Art of Resistance: Guerilla Girls
10/30/20 - The Guerrilla Girls have been resisting sexism and racism through art for the last 30 years. An anonymous collective of gorilla-mask bedecked agitators, their campaigns have ranged from protests to posters, billboards, and museum interventions. With style, humor, and collective action, they call attention to issues rich and powerful institutions would rather side-step. All the members take pseudonyms after dead women artists. We talked with founding members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz about the body of work collected in a new book: Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly.
As we all grit our teeth for Election Day, we wanted to hear from people who have been deeply engaged in changing systems, for the long haul.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
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TRANSCRIPT: ART OF RESISTANCE - GUERRILLA GIRLS
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello, hello Aminatou Sow. We have a real treat today on the show: it is our second of two episodes about art and resistance which, you know, I had this moment where I was like is this the best use of our last podcast before the election? And I'm going to say yes in part because today's guests have been at their work for a long time, 30 years to be precise, and for me anyway being in touch with the stories of people who are -- who have been working hard for a long time and are going to continue to work hard regardless of who is sitting in the White House or in state houses, that makes me feel better on some level of just like the it's not all about whatever happens on Tuesday. We are pleased to have on the podcast two of the Guerilla Girls who are an art and activist collective with a kind of rotating, not entirely fixed crew of members. All of the members take on the name of a dead woman artist as their pseudonym for all of their work related to the Guerilla Girls. So I spoke with Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo who have been members of the group since its inception. So, you know, people who have been doing this work for many decades.
And part of the reason they are doing interviews now is that there's a new book out collecting much of their work over the decades: their art, their billboards, their signs, their installations, their performances. It's called Guerilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly.
[Theme Song]
(2:15)
Ann: You know if you're not familiar with them you have probably seen at least a few pieces that they've produced. A very early poster that established them was a critique of the way gender plays out in terms of which artists are shown in museums and how people of different genders are depicted. The poster said "Do women have to be naked to get into the MET Museum? Less than 5 percent of the artists in the modern art sections are women but 85 percent of the nudes are female." So that's an example of the kind of thing that they really made a name for putting front and center and their work really kind of goes beyond just issues of gender and representation within the art world although I think that that's really where it began for them and I think they're a great example of creative work dovetailing with fueling and being the basis of activism work for the long-term.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Hello and welcome to Call Your Girlfriend Frida and Kathe.
Frida: Hi.
Kathe: Hey Ann.
Ann: I am so happy to have you both with us. We are remote, alas. I am not sitting in a room with the two of you in your full Guerilla gear which maybe feels liberating. I don't know, how does it feel to be doing these interviews without your normal getup?
Frida: How do you know we're not wearing our masks?
Ann: I don't know, you sound so clear. I guess maybe you've got the microphone stuck between the rubber teeth but . . . [Laughs] This book you have out right now is essentially a 30-year retrospective. I'm wondering as you sat down to pick out works that you wanted to highlight or things that you felt important was there anything that jumped out as wow, that was really a moment or that work was really important to us that maybe in real-time had not been your favorite or not felt like it was, you know, such a milestone?
(4:05)
Kathe: You know things resonate differently at different times and we're used to looking at all of the work. There have been many exhibitions of it and things like that and we have it around us. But it's always fascinating to see the trajectory and to me it was wonderful to see all these hundreds of works in chronological order from our first early sneaking around in the middle of the night street posters to giant billboards and crazy things we can do on the streets and elsewhere right now. But one thing that struck me, it always was one of my favorites but I think it's kind of a great example of how we do things, from the very beginning we dealt with racism as well as sexism in the art world and beyond. And one of our early posters, you know, we're known for our bold headlines and killer statistics so here's something I just think really resonates anew in the art world today where things are even more expensive.
When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable what will your art collection be worth? The art market won't bestow megabuck prices on the works of a few white males forever. For the 17.7 million you just spent on a single Jasper Johns painting you could've bought at least one work by all these women and artists of color. Then there's a list of almost a hundred incredible, hugely-recognized and appreciated artists and it is still a really interesting question: why spend millions of dollars on one work when a museum could cast as wide a net as possible and actually collect all the great artists out there and preserve them, these diverse artists, for history?
(6:00)
Ann: So do you think that we're at that point yet where, you know, sexism and racism are not quite so fashionable and those collections full of white men are not as valuable? I mean I feel like we still have quite a ways to go. We're sort of at the lip service phase but not at the actualized phase of not buying into these things.
