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Girls begin to talk and stand on their feet sooner than boys, because weeds grow more
quickly than good crops. Martin Luther, 1533.
I consider women writers, lawyers and politicians as monsters and nothing but five-legged calves.
The woman artist is merely ridiculous. But I am in favor of the female singer and dancer.
Auguste Renoir, beloved Impressionist painter.Kathe:
Dear group of Communists: You're the strongest bunch of *** ever seen in the world of
art. Don't think to the career you will make at 80. Best work of art a woman can make is
in bed making well love and maybe procreate non-idiot females. Feminism is the reason
for high number of AIDS statistics. Thanks to you, *** feminists, if weakest men become
gay and AIDS raise up in USA. A woman can be genius. Do you remember the Holy ***,
you damned bunch of ***? Answer me if you have the courage, bunch of ***. That's
a letter to the Guerrilla Girls from an Italian art critic.
Dear G-Girls: Once I asked the slugger Hank Aaron, who had just broken Babe Ruth's home
run record just how good Aaron thought the Babe was. He shrugged. For him it was an irrelevant
question. The Babe hadn't played against those great African-American athletes banned from
the major leagues. How can you look at old-time baseball when only white men played? How can
you look at art with only white men hanging? So thanks, Guerrilla Girls. There's no way
in the world I can ever again begin to listen to professors and experts and curators and
salespeople hustling me a skewed, segregated art game. Robert Lipsyte, New York Times sports
columnist.
OK, so as you know, I'm Kathe Kollwitz. This is Frida Kahlo. We're two of the founding
members of the Guerrilla Girls, and I've been involved in pretty much almost everything
the group's done over the years.
With me today of course is Gertrude Stein, another founding member of the Guerrilla Girls
who now is involved with the group Guerrilla Girls Broadband, and she's going to tell you
about that in a second, and Alice Neal, a former member, long long time important member
who's gone on now to do other things in her art career.
Now, the Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous women artists, and as Mara explained, we use
facts, humor and a little bit of fake fur to expose sexism and racism and corruption
in the art world. We don't do posters that like a lot of political art, point to something
and say "this is bad." We in fact try to twist an issue around and make people laugh at it
and present it in some way that it hasn't been seen before. To give people a chance
to really rethink it.
We wear Guerrilla Girls in public, and we take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms.
This anonymity keeps the focus on the issues and away from our personalities. Many, many
women have been members of our group over the years, and we've been diverse in ethnicity,
*** orientation, age and also level of art world success. Our work is passed around
the world by tireless supporters, and we are taught in many schools and universities. We
get thousands of letters every year on our website, guerrillagirls.com. We could be anyone.
We are everywhere.
So, we've done so many posters, stickers, billboards, lots of other projects. We've
written several books, including The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of
Western Art- thank you, that's great- ***, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls'
Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes, and The Guerrilla Girls' Art Museum Activity Book.
We have a website which we'd love you all to visit. And we've shown up in so many different
things, including the New York Times, the London Times, the New Yorker, the Washington
Post, and ***, on NPR, CNN, and the BBC.
Just in the last few years we've appeared in over 90 universities and museums around
the world, including MOMA, as Mara mentioned before, and the Tate Modern, where a whole
room of our posters is on display. We also created large scale installations for Venice,
Rotterdam, Mexico City, Bilbao, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Athens, and just a few weeks ago,
posters arrived were carried around the streets of Shanghai at the Shanghai Contemporary Art
Fair.
You know, one of our goals has always been to change people's minds about that F word,
feminism. We believe that feminism is a way of looking at the world. And perhaps it will
be a way to save the entire world.
We think it's ridiculous that feminism has been demonized in the media for so long that
many people who actually believe in the tenets of feminism, equal opportunity, equal pay
for work, human rights for women worldwide, including the right to an education still
do not consider themselves feminists.
Guerrilla Girls started out in 1985 sneaking around the streets of New York putting up
posters in the middle of the night. Posters that told the truth about the status of women
in the New York art world. By the way, here's one of our early posters on a mailbox, and
putting a poster on a federal mailbox is a federal offense. We did it because we were
pissed off, but the posters caught everyone's attention, and really started people talking
about the issues.
