Guerrilla Girls

Tate Website Article about the Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. To remain anonymous, member don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists. According to GG1 identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities.

Many feminist artists in the 1970’s dared to imagine that female artists could produce authentically and radically different art, undoing the prevailing visual paradigm. Shaped by the 1970’s women’s movement, the Guerrilla Girls resolved to devise new strategies. Most noticeably, they realized that 1970s-era tools such as pickets and marches proved ineffective.

Throughout their existence, the Guerrilla Girls have gained the most attention for their bold protest art. Their projects (mostly posters at first) express observations, concerns, and ideals regarding numerous social topics. Their art has always been fact-driven and informed by the group’s unique approach to data collection.

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The Guerrilla Girls are drawing attention to and trying to rid of sexism as well as racism, I can relate what the Guerrilla girls do and their message to my work by looking at the links that I am aiming to show the changes or the no changes in the way women are portrayed and put forward in some of the era’s where the male gaze was very prominent.

I can also relate the Guerrilla Girls to the ideas of Cindy Sherman as her photography aims to force the audience to reconsider common stereotypes and cultural assumptions, among the latter political sarire, caricature, the graphic novel, pulp fiction, stand-up comedy (some of her characters are indeed uncomfortably “funny”).

Both the Guerrilla Girls and Cindy Sherman show that they are against the objectification of women and the idea of the male gaze. I feel I can gain inspiration and ideas from them as I look to move the project forward and look more closely at the time periods I am recreating the adverts from to understand where women stood at that time to then reflect on how they are being presented in those ads.

Cindy Sherman

Manet’s Olympia and it’s Impact

One of the figures who Inaugurated modernism to the history of the art is the renowned French Painter Édouard Manet. As one of his most celebrated paintings Olympia shook the society and made a huge impact on the upcoming generations of artists. The highly controversial composition was painted in 1853 and exposed to the public 2 years later. It represents a nude woman in a leisure pose with a servant bringing flowers. The daring look of a shameless woman caused quite a stir and the public considered the painting indecent since it displayed a sex worker in her boudoir. In relation with that is the fact that the very name Olympia was associated with sex workers in 1860’s Paris.

Manet’s Olympia has been used during the 1970’s as an important reference in the context of the male gaze proposed by the feminist movement. Especially the Black feminists argued that Manet did not include the figure of the maid for the artistic convention, but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty.

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