Frida: You know, the art world and in particular the art market has taken up women and artists of color because they need to monetize new ideas. And yes, they have chosen a few but it really doesn't represent the broad spectrum of people working -- of women and artists of color working. What it does is it makes a few winners and that's really part of the problem of the art world. As long as the art market drives it it's going to be trying to look for the winners for everyone to invest in. And that's kind of a lousy way to write art history if all collectors and all museums are going after the same small handful of artists. That doesn't tell a very broad or rich history at all. So in a way it's the structure of the art world that is holding it all back.
Kathe: But can I just say something? Museums do not collect artists to monetize them. The system unfortunately has already monetized some, you know, what you talked about, the winners and the losers. But in museums they were just moribund with their old collection and the progressive people in the museums trying to push forward new ideas and a new agenda weren't empowered until recently when employees of the museums fought to get some of that old guard out of there. There is a real desire today among all of us in museums and out for museums to play catch up and get their collections in line with the real story of our culture.
(8:15)
I think museums themselves, the people within museums, want to -- you know, they're so beholden to their billionaire trustees that they tend to have a lot of work that those guys donate to them and there definitely are people in museums who want to throw that model out and try to find a new model somehow.
Frida: Kathe you're more optimistic than I am but let's let both . . . [Laughs] both of your points coexist.
Ann: Yeah, and I want to go back to the beginning a little bit because one thing we talk about a lot on our podcast is about starting where you are or about figuring out the things that you have to contribute or the things that make you especially angry or passionate and marrying those with the skill set you have. I would love to hear you speak about maybe some of the emotional underpinnings or the friendships or whatever it might be that really formed the foundation of your activist work in the early days.
Kathe: We were just a bunch of artists who were pissed off that all the opportunities in the art world went to white men. There are so many great artists around we knew that wasn't the problem but the system really believed that one great genius proceeds another. That art isn't part of its time; it's just somebody springing from out of nowhere. You know, a Van Gogh or a Picasso or whatever.
Ann: Sorry but . . . [Laughs] Yeah, yeah.
(9:55)
Kathe: And the world of artists that we were involved in as artists was so different than that. There was so much work about the world, work of all kinds, activism, protest art. That's always been there. So we went to this demonstration at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 because one of the curators there had done an exhibition with 169 artists. Only 13 were women and of those all the artists -- very few artists of color. And we saw that nobody walking by the museum -- this is an old-fashioned picket line, you know, signs, a lot of people we knew marching around -- nobody cared who was passing by. They went right into the museum and went to see their Picassos and Van Goghs and Cezannes. And that was really the a-ha moment. We realized there had to be a more contemporary, in-your-face, convincing way kind of using strategies of advertising and persuasion to tell people that what they thought about art wasn't what was really going on.
Frida: We kind of decided to lob a lot of big questions at the art world and see how they would answer them. The fact that male artists allowed their work to be shown in galleries that showed no women or artists of color, even if those male artists -- those white male artists were progressive. Why is it that only one gallery showed more than one black woman artist? Why again is all that money put into one or two artworks when we could have a whole collection for the same amount? We just started throwing questions at the art world.
(11:50)
And I think these questions were posed in other ways but they weren't really answered. We did it in such a way they couldn't avoid it. So we started everyone talking about it. So I think we really intended to raise consciousness and I think we did.
Ann: And a big part of your work has involved counting, has involved the raw numbers of just how few white women and people of color are represented in galleries, in museums, you know, in Hollywood, beyond the art world as well. I'm curious about whether you think there are limits to kind of just counting and showing numbers as a sort of motivating factor. For me the numbers haven't changed that dramatically but what you were just saying about artists who are maybe self-identified, progressive, white male artists who continue to show in this context, to me that feels like maybe now more of the lever to pull. Like we kind of know the numbers are bad now. And I wonder if you can talk about that, the limits of counting versus is it important to still put those numbers front-and-center?
Kathe: Well it's important to show how little things have changed and how much things have changed. And we've never been just about counting. Even from the very beginning we have this creative use of statistics, not that we made the statistics up creatively, but we had a way to present them with such a punch that you couldn't forget it. And you know we've recounted this poster many times and it's true it hasn't changed but I'm going to read it to you because this is such an example of one of our works, it's our most well-known work that I don't think you could ever, ever go into a museum and look at art the same way once you've seen this. And it's "Do women have to be naked to get into the MET museum? Less than five percent of the artists in the modern art sections are women but 85 percent of the nudes are female."