Just to be clear, we weren't complaining because there wasn't 50 percent this, 13 percent this,
40 percent this, this is how pathetically, pathetically low the numbers in the art world
were.
Now, a few years after those first posters, we were asked to design a billboard that would
be around Manhattan in various places. And we thought it would be a great opportunity
to try out this crazy voice that we had developed that had been successfully provocative on
a larger audience.
So one Sunday morning we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to conduct what we have affectionately
come to call the "weenie count."
Do you know what our weenie count was? We counted naked males and naked females in the
art works. So when we went through the Classical art section, to our great surprise, almost
all of the naked figures were male. It was only when we arrived in the 19th and 20th
century sections, that early modern era when sex replaces religion as the major preoccupation
for European artists did we get this statistic.
You know, our work has made a big difference in the art world, we hope. But old habits
die hard, and some museums lag behind. We went back to the Met two years ago to see
if anything had gotten any better. We were sure that it had, but this is what we found.
Fewer women artists, but more naked males. Is this progress?
You know, recently, the Guerrilla Girls has been faced by a really big dilemma. What do
you do when the system spent your lives attacking suddenly embraces you? In 2005 we were asked
to do a big installation... In the last couple of years, our work has been seen at major
museums all over the world. So, what is a girl activist to do? This is something we've
really agonized over, but we've always made a decision, in the whole time of Guerrilla
Girls, to try to get the message out to as large audience as possible. So for now, we've
decided to go along these exhibitions and appearances at museums. Also, we have to admit,
it's a thrill to criticize these institutions on their own walls, and it's also really necessary
to criticize them on their own walls.
Here's what we did then: took an installation of six, seventeen-foot tall posters, that
were the first things that people saw when they entered the... We took on the... itself,
documenting a hundred and ten years of discrimination, but we also declared it the first feminist...
Why? Well, because Mara said it had the first female directors in the history of..., and,
surprise, it had the highest number of women artists shown ever. We also took out the museums
of Venice. We discovered that every historical museum in Venice, except one, did have work
by women artists in their collection. But, almost all of it was kept in the basements,
and not shown on the walls of the museums.
So we appropriated this iconic image of Marcello Mastroianni straddling Anita Ekberg, from
the famous Fellini film "La dolce vita," and we declared that viewers everywhere should
go to museums of Venice and demand them to put women on top.
A few months ago the Washington Post newspaper gave us a full-page as part of a special section
on feminism and art. So we've designed our own tabloid called "Not OK: The Guerrilla
Girls' Scandal Rag" and it reveals the shocking truth about the low low number of women in
our tax-payer supported and national museums. For instance, when we did the research we
found that at the National Gallery, there was not one single work by an African-American
artist, female or male, hanging at the museum that month. Which is pretty unbelievable.
For a tabloid, we also had the post buy us a picture of Brad and Angelina, because no
tabloid's complete without them. The caption we put under them says, "Celeb's say museums
must adopt new policies."
And this just shows you, how pathetic the statistics were, at our national museums,
National Gallery of Art. These are our... at that moment, a few months ago. National
Gallery of Art: 98 percent male, 99 percent white. National Portrait.
Gallery: 93, 99. Hauser: 95, 94. American Art Museum: 88, 91. Now, when the Post called
the National Gallery to fact-check, the museum went bananas and it hurriedly installed, at
the last minute, a sculpture by an artist of color. And the Hauser suddenly found work
by women artists of color it never knew. In fact, after the Post article came out, a group
of twenty women curators at the National Gallery organized themselves, anointed themselves
the Gallery Girls, and vowed to increase the number of women artists in the gallery. Curators
of conscience.
Everywhere: Make sure that your museum is not just telling the white male version of
art history. Kathe: You know, there is an area of US culture that's, believe it or not,
even worse than the art world, and that is Hollywood. The film industry loves to think
of itself as being progressive, and ahead of the curve. But if you look behind the scenes
of the numbers of women and people of color in positions of power; as directors, writers,
editors, cinematographers, you find a really, really, really low number. So for several
years now we've been renting billboards in Hollywood, just right at the time of the Oscar's
and just a few blocks away from where the ceremonies are held. For our very first one
in 2002, we put a little realism into the Academy Awards and redesigned the "Golden
Boy" to look more like the guys that take him home.
