and one of our early members misspelled the word "guerrilla"
and wrote "gorilla", the animal. And we have been wearing these lovely masks ever since.
The work of the Guerrilla Girls has been a constant protest against the subordinated position of women in the world of art.
One of their first works, a true icon of theirs, was a billboard inspired by the Ingres' painting "La Grande Odalisque",
in which she was portrayed as a Guerrilla Girls activist and asked herself the following question:
Does a woman have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? The answer was demolishing.
Less than 5% of the artist in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.
This aesthetical use of statistics allows them a direct and clear protest against the contradictions within the world of art and creation
shown by democratic societies and their pretended achievements in the field of equality.
Their actions reach out to other fields, like cinema.
Focusing on Hollywood, and specially the Academy Awards, Guerrilla Girls charge using statistics again.
In 2006 they created a billboard, the first in Spanish, claiming no woman had ever won a Best Director Oscar
and only 3 had ever been nominated.
The winner could be, for the first time, a woman: Kathryn Bigelow!
3 years later Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar to Best Director with her film The Hurt Locker,
competing against James Cameron, her former husband, who was nominated for Avatar.
Another of their famous billboards deals not only with the male-chauvinist attitude of the Oscars, but also with its racism.
They claim the award is white and male just like the guys who win, and again, statistics proof them right.
Only 5.5% of the Acting awards have gone to people of colour.
That very same year, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington Won the Oscar for Best Acting
and Sidney Poitier got the Honorary Award in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human.
The mark of Guerilla Girls in this and other areas of the world of creation is undeniable.
Stand up, no matter what you do. Stand up for what you believe in. And if you are an artist, be an activist too.
Stand up against the system and be a complainer. We are creative complainers. We do it in our own creative way.
Everyone needs to find their own way, their own voice. Humor helps. Try it out!