BY ZANNY BEGG
The Guerrilla Girls were formed in 1985 after the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a blockbuster exhibition of 169 of the world's "most significant contemporary artists". All the artists whose work was on display were white, and only 13 of were women.
Outraged, a group of women organised a protest outside the gallery with placards demanding a more balanced representation of artists. When this form of protest was ignored, some of the women decided to push their point further by setting up the cultural action group, Guerrilla Girls. Since then the group has snowballed into an international movement that describes itself as the "social conscience of the art world".
One of the earliest decisions the group made was that its members would remain anonymous. Group members decided to take the names of female artists who had died to reinforce their place is history. They also decided to wear gorilla masks. I spoke to "Frida Kahlo", a founding member of the Guerrilla Girls, at the Sydney International Women's Day march.
Kahlo explained that, at first, Guerrilla Girls hid their identities because many were artists themselves and did not want to alienate the collectors and galleries. They were also aware that women are often judged by their physical appearance; remaining hidden, therefore, was a powerful way of focusing attention on the "message not the messenger".
Over time, the Guerrilla Girls grew so famous and so powerful the need for anonymity was gone. "None of us really need to hide any more", Kahlo explained, "but we are not going to get rid of our ape masks, because they make us more powerful. Why should superman take off his cape? If he did that all we would be left with is dorky old Clark Kent and that is so much less exciting then superman."
One of the Guerrilla Girls' first actions was to produce a series of posters which highlighted the depth of inequality in the art world. By pointing out statistics such as "less than 5% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum are women but 85% of the nudes are female" or that "women represent 49.2% of bus drivers but only 16% of artists represented by galleries in New York", they embarrassed the most established art institutions. Very rapidly the name Guerrilla Girls became synonymous with discussion about equality of representation in art. Today, the Guerrilla Girls are an established part of the syllabus for the study of contemporary art.
Kahlo attributes their success to their ability to "capture a collective outpouring of anger and disgust amongst women across the world" over how a "tiny bunch of wealthy collectors" are able to ignore the artistic contribution of women and people of colour.
Since the Guerrilla Girls were first formed, Kahlo feels that the situation for women artists has become better but she explained that there is often a "trade off" in which art galleries will show more works by women but less by artists of colour, or vice versa.
"We still suffer from tokenism", Kahlo explained. "Oppressed groups are played off against each other, but they are still a minority of those whose work gets shown". More importantly, women and people of colour who are artists find it very difficult to sell their work.
More recently, the Guerrilla Girls have set their sights on the film industry. According to Kahlo, the Guerrilla Girls will be targeting the Sundance Film Festival and the Oscar Awards to highlight the industry's appalling record on gender equality. "Women win the categories created for them: best actress, best supporting actress and so forth, but they don't win across all categories, for example sound, directing, producing and special effects", Kahlo noted. Of the top nine film distributors in the USA, last year five of them each released only one film by a female director, while four released none. Only 4% of Hollywood directors are women.
To address this issue the Guerrilla Girls have produced a series of stickers which they encourage people to put up in cinemas. The response to this has been global. Kahlo was surprised to receive a phone call recently from a cinema owner in New Zealand who wanted to know why he was being targeted by "a group of Guerrillas from New York".
Although the Guerrilla Girls focus a lot on statistics, Kahlo was quick to point out that they are not in favour of quotas or censorship as a way of achieving change. "Our approach has always been to use public embarrassment, humour and education to get our point across", she said.
Asked what she was doing at International Women's Day, she laughed and said, "doing a lot of interviews for papers like yours". On a more serious note, she added, "We hope to make every day women's day and that is why the Guerrilla Girls have a responsibility to keep going, to keep targeting the powerful few who exclude the rest of us".
Visit the Guerrilla Girls web site at <http://www.guerrillagirls.com/>.