The anatomically correct Oscar: he's white and male, just like the guys who win. Now,
we had to back up this outrageous statement with some facts, and here they are. Best director
has never been awarded to a woman. Ninety-four percent of the writing awards have gone to
men. Only three percent of the acting awards have been given to actors and actresses of
color. That was the third year that both Denzel Washington and Howie... won Oscar's for their
performances, and we are convinced it was because of our billboard.
Now this past year, Jennifer Hudson became a fourth African-American woman in seventy-nine
years to win an Oscar. And Forrest Whitaker became the sixth African-American male to
win. Of course, we take credit for that too. Here's our most recent billboard.
When the Hollywood producers come to us seven times, and they say, "Guerrilla Girls, we
want to make a film about the history of sixties and seventies feminism," and they say, "We'd
love to hear your ideas." Well, usually as soon as we tell them the ideas, we never hear
from them again. Well, one day we were sitting around thinking, what if Hollywood did make
a film about the history of seventies feminism? The minute that idea flew into our heads,
another idea flew right behind it. Maybe we're lucky that Hollywood hasn't made that film.
So we decided to create the movie poster for the film we hope never gets made the Hollywood
way.
OK. So we have to cast our movie, and of course we have... We have... as feminist leader...
We have Halle Berry as civil rights leader Flo Kennedy and we have Catherine Zeta Jones
as congresswoman... And, of course our tagline: "They made women's rights look good, really
good." Now, those of you in the audience who have studied the seventies feminist movement,
and those of you in the audience who are part of the seventies feminist movement will see
right away, we've tried to be really historically accurate in our film. You will remember with
your studies or your experience, that the great feminist leaders did wear bikinis 90
percent of the time.
Now, to round out our credits, we made it a Jerry Bruckheimer production, directed by
Oliver Stone, and get the soundtrack album by Eminem.
Now, for some pure politics. We focused on art and film stuff today, but we've also done
a lot of posters about politics and social issues. In the last few years, everyone has
been asking us what we are doing to help our country's efforts to fight terrorism and win
the war in Iraq. First, we must tell you, we think this war needs an entirely new weapon
and we have proposed one to the Department of Defense. Here it is:
It is the Estrogen Bomb. Now, how does an estrogen bomb work? You drop it on Washington,
and all of the guys in government throw down their guns. They hug each other. They apologize.
"I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. It was all my fault. No, it was my fault."
Then, finally, they start to work on human rights, education, health care, and an end
to world poverty. Got leftover estrogen pills out there in the audience? Send them to George
Bush: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
OK. So, what are some of the things that we'd like you to take home out of this? Well, first
of all, change doesn't just happen. You have to fight for it. Second, we would like everyone
to invent their own crazy way of being an activist, just like we did, and, their own
way of being an artist, and while you're at it, their own way of being a feminist too.
So, I had a few questions that I wanted to ask the Guerrilla Girls. I think the one that
seems the most obvious one, and I think the one that you'd probably love to hear about
is: what was the spark that caused them to begin? You know? In 1984, '85, that's almost
twenty-five years ago that they formed as a group. So, I want to hear from them the
history of their formation. So, I wonder if they could tell us a little bit about that.
Well, in 1985 the Museum of Modern Art opened after several renovations ago. They re-opened
with an exhibition that was called: An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. It was supposed
to be the last word about what was going on in the contemporary art world around the world.
There were a little fewer than two hundred artists in the show and only seventeen women.
The stats were bad enough, but then the curator, of the show, said in the press, and he will
go unnamed, he may be out in the audience today. He said anyone who's not in my show
should rethink his career. Now, that was pretty damning. So, a number of us went up to the
Museum of Modern Art and protested with placards and chants and banners, in a very traditional
kind of way and at the end of the day, we made absolutely no progress. Everyone going
into the museum argued with us. So, we decided that it was really time to invent some new
strategies to make people take this issue seriously.