(14:00)
So see the strategy? We stick in the five percent of artists but then we combine it with this whole other issue about how there's so many naked women, especially in western art of a certain kind, and I dare you to look at what's on the walls in any institution the same way after you've seen this poster. Of course we didn't know that when we did it. You know, we just were trying to come up with new, crazy ways and really fierce, interesting, disruptive ways of doing this activist work about art and politics and everything else. But now you look at it and you can see this is a real gamechanger.
Frida: Also if any of your listeners do buy our book and look through it they'll realize that we also ask some rhetorical questions. Our top ten signs that you're an art world token, which we really wanted to ask the question, is tokenizing women and artists of color and trans artists and LGBT artists, is tokenizing them a solution to the problem of exclusion or is it a continuation? And we also have done some recent things about the election that ask that question, without any statistics at all, basically saying do we have a democracy if all the votes are not counted? How can we celebrate the 19th amendment if all votes are not counted? So many of our works are not reliant on statistics.
Ann: Right. Well and another thing I think about your work is a sort of humor and playfulness honestly. And I'm wondering, you know, there are some different things that I hear from people when it comes to finding joy or a sense of fun in simultaneously doing protest work or doing activist work. You know, on one hand there's the it's not my revolution if I can't dance to it and on the other end there's a sense that especially if you're someone that comes from a background of more privilege if you're having fun while protesting it means you're not really risking yourself enough. I'm wondering how you think about the role of humor and fun and joy in protests.
(16:15)
Kathe: You know we're all about breaking through people's preconceived notions about everything so humor is a really great way to do that. You get into somebody's brain, you twist things around, and it's a great way to reach somebody. But I think your question is super interesting because I think the people who have been members of our group over all the different times, you know, sometimes people just are funny and you can't help but get the humor in there. And I think we just always have that. It's a good way to convert people and maybe to make some people angry because of the humor but I think protests have to be done in many, many ways and it's all fantastic. It's such a horrible time right now but an amazing time of activism and the more ways to fight for human rights for all and against racism, against sexism, the more ways you can do that the better.
Frida: I might also add that humor isn't always about fun or joy; humor can be very biting. All you have to do is listen to Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or even Hannah Gadsby to realize the pain and anger that can be expressed through parody. So I don't think that we are about joy; we are about confronting the system and sometimes the only thing you can do to your oppressor is make fun of them. It's your only power against them. And I would say that that's the nature of our protest and our work is to in a way ridicule and humiliate the system rather than to find joy in resistance. Although we do have fun.
[Ads]
(20:00)
Ann: I would love to hear your thoughts on being part of a collective because I know you say there are over 55 people who have been members of the Guerilla Girls over the years, you know, some for a very long time like the two of you; some for just a short period of time. We live in such an era of heightened individualism, you know, what are you the individual doing? What responsibility do you bear for your actions in the world? And I'm just curious about what power you find in being part of a collective and particularly a collective where you are all anonymous parts of thew hole.
Frida: I would say many of the 20th century art forms like film or music, they're rarely done by lone individuals. They're always done with a team. Theatre of course is another one. So why should the visual arts be so grounded in the expression of a single individual? If you look back in art history the ateliers of artists during the Renaissance were huge. Even though they were sort of organized around the idea of a genius when you start picking at them you realize that Michelangelo didn't chip or didn't carve all his own marble.
So I actually believe that idea of the lonely, mad genius is a kind of invention of modernism and the sad thing is artists are educated to accept that, visual artists, and we just felt we had more power if we were working together. We had a broader reach. I mean it's not easy. It gets messy. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree. Some people leave angry; some leave happy; some come back. It's complicated. But I don't think of it as being so unusual. However again getting back to the art market the art market seems to want great geniuses because that's what drives up the prices of so-called masterpieces.
Ann: What about the protest aspect of it or the resistance aspect of it? What is it like to kind of work through some of the disagreements that crop up when people who have different approaches to making change have to work together as a group and sort of settle on an action?
(22:25)
Kathe: You know we're an unusual group because the whole idea started with the idea of putting posters up on the streets of New York. So we of course do talk about the issues but we weren't formed to try to figure out what to do. We had a mission from the first meeting and we kind of got those two posters together and passed the hat around to pay for printing, put them up on the streets, and all hell broke loose.
