Guerrilla Girls is a group of female artists, founded in 1985. It started with the idea to put up posters on the streets of New York: in-your-face posters that exposed gender and racial discrimination in the art world. The group consists of women of all ages and races and their members come and go. All the members remain anonymous and adopt names of dead women artists, like Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz (two of the founders of this group). Whenever they appear in public, they always wear gorilla masks. This anonymity works two ways: to focus on the issues rather than their personalities and so their personal careers won’t be affected by their work as a guerrilla girl. The gorilla masks came after a misspelling of the world ‘guerrilla’ by a member and offered a perfect solution to remain anonymous. They use humour in their work to prove feminists can be funny.
The idea to do something about the discrimination in the art world started in the spring of 1985 in response to an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was called “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” and included 165 artists of whom only 17 where women. The number of artists of colour was even smaller and none of them were female. There was a demonstration that two of the founders joined, with people walking in a circle chanting “Museum unfair to women artist.” They noticed a few things, like they got almost no attention from passer-by’s. This kind of demonstration worked in the 1960’s and 70’s, but not in the 80’s. There had to be a more contemporary way to get the message across. Moreover: people think the art world is above it all. Compared to all the fields that have changed since second-wave feminism, the art world is way behind. They made two posters at first, one attacking galleries and one attacking male artists. They identified the worst galleries that showed less than ten percent women artists. Then they started picking at random the most prominent male artists who showed in those galleries. They came up with a lot of male artists who identified themselves with left-wing politics, what was quite interesting. The funny part is that they had a list of male artists who don’t like each other, they created a club of artists who would never get along. Then the idea came to make it a club: what do they have in common? You can fill in the blanks: nothing except they show in these galleries.
These women use wit, humour, stealth, anonymity, in-your-face confrontation and cheap reproductions to function as the self-proclaimed “conscience of culture”. After the first posters attacking the discrimination in the art world, they expanded their territory and focused on gender and racial inequities in the worlds of art, theatre, film, politics and the culture at large. They have produced over one hundred posters, published books, sold T-shirts and spoke a lot in public (of course wearing gorilla masks). In these thirty years of activism and exposing inequality in the art world, a lot has changed, and a lot has not. Percentages of women artists in galleries have gone up and New York Museums that gave no women artists a solo exhibition now did to that. Over time the stickers and posters the Guerrilla Girls used in their campaigns became desirable artefacts themselves. The Tate Modern has it as part of its permanent collection. Which itself is quite humorous, because these posters were meant to be hanged on the streets and are now institutionalized.
This group of women is still active today, due to the still unresolved racial and gender discrimination in the world and art world. One of their more recent projects is a comment, or rather an attack, on billionaire art collectors. These billionaires have spent millions of dollars on their collections and some give these collections to a city in exchange for a museum with their name on it. This is what happened with the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, of which the art collection is eighty-nine percent male and ninety-seven percent white according to the Guerrilla Girls. Unlike the Museum Ludwig, a lot of art collectors do not give their collection to the public, but maintain a private collection. So in 2015, they criticized these billionaire art collectors the way they always do: with humour. The project, called “Dear Art Collector Billionaire”, was centred in New York. Firstly, the Guerrilla Girls put stickers which criticized art collectors, museums and galleries on objects and walls around museums and they even handed out these stickers to people there (image 1, 2 and 3). Their next step was projecting the text from the sticker about art collectors onto the wall of the new Whitney Museum while there was a block party going on:
“Dear Art Collector: Art is sooo expensive! Even for billionaires! We completely understand why you can’t pay all your employees a living wage!” (image 4)
While reading it, you feel the oozed sarcasm. The same goes for the texts of the stickers about museums and art galleries. The idea of the projection was all about the visitors that came out of the museum, feeling good about themselves and all the art they have just seen. And then on the wall above them, there is this projection and so the wall starts talking to them. In a short film they made about this project, they explain their use of humour as a strategy. Early on they discovered that if you can get someone who disagrees with you to laugh, you have a hook inside their brain. And once you’re inside their brain, you will be able to change their minds about things. This is what makes humour such a powerful instrument, because you can bring to light serious matters in a non-threatening way. Using a sarcastic tone, the Guerrilla Girls only a few sentences to clarify what is wrong and why. When one reads one of these stickers, laughing is the first reaction to occur. Immediately after, you will think about why you laughed and that is the strategic part: they are in your brain, to use the Guerrilla Girls’ words, and now they are able to change your mind about things. The projection takes things even further. Though it has the same texts as the Dear Art Collector Billionaire sticker, this text is divided into smaller parts Band projected one part after the other. In this way, the words read like they are spoken out loud – by a Guerrilla Girl – and therefore it gives the message even more strength. The fact that it is a giant projection above the entrance of the Whitney Museum on a busy night is another important factor that gives this humoristic attack on billionaire art collectors, museums that work with them and the galleries a stronger voice.
In 2016, the Guerrilla Girls made a poster about these billionaire art collectors and their private museums, such as the Saatchi Gallery or Palazzo Grassi (image 5). These art collectors are responsible for the manipulation of the art market, say the Guerrilla Girls. Only the few popular artists are bought by collectors, are represented by art galleries and therefore are shown in museums. This is the inequality that the Guerrilla Girls have fought since the start. In the film Girlsplaining the Museum Ludwig, they explain what is wrong and why, in a humorous tone they always use. The stickers and projection on the Whitney Museum that belongs to this “Dear Art Collector Billionaire” have been made in the same way the Guerrilla Girls tackle gender and racial discrimination for over thirty years.