Katalin Olarreta
OLA15459216
BA Textiles
DOES "GOOD CENSORSHIP" EXIST? SELECT ONE EXAMPLE OF A CREATIVE OUTPUT THAT HAS BEEN CENSORED OR PROTESTED, ANALYSER THE INTENTIONS AND IMPACT OF THE WORK AND THE POLITICS OF THOSE THAT REACTED TO HELP ANSWER THE QUESTION.
"Ethical attitudes manifested in artworks have absolutely nothing to do with the correct appreciation of them as art, so that the ground for censoring them is never their status as art… I would instead suggest that art has no special grounds for claiming immunity from censorship as compared to other kinds of valuable expression such as scientific and political speech…". (Gut, 2007)
Art and design have the power to raise questions, challenge beliefs. Foucault argues that creativity "opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself". (Foucault, 1961)
When we think about censorship, we tend to think about particular objects (artworks, images…), opinions, a specific person or a speech. However, most people do not realise that what is often seen as a discrimination to a certain collective can also be censorship. And one of the most oppressed and censored collectives have always been women.
"The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education — understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols signs and signals". (Linda Nochlin, 1971)
Throughout history, there have been women who have figured out how to get around all the established rules. And many rules were set up to keep them out of making art. They were not allowed to have studios, sign contracts, have businesses or paint any nudes. The truth is there have been as many female artists as male artists, but they have been put in the shadow by men. Society does not like women who speak up.
One of these female artists was Corita Kent. She was a sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles and taught art in the 1950s and 60s at Immaculate Heart College. During that time she forged her own printmaking aesthetic while also inspiring and opening minds of her students. Even before Warhol, Sister Corita was experimenting with silk screening and iconography of advertising. She made posters, serigraphs, banners and murals that combined her interest in faith, literature and activism. Creating dynamic, powerful images that asked the critical questions of her time. Her work was highly political, addressing the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. Her banners and posters could often be seen at rallies in the 60s and 70s.
Settling in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Yoko Ono developed an interest in art and began writing poetry. Considered too radical by many, her work was not well received, but she gained recognition after working with American jazz musician/film producer Anthony Cox. It was a real shock when Ono performed her 1964 Cut Piece. In it, the artist sat on the floor in a traditional, passive Japanese pose and let complete strangers cut pieces of her clothes until she was naked. This act was loudly protesting violence against women and it was the first of its kind to cry out for women’s rights. It happened around the same time when Gloria Steinem’s PlayBoy diary and Simone De Bouvoir’s The Second Sex were published.
Frida Kahlo was always a revolutionary artist. She had a tumultuous life filled with accidents, intrigue, pain and suffering. She was born in Coyoacán, México in 1907 and contracted polio as a child. She learnt how to paint at age 18, while recovering from a debilitating bus accident, making self portraits and still lives, influenced by the colours and forms of Mexican folk art.
Kahlo achieved some renown during her lifetime but her work only really gained traction in the 1970s, when the feminist movement began to unearth and celebrate remarkable work like Kahlo's.
Through her works we see Kahlo addressing her many hardships — displacement from home, losing her mother, miscarriage and divorce. Her images reflect upon her own life, but also universal issues, of course — pain, heartbreak, revolution.
The world she constructed seem surrealist to some, but she insisted "I never painted dreams. I paint my own reality".
Yayoi Kusama, 97, is one the world's best known living artists and has had a remarkable career. She was born in Japan and moved to New York in 1958, first creating paintings called infinity nets, large scale canvases covered completely in small painted loops. This obsessive accumulation of gestures, extended into objects, phallic soft sculptures as well as walk in sensorial environments. She calls her work art medicine, which applies both to herself and her audience, asking us to "forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment."
However, it is important to mention that some institutions always chose one or two women artists for their exhibitions in order to "prove" how "progressive and forward-thinking" they are. This practice is called tokenism.
The Guerrilla Girls have played a huge role in the art industry for the past over 30 years. They are a group of anonymous artists that have not only expressed anger towards the art institutions but also have transformed people's minds. By producing posters, books, and performances, the Guerrilla Girls have always achieved their the goal of exposing acts of sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film, and culture at large. They have always defended that we can't tell the story of culture without talking about women and artists of colour. The history of art as we know it, has been the history of power.
The art world is controlled by a small group of people, telling us the larger culture, what visual history is. Art has become a commodity, an investment. A symbol of success and sophistication for the new global capitalists who have money to burn. Museums are run by these people. This is why we haven't been shown the whole picture of history of art. Allowing collectors to control what is preserved, protected and collected as art is really disappointing.