And that fact, that beginning has really helped us over time because of course people have very different ideas about things but almost everyone in the group has always followed the paradigm that the group was born with: tell people something they didn't know before. Don't just do political art that says "This is bad" but twist an issue around and present it in a different kind of way. So I think that helped us always.
Ann: So one thing that occurs to me about your choice to appear in masks and use pseudonyms is it is a powerful way to keep the focus on the issues and on the work and on the art as you have said many times but I think it also in a negative way can be a way of not being accountable for who you are and perhaps the biases you bring to work. We're living in an era where everyone is really very interested in who are the individuals behind things and what sort of power do they bring and how are they living in accordance with the work that they're making and the statements that they're making? And I would love to hear you just talk about this idea of whether it's accountability. You are now powerful art world figures in your own right. Do you feel any obligation to kind of say "This is where we're coming from as the people behind the masks as we take these actions and make this art?"
(24:30)
Frida: Well, you know, there's a long history of anonymous free speech in our country. The federalist papers were all written by pseudonymous authors. Of course we all found out who they were. And someone could find out who we are too but it really doesn't matter. Anonymous free speech is protected and sometimes it's essential because if you speak up to the powers that be there can be retaliation.
I think that argument that we're not accountable because we're anonymous is not quite true because everyone knows where to find us. We're very visible. We're not hidden. We have a website. We're doing things all the time. And we've been attacked and criticized and it hurts just as much when you're anonymous as it does when your name is out there. Would we be anonymous if we were to start again today? I'm not sure. Things in 1985 were very different: the art world was a small place and to be honest we were all looking for a place in it and we decided to be anonymous to protect ourselves and our careers. But then we realized that it was a great strategy and it allowed us to speak for the condition of women artists and not be criticized for what we did or did not have in our personal lives. It really gave us a chance to depersonalize things. And when you're dealing with institutional racism, institutional sexism, anonymity is very helpful because if you're inside the institution then you pay a price. All you have to do is look at whistle blowers to see what happens to them. So would we be anonymous now? I'm not sure because we live in this era that values authenticity, transparency, etc.
(26:25)
Ann: I'm curious about -- you know we're in this moment where a lot of institutions including in the art world are sort of saying the right things and it made me curious about your experience going from being outside critics of galleries and museums and the market and all of that to being invited by them to show your work or being invited by them to project that criticism onto the very buildings that you're criticizing. I'm wondering if you ever worry that them kind of empowering you to air these critiques allows them to acknowledge that criticism and then kind of duck it or not really remedy it, and how do you weigh trying to keep the pressure on now that you have this different position vis-à-vis the art world?
Kathe: Well obviously yes we're invited to do interventions that upend the museum itself and we're usually invited by a particular person who wants to change things very much and wants us to come in and help do it. So yeah, when we leave who the hell knows what happens? But so many people do want to push this rock up the hill. And when museums first came calling I guess the first thing was about 15 years ago we were in the Venice Biennale and after that we started to have a lot of exhibitions and interventions and special projects in Europe. We've never had that much in the United States really but that's kind of happening now.
(28:00)
And it was a crisis of conscience, you know, are we being used? To which the answer is probably yes. But when we see our work in a museum we get tons of letters from people saying "I never knew about this before." So to critique an institution on its own morals, to critique the system on its own laws, is really an important part of our mission and our work. Museums have big audiences and they're learning a different kind of attitude toward art. They're learning the reality that they never were taught and don't see in how museums present things.
One of our most recent works is called The Guerilla Girls Code of Ethics For Art Museums and in the book you can see we made this monument and then we Photoshopped it in front of all these museums, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. It's really, really kind of hysterical. And I could just read you a couple of these.
Ann: Yes please.
Kathe: This kind of says it all about what we think, so here is the code of ethics: "If thou exhibit art mostly by white males, bought at the most expensive galleries, then donated by wealthy collectors, thou must renameth thyself The Museum of Rich People's Art. Thou shalt honor thy employees and pay all of them a living wage plus health insurance." There's a couple others. "Thou shalt not permit billionaires who sell deadly, addictive drugs, make tear gas, deny climate change, or undermine elections to art wash their reputations with huge donations and get their names on museum plazas." And this is particularly important, the last one. We love this one. "Thou shalt admit that if thy museum does not show art or hire staff as diverse as the culture thou claim to represent thou are not showing the history of art; you are merely telling the story of wealth and power."
