Above: “How To Enjoy the Battle of the Sexes,” The Guerrilla Girls, London’s Tate Modern
Flash back to 1984 and the International Survey of Recent Paintings and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Women artists did the math: Out of 165 artists, a mere 13 were women. The Guerrilla Girls were born. They picketed MOMA. As “the conscience of the art world,” they’ve been battling gender inequality and racism entrenched in it ever since.
Why masks? The protesters’ anonymity achieved by guerrilla masks puts the spotlight on the issues instead of the individual women artists or their talents.
The Tate Modern currently has a large wall dedicated to Guerrilla Girls’ posters stridently illuminating gender and race gaps throughout the world.
Above: Guerrilla Girls
The Guerrilla Girls were not the first women to employ guerrilla tactics against the male establishment and racism in the art world. They were preceded by the 1970 Ad Hoc Women’s Committee’s protests against the Whitney Biennial. The committee’s attention-getting weaponry included secretly depositing raw eggs and tampons throughout the museum on an ongoing basis.
Expanding this dialogue to include sexual identification issues, the Tate also features work by Singapore-born artist Ming Wong. Life of Imitation (2009), the male artist’s two-channel video installation:
reworks a classic Hollywood melodrama scene from Imitation of Life (directed by Douglas Sirk, 1959) between a black mother and her mixed-race daughter who has been ‘passing’ for white. The roles are played by male actors from the 3 main ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay and Indian), switching roles in every shot.”
Above: Poster art for “Life of Imitation,” Ming Wong
Wandering around the incredible Tate collection, we both zoomed in on how much the content warning for works by Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou seems tongue-in-cheek in light of how many nudes are found in the Tate, including the Guerrilla Girls’ protest art. Is the warning because his works are contemporary versus classical male sculptures harvested from Italy or Greece?
Above: Glass sculpture by Pascale Marthine Tayou
The world is my inspiration. It is so large and full of objects which through their diversity help me bring about solutions to my existential problems”
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Okay. I’ve taken advantage of the option below for two decades now. And I’ve been enjoying that “relaxed fit.”
Have fun with the money you’ll save on clothes and cosmetics after you’re fifty and no one cares what you look like.”
The Guerrilla Girls
But none of these things should matter. Combatting sexism and racism still seems in need of guerrilla tactics. Sigh.
Postcards from Barton Springs 