Basically, we got a small group of women together, and we came into the group with the idea of
putting two posters up on the street and very quickly sat down and did the research. The
idea was to make artists and galleries start feeling guilty about the low, low, low numbers.
So, the first one said, "These artists allow their work to be shown in galleries that don't
show women." You know, that show 10 percent. Then the other one was, "These galleries show
less than 10% women or none at all." And they were all a list of the top artists of the
day and the top galleries of the day.
We remained anonymous because then we could name names. We could finger the galleries
and think of the resource.
That one caused a big stir on the street. Because, we put up these two posters and all
hell broke loose.
Putting up the posters was an experience, too. ...Middle of the night, the glow off
the moon. Getting chased by the cops. Police would come up after us and we'd have to run
from different places and it was...
It was fun because you could put them up on a Friday night and then hang out around the
posters on Saturday afternoon, when everyone was at the gallery. We got lots of great ideas
just from the interaction people had to the posters.
Mm-hm. Jot down and actually we decided to use statistics. Just black and white, direct.
It was shocking to us. It was homework. We just sat down, went through the magazines,
numbered, counted, and recorded everything. It was amazing, what we came up with.
And how did you do that sort of pre-Internet? Did you go and look at the archives let's
say, for the Guggenheim and ... It's very easy now. I recently did a lot of research
for the Global Feminism Catalog and it was very simple. I just went on the Tate Archives
and could look back and look at the appalling results of how many women artist's exhibitions
there were.
Our secret research tool, for years, was the Arte Numerica Annual.
Wow.
And, it came out once a year and it had everything you needed. Every gallery just so proudly
displayed a list of artists. Well, we'd just go down the list and...we had these five minute
research projects. We said, "If it takes women five minutes to get the research, we're not
going to do it, because it's going to be faster ..."
We have moles all over the place, too. Always had and always will. That give us information.
And now, a lot of these institutions are playing catch up and trying to count again. The Museum
of Modern Art had no idea how many women were in its collection. I mean, if you went to
the museum, you could see probably none. There's hardly any, but they have just begun a process
to try to identify and the numbers are really low. Especially, since they are a modern and
contemporary museum.
We had this intuitive feeling that something was not right. We always thought that for
a long time and we didn't really know how to crack or do it. So, we did it that way.
When we sat down and the information was shocking to everybody. So, there was the answer, right
there, on how to start to approach this.
And we went after, first, artists, galleries, critics, collectors, museums. We went after
one group after another and it wasn't long after that that we started thinking about,
"Hey, we could use this kind of, in your face, humorous way of talking about things in other
fields." Many of us were activists in the world, as well as artists, and we wanted to
be activists in the art world. So, we went out and we started right away, doing anti-war
posters, social issues...
The Gulf War.
What?
The Gulf War, we wrote down the statistics. But, the roles that we get as a woman in the
Gulf War, it's like the south in 1960.
Mm-hm.
It was really combining our own personal lives as artists. Really combining with us being
in the world and how it affected us.
But, we were really operating in an atmosphere of total disbelief. Everyone wanted to think
that the art world is a very liberal, open place and that it was ahead of the rest of
the world. It was sort of avant garde. But, every time we did the figures we realized
that the world... of art, was derriere. It was backward in the way it treated women in
arts. But, everyone in the art world had this superior attitude that, "Oh, there can't be
any sexism or racism, conscious or unconscious in the way we see things." But we did get,
actually, some apology letters from critics and curators who said, "Thank you for making
me think about what I do and I'm going to try hard better."
Well it's so sort of institutionally, you know, sort of, it's so insidiously unconscious,
you know, that I don't think people really think about it and maybe that's what you're
helping to make clear. But the question I was going to have was do you think that things
have changed and if so in what ways? I mean obviously permanent collections are still
not you know really, really that great, I mean you know, Terry Saltz recently sort of
did a wonderful about the coming collections of the Museum of Modern Art, after the installation
and talked about how it was like four percent women, or something, were on display, it was
appalling, you know he's been a great sort of male feminist art critic, kind of really
doing some guerrilla work for us, you know. But so where do you think things have improved
and where haven't they? What sort of work do we still have to do?