This discrimination of institutions happens all over the globe, not only at the biggest museums. One of the Guerrilla Girls' most crucial posters was their 1989 "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?", where they protested against the museum having "Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female". This was a huge boom at the time, gathering more and more people to complain to the art institutions.
As Guerrilla Girl "Frida Kahlo" stated in an interview, "in 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition titled An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, marketed as a current summary of the most significant contemporary art in the world. Not only were a mere 13 of the 169 artists in the show were women, the exhibition’s curator said that any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink ‘his’ career". After its extensive expansion in 2004, the Museum of Modern Art in New York featured 410 works in its 4th and 5th floor galleries, where painting and sculpture are exhibited. Only 16 of those works were by women. Little has changed since then, by 2014, the statistics had gone to worse, with less than 3% women artists and 83% of the nudes being female at the Met. Museum, New York.
Even before the Guerrilla Girls was founded in 1985, feminist art collectives of the 1970s had attempted to secure a place for the disenfranchised in museums through public performances and protests within the museums. Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group were two artist collectives that were the precursors to the Guerrilla Girls. In 1969, AWC drafted a list of demands for MOMA, which requested greater representation of African American and Latino artists in their exhibitions, more artistic freedom, and to make museums more available to the general working class. AWC, along with Art Strike and others formed the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee, who, in 1970, criticized the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition for showing too few female artists and requested with pamphlets, posters, and even placing raw eggs and tampons in the exhibition spaces, for the exhibition to have 50% female participation.
As proved by statistics,
-In the City of London, from 386 public works of art, only 8% are made by women.
-51% of visual artists today are women; on average, they earn 81p for every 1£ made by male artists. (National Endorsement for the Arts)
-Women working across art professions make almost £20.000 less per year than men.
-ArtReview's 2017 Power 100 list of the "most influential people in the contemporary world" was 38% women – though this is an improvement from 2016's list, which was only 32% women.
Regarding museums and galleries,
-Tate Modern shows 83% male artists and Saatchi Gallery does 70% male. The National Gallery had 2.300 artworks in 2011, from which only 11 were by female artists.
-Work by women artists makes up only 3-5% of major permanent collections in the USA and Europe, and 34% in Australian state museums. (Judy Chicago, The Guardian)
-Of 590 major exhibitions by nearly 70 institutions in the USA from 2007 to 2013, only 27% were devoted to women artists.
-The top three museums in the world, the British Museum (est.1753), the Louvre (est.1793) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (est. 1870) have never had female directors.
-Women hold 30% of art museum director positions, earning 25% less than male directors. (In museums with budgets over 15 million pounds.
The good news:
-In 2005, women ran 32% of the museums in the USA. Today, they run 47.6% of them, although mainly the ones with the smallest budgets. For the few galleries that have been defiantly fighting the corner for female artists for years, the fact that the art world is finally catching up is bound to be a relief. Jane Hamlyn, who runs Frith Street Gallery, for example, has spent decades ruthlessly championing artists such as Marlene Dumas, Cornelia Parker and Fiona Banner.
In education,
-From 16-19th century, women were barred from studying the nude model, which formed the basis for academic training and representation.
Now, more than half of the graduates of art school are women, but they still get fewer opportunities than men.
In the art market,
-In the list of Top 100 individual works sold, only two artists were women. 75 of those 100 artworks came from just 5 male artists.
-96.1% artworks sold at auctions are by male artists.
Looking at my hometown, Bilbao, I sadly found out that the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum only showcases 14% of women artists and the Fine Arts Museum had not had a single solo show of a female artist in the past 10 years.Spain is particularly poor when it comes to supporting women artists, with seven Spanish institutions of 21 admitting to less than 20 percent women artists in their collection. This is unacceptable and we must demand changes.
The Guerrilla Girls provide part of the answer to questions regarding the direction of feminism and equality today. Their success in the art world has led them to gain a voice also heard in the broader context of popular culture, and is an important model for the possibilities that can come of creative ways to promote feminist ideals in an era when disconnect and apathy are often seen as more common than organization and passion. These performances allow the Guerrilla Girls to continue to use facts and statistics that cannot be denied by the institutions, with satirical language that urges the viewer to contemplate their own perceptions of institutionalized art.
By calling attention to identity, sexuality, politics, and history, women artists have dominated the art debates for the last several decades. I hope, we won’t have to fight much longer.