(30:10)
Ann: Ugh. I can't wait until this pandemic is over so people can read that physically outside of museums. [Laughs]
Kathe: It's really going to be fun. We're looking forward to it.
Ann: Ugh. I want to ask about the future and whether there is a constant flow of new members cycling in and out or is this something that you envision doing in perpetuity or what?
Frida: Well yes we do have new members but we really encourage and are really threatened by all the other groups that are doing work like we're doing. Right now there's just an incredible network of art activists that are actually confronting museums. There's Change the Museum. There are groups that are representing union efforts inside the museums. So you don't really -- you know, it takes the burden off us. We're not the only group complaining about the structure of the art world. So whether we continue or not I think there is a continuum that has been started and a kind of ongoing concern among people to question the nature of the art system.
Kathe: And culture, all of culture and politics. I mean we've done a lot of stuff that's not about the art world as well.
Ann: Right, yeah.
Kathe: Who knows what will happen?
Ann: Truer words.
Kathe: Maybe we'll be ghosts. Anyone who's ever been in the group in a hundred years will be ghosts who come back to haunt the Museum of Modern Art.
Frida: Or maybe zombies.
Kathe: Or zombies. We have the zombie poster.
Ann: Oh my gosh, yes, yes.
(32:00)
Kathe: Actually it's the cover of the book. You've seen the cover of the book, Ann, right? It has a zombie, a guerilla zombie.
Ann: I love the idea that the endgame is ghosts and zombies.
Frida: You know we are working on a future project that's not in the book but it can be seen on our website and it's called The Male Graze and it really has come out of the Me Too movement and I'm Not Surprised which is the sort of art world version of that. We realized when we started to look at the number of artists who have been accused of sexual harassment that it really is a continuum in the history of art and if you start to look at the work itself it's in the work. If you look at the history of European art you see all sorts of instances of first of all women lying idly on a bed to be in a way consumed to scenes of seduction, abduction, rape, even murder. And so it's not -- you know, the idea of sexual assault is in the artwork and it's also in the stories of our culture as well. It's part of western culture and lots of things have changed so we think that in the future art should take a tack away from representing women as survivors.
Ann: Yeah, that would be great.
Frida: And objects of sexual assault.
Ann: I'm wondering if each of you have a personal favorite work in this book or something that you feel a special connection to.
Kathe: One? [Laughs]
Ann: People do pick favorites. [Laughs]
(33:45)
Frida: Well the works that I'm the most fond of are the ones that are more than a single image. You know, our Hot Flashes which was a newsletter we did in the '90s and also our books, The Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: Guerilla Girls Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes and A Bedside Companion to the History of Art where you can really dissect a topic. And that's why I'm so excited to work on The Male Graze.
Ann: Right.
Frida: Because you can really get into it.
Kathe: I'm really proud of, you know, it's so great to look at all of the stuff and see it all together to all of us who've worked on it. But I'm very proud of an ongoing campaign we've been doing about income inequality and in the book is a big picture of a billboard that we did in Oklahoma City as part of a project that Four Freedoms did a couple years ago. And it says "Dear boss, your mansions and fancy stuff cost a lot. No wonder you don't pay us a living wage." And just to continue on what Frida said another work that I really like and people seem to -- it seems to really go somewhere with people -- is called Three Ways to Write a Museum Wall Label When the Artist is a Sexual Predator. Because we've been, as she said with The Male Gaze, we've been thinking about how all these Me Too issues play out in the art world and museums are actually having meetings right now where they have to decide if it's an artist who is known for harassment or abuse or rape do we have to put that on a wall label next to the artist's work? Or should we cancel the artist? That's been done at some museums too.
(35:40)
So we showed them three ways to write it. The first is for museums afraid of alienating their billionaire trustees and collectors who donated the artist's work. The second is for museums conflicted about disclosing an artist abuse next to his art. And the third is for museums who need help from the Guerilla Girls. And we very carefully crafted the museums in denial, the museums tentatively trying to deal with things, and then of course our own analysis of it.
Ann: I love that. Thank you so much to both of you for being on the show and for this incredible body of work and resistance that you've created.
Frida: Thank you.
Kathe: Thank you Ann so much.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.