wordcrush

Last week the Guardian featured an article about the Guerrilla Girls a group of activist women artists concerened with the stupidly unbalanced ratio of male-to-female work in the the art world. As seen in the picture, the group dons gorilla masks. Though this may seem somewhat unclever at first, I think it actually casts an interesting reflection back upon those institutions that they're critiquing. When the predominance of male artists has become so natualized, perhaps it's time to draw attention to that naturalization process.

The Girls' efforts began in 1985 when they first picketed a MoMA NY exhibition: "At the time it was running a show that purported to be the definitive survey of contemporary painting and sculpture, and only 13 of the 169 artists featured were women." While you'd think that perhaps the landscape has changed since then, they point out that "in 2005, they conducted some fresh research into European collections, and found that, even where museums owned significant amounts of work by female artists, it was all in the basement." I actually conducted my own informal research into a similar topic when I started this page, as I felt my initial posts reflected a disproportionately high ratio of dead white guys. What I found is that there is an amplifying imbalance that I always need to be vigilant against: It's not only the artistic institutions that overlook women artists and writers, but also a selective filtering in the media itself.

Just causes aside, a nicely balanced wikipedia entry makes some interesting criticisms of the Girls, basically claiming that they are fighting for an already elite and overcompensated group of artists. I tend to question this type of critique based on its assumption that everyone must take up every cause. It seems to me that if there are some people fighting for a higher ratio of women artists in highly visible institutions, and some fighting for equal pay across the board, and some writing articles about imbalances in the media, these structures will mutually reinforce one another. They don't need to be considered as exclusive.

P.S. If you'd like to join the Guerrilla Girls, they're not accepting new members, but go right ahead: "You don't have to be gorillas. There's always room in the world for more masked feminist avengers."

# posted by Lintropy @ 1:16 PM