Well like any, you know situation, any civil rights struggle, there are advances and there
are setbacks. And what we found now is that it's a no-brainer. You can't have a collection
or a survey or an exhibition that purports to be broad without the work of women who
are artists of color. That it's just not possible. And you can't have an art collection that
really talks about culture without the voices of everyone in the culture, that's fine. So
But there's a crushing, crushing glass ceiling for women and artists of color as you go up
that kind of ladder. And if you look at auction results, auctions are this month, so take
a look and see how many women artists and artists of color ever come up at auction and
whether their work sells for what white male art sells for.
Look at museum retrospectives. Look at monographs, see if you know women and artists of color
really are seen as often at that level of professional success. They certainly don't
get the money and money in many ways is production. So if, you know it changes, it gets better
I think you need to light the consciousness of it. I don't think anybody could look back
now and feel the same, not be aware of the count, what's there and what's not there and
that's a big difference, and the more artists of color and show and the more collections
that come from women, and the more diversity of the collectors and curators, and your position
helps.
Yeah, that's right.
Opens up the idea that there's more than one way to see something, or there's more than
the one experience.
Well, it really needs to begin, as you said, on the entry level and on the foundational
level and so what advice to we give to, even people like collectors who will in turn ostensibly
give, you know, their collections to the museum, I mean so again, on the foundational level
like a collector, or you know again, museums and their collection policies or their permanent
exhibition displays and their you know, exhibition programs and public programs, etc. at the
foundational level. What advice would you give to collectors and to museums to make
these broader institutional changes you know?
It's a bargain.
It's a bargain. It's bargain shopping. Yes, bargain shopping.
Definitely.
Huh?
Well, I mean, it's really problematic how art museums are so dependent on collectors
who are oftentimes art investors and it's really about dollars and cents and money.
Seeing things in terms of its monetary value in the world, is a lousy way, a lousy way
to collect our historical artifacts. There has to be something else. I mean if literature
were taught that way, they'd only be teaching the best selling Jacqueline Suzanne in literary
classes. You know, really. So maybe there needs to be another, there needs to be a cut
off. Collectors are fine but why do they have so much influence on museums?
Well, also it's a very dire time in the art world right now because art is selling for
so much money, maybe not after this week, the stock market, latest stock market plunges,
they can't afford it, so they need the collectors to give them the money to buy it and most
collectors just make cookie cutter collections of the greatest hits. You know, they have
advisers who tell them what to do. So I would say to any of you out there who are collectors,
have an individual collection. You know have a mind of your own, just don't consider the
art world an Olympics and collect the five people who someone tells you are the winners.
on, looking down on the ceiling or something a hundred years ago, and we went through the
Brooklyn Museum, we don't want the museum to have collected all the wrong stuff. We
That's a dilemma because the change does come from within. I mean all you can do is put
out the message and put the seeds and talk about it but to really make shifts that's
an individual decision, a journey and but the, it would be nice to see the collectors
come back and really collect from the gut, not just from the wallet or what someone else
says to them. I think that's been lost for awhile. There were those collectors and now
Wendy, one of us should make art that can't be bought that can be owned by many, many
Look at art posters, or whatever, art posters and books are cheap, you know. You run your
Well you mentioned the question about collectors, but I mean, we still need to discuss museums.
I mean clearly, you know I think the Brooklyn Museum has made a great effort here with developing
the first center for feminist art, but I think also there have been great initiatives by
like, you know the Tate... or I think the Tate General in March of 2006 they declared,
I don't know if they have yet to you know make this happen but, they will make a huge
it was really sort of grotesquely low. Also the Maderi Museum in Stockholm, I think within
a month or two of that declaration by the Tate also made a similar you know public initiative.
So there are, I think that, I mean these are moves in the right direction. So what other
kind of, is there anything else sort of that, I mean these are obviously wonderful.
exposed and collectible buys, they're all interconnected.
Again, it's the level of consciousness that needs to be raised perpetually, over and over
Right, they can't be, you can't make anyone really change the inner.
Change. Anybody else? OK? Thank you.