Originally published in the Blaffer Newsline [Blaffer Museum magazine, Houston, TX, 2005]
As young college students in the 1980s, my friends and I used our Sharpie permanent markers to graffiti sexist advertisements in the New York City subway. We inscribed confrontational questions to the male gaze that was being wooed by the ever-burgeoning culture industry. No too much later, in the mid-1980s, bold black and white wheat-pasted posters with stark facts and pointed questions began to appear on the streets of SoHo in New York City:
“WHEN RACISM & SEXISM ARE NO LONGER FASHIONABLE, WHAT WILL YOUR ART COLLECTION BE WORTH? (1989)
Long before the term “culture jamming” became common parlance among feminist activists, the Guerilla Girls’ (GG) “subvertising” ads began appearing in the streets. As they did, a feminist fairy tale came to life for me and my ad-busting compatriots. Taking back the public sphere, the GG turned the visual language of the commercial world against an increasingly corporatized art world. Interrupting the comfortable miasma of the Cristal drinking, Reagan-era, auction-house inflated 1980s art market, these mistresses of the graphic grenade hijacked advertising fonts and billboards to launch a shock-attack at NYC’s galleries and museums.
Started in 1985 by a diverse group of women artists in response to a “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art that only included 13 women of 169 artists and was made up entirely of artists that were white and either from Europe or the US, the GG donned gorilla masks in public (a pun on their freedom fighter guerilla theater tactics), assumed the names of women artists from the past, checked their facts, and took to the streets as feminist masked avengers. Their canvas was literally the power structure of the art world itself. Using a “quick facts” approach to feminist bookkeeping, they tallied accounts payable by shining a spotlight on the structural injustices and institutional practices of the art world. They would be the self-appointed “conscience of the art world.”
The GG were flipping primitivism and ideas of female beauty on their head, arguing for the intelligence and wit of the Other, like a back-to-the-future planet of the feminist apes. Envisioning a feminist future, the GG dislodged the art scene from an entrenched complacency where curators and collectors were content to reproduce the same old (white) bad boys art world canon. And they served up their feminist conscience with a sense of humor.
The joy of the GG’s work is their low-tech, high impact use of graphics and materials, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools wielded with all the skill and savvy of the trained artist. And that is the point: the GG perfected a set of tools by fusing Conceptual Art and graphic design that all of us could take up and wield with political and aesthetic finesse. Troubling the idea of high and low, these highly skilled artists, many of whom were systematically excluded from the hallowed halls of the museum, transformed pedestrian venues such as the billboard and the telephone pole into art venues.
The GG coincide with the emergence of other graphic activists like Gran Fury of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and anticipate the pull-no-punches, DIY, independent media activism of Riot Grrrls and the so-called third wave. We see their continuing influence as we watch new feminist tools of collective direct action and aesthetic template-sharing circulate in a variety of feminist visual culture activisms from the Radical Cheerleaders to Code Pink. The power of such templates is that they can be redeployed in dramatically different circumstances, where sexist oppression, patriarchy, and racism are hard at work. They invite a bevy of imitators in self-styled feminist resistance tooled to local needs. Female fandom promises to take up the activist torch in myriad and unpredictable ways.
My students in the Fall 2005 Introduction to Women’s Studies at University of Houston asked whether the GG’s ubiquitous gorilla masks were a sign of shame—Are they failing to stand up for what they believe? Are they hiding? No, what the GG have harnessed is the strategic power of the closet—the power of the anonymous watchdog. Their anonymity is a counter-capitalist move that rejects the art world’s obsession with the cult of personality. It is also a necessary means of protection for these whistleblowers of the art world. And finally, the veil of anonymity allows for the promise of exponential growth. The GG enact a feminist surveillance, creating a Foucauldian panopticon that can return the male gaze and claim a position of power. Anyone and everyone might be a Guerilla Girl! And we are watching.
Clearly the art-world protests of the GG in the 1980s make a show like Girls Night Out possible. It is interesting that as the GG publish their latest book, BITCHES, BIMBOS, AND BALLBREAKERS: The Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes (Penguin 2003), the catalogue for Girls Night Out presents that show as a post-ironic liberal humanism that transcends any need to critique stereotypes. Such juxtapositions place the GG as the angry foremothers whose political critiques are rendered obsolete by the emergence of post-feminist “girl” artists. Following feminist critic Madelyn Detloff’s analysis of feminist generational conflict, this is a war figured as a perverse dialectic where the angry mother’s political punch is muffled by the post-feminist contempt of the daughter, inciting a cycle of annihilating violence required for the younger generation to assert its’ own needs without paying the price of old wounds. Instead, I suggest, that we recognize the possibility for generous interplay between these two entities as we forge feminist futures. As products of their differing historical moments, both seek transformations in an art world that increasingly uses tokenism and double-speak about diversity to both invest, and more profoundly to divest, from a commitment to de-segregating the old boy’s club of the art elite.
With their new book on female stereotypes, which begins with a letter from a twelve-year-old fan about how female power is portrayed as evil and ugly in fairy tales, the GG enter the space of the bad girl as good consumer. Rather than simply capitalizing on the new girl market, the GG are marketing feminist content and a feminist tool kit to young women, challenging them to be savvy deconstructers of the culture industry that is increasingly targeting girls as consumers. Along with exemplars like Bitch and Lip magazine, the GG infuse girl culture with the original bite of DIY grrrl culture, before it can be thoroughly assimilated by market forces. And perhaps most thankfully the GG are making the F word cool again.
When the GG come to UH, they will hold a workshop sharing their knowledge and expertise on not only how to be a savvy consumer, but on how to become a cultural producer.
The challenge is after they leave whether there will be any Guerilla Girls left in Houston…
Original author note: Jeanne Scheper is a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies at the University of Houston.
*Additional hyperlinks added to this version.
jeanne scheper, phd 