Female activists known as "Guerrilla Girls" use humor, outrageous imagery, and gorilla masks to reveal corruption in politics as well as ethnic and gender prejudice in popular culture. By exposing the underreported and underrepresented instances of discrimination in society, the group of females challenges the tenets of the dominant story.
In 1985, the Guerilla Girls organization got its start. This year, angered by the underrepresentation of women in the show "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" at the Museum of Modern Art, where only 13 women out of 169 featured artists, an anonymous group of seven radical feminist artists and activists formed Guerrilla girls and took to the street to put art world’s gender inequality to shame. Moved by this event, Guerrilla girls soon started to work collectively to produce artwork to fight sexism. They adopted new rhetorical strategies, specifically mimicry, artwork re-production, and strategic juxtaposition.The group’s name is a clear example of their use of rhetorical strategiesWhile the word ‘girl’ is often associated with immaturity, Guerrilla girls decided to distinct this word from its connotation and reclaimed it so it cannot be used against them. Anonymity was another effective strategy Guerrilla girls used to “keep the focus on the issues rather than their personalities.”Therefore, they concealed their true identities and adopted pseudonyms of some famous deceased artists, such as Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz“ to revive dead artist women in art history (Stein, Gertrude). Their idea of wearing gorilla mask was inspired by a Guerrilla girl's fortuitous misspelling of "guerrilla." Their using of a new image an invention of their language to appeal to young feminists helped reinforcing effective moods of communication of the Guerrilla Girls.
The Artwork: Do women have to be naked to get Into the Met.Musem?
This artwork was originally designed as the billboard for the New York Public Art Fund in attempt to appeal to a general audience. However, the Public Art Fund rejected the design and considered it tobe not clear enough. In response to that, Guerrilla girl rented advertising space on New York buses “until the bus company canceled our lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres' famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand."Ironically, bus company was bothered by the phallic-like fan’s handle but not with the appearance of the naked woman.
Mimicking what is considered feminine in the art world and Juxtaposition of the eroticized nude female, and the large, snarling gorilla head are two smart tactics Guerilla girls employ in this poster (Demo). They use the image of Ingres’ Odalisque, one of the most famous nudes in the art history and transforms it to an aggressive looking gorilla that seems to roar out the title question. Underneath the title, Guerilla girls provide a thought-provoking fact about women representation in the art world.They want to shed light on the long history of the female nude in Western art as a subjugating theme, with a man's perspective or the ‘male gaze' is the prevailing viewpoint in art. By covering the face of the nude female with a large aggressive gorilla head, “these artist-activists are quite pointedly refusing to look back at the spectator” (Sturken and Cartwright 123). This recreation of the female figure successfully transforms her passivity to an action of rejecting being a subject of exoticism. Guerilla girls state humorously that the female nude now owns the complete control by modifying the fan's handle to resemble a phallus. In addition to that, they use highly saturated hues represented in the yellow background and pink text to grab a viewer’s attention.
Conclusion
The Guerrilla Girls movement can be said to be successful in reinventing the “F” word in Feminism and making women more respected in the society. It is worth appreciating that the group has managed to influence feminism using posters, books, actions, videos, and stickers.
Bibliography
Chadwick, W. and Girls, G., 1995. Confessions of the guerrilla girls.
Chave, Anna C. 2011. The Guerrilla Girls' Reckoning. Art Journal 70 (2): 102-11.http://0- www.jstor.org.library.scad.edu/stable/41430728
Demo, Anne Teresa. "The Guerrilla Girls' comic politics of subversion." Women's Studies in Communication 23, no. 2 (Spring2000 2000): 133-156. Humanities Source, EBSCOhost (accessed October 20, 2017).
Stein, Gertrude. 2011. Guerrilla Girls and Guerrilla Girls BroadBand: Inside story. Art Journal 70 (2): 88-101.http://0-www.jstor.org.library.scad.edu/stable/41430727
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. Oxford; New York; Oxford University Press.
