D6

Elsie Hambrook

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Speak Up

"Women of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our stereotype."

This -- edited -- rallying call is from The Guerrilla Girls, a group of internationally recognized female artists having their first gallery exhibition in Atlantic Canada, at the Acadia University Art Gallery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

The Guerrilla Girls formed in the mid-80s in New York City because of their disgust with the sexist and racist ways of the art world. Ever since, as their motto says, they've been "Fighting discrimination with facts, humour and fake fur!"

These are women who know how to have fun while making their point.

They were initially provoked to organize when the Museum of Modern Art's international retrospective of art turned out to be 92 per cent male and 100 per cent white. Overnight, they papered parts of New York with posters that named names and gave statistics. They got the attention of the entire world. One of their most famous later posters shows a classic nude with the saying, "Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum?"

They operate as masked avengers, wearing gorilla masks and using the names of deceased female artists, to protect their own careers from potential backlash and to keep the focus on the issue, not the individual members.

Armed with their talent and masks, the Guerrilla Girls have taken on sexism and racism in the Oscars -- with an anatomically correct Oscar -- the stereotypes applied to women and what is left out of art 'history.'

They've branched out to general political commentary with cards that are meant to be "weapons of mass instruction," such as "The world needs an Estrogen Bomb. You drop it on an area of violent conflict, men throw down their guns . . . apologize . . . start to clean the mess." They got women to send George W. Bush leftover estrogen pills.

Another poster that remains famous lists the advantages of being a woman artist, including not being stuck in a tenured teaching position; seeing your ideas live on in the work of others; being included in revised versions of art history; and being reassured that whatever kind of art you make, it will be labeled feminine.

Recently, the Guerrilla Girls partnered with the Washington Post newspaper to create a full-page piece on art and women: they did a tabloid page with a screaming headline "Thousands of Women Locked in Basements of D.C. Museums!" and showing the low number of art by women in public museums -- and most of it in storage.

They were invited to design a campaign about the situation in Ireland for female artists. Their culturally sensitive message -- "I'm not a feminist but, if I was, this is what I would complain about" -- detailed the low percentage of art by females in Irish museums despite the fact that half of major art prizes go to female artists in Ireland.

Nowadays, the work of The Guerilla Girls hangs in museums and on billboards around the world, and the 'Girls' give performances in packed-auditoriums.

Almost 500 were in attendance at their recent performance for the Acadia Art Gallery, to listen to two founding members of Guerrilla Girls discuss their current projects. On tokenism: instead of showcasing the diversity of artists of colour, the art world showcases the same artists of colour over and over. "Is tokenism a solution to the problem of exclusion or is it an extension to the problem of exclusion?" Or, as their poster says, If February is Black History Month and March is Women's Month, what happens the rest of the year?

One of the Guerrilla Girls' goals is to reinvent the women's movement's image, "People believe in feminist causes, but won't call themselves feminists. The term has been demonized . . . Girls fear it will make them unattractive, older women fear that it will affect their careers."

But, the Guerrilla Girls stressed, "change doesn't just happen, you have to fight for it."

An upcoming book by Guerrilla Girls will be on "The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria" about one of those "women's illnesses" that used to be diagnosed. The Guerrilla Girls noted that the end of hysteria as a recognized illness coincided with the release of Simone de Beauvoir's influential book, The Second Sex, and quipped, "Maybe feminism was the cure for hysteria!" One of their shows with which they tour the world, titled Feminists Are Funny, is a "hysterical and historical" . . . "romp through the works of some of the most prominent and amusing women of the 20th century."

Using theatre and humour to get a message across is an effective method too rarely used by local groups. One exception that comes to mind is the play "We don't work for peanuts" by the Moncton Sable theatre group and New Brunswick's Coalition for Pay Equity.

When an audience member in Wolfville enquired how people join their collective, the Guerilla Girls explained that they are not open to membership and people should "invent their own way of being an activist, artist, feminist." And on men joining their collective, they've been quoted as saying "We'd love to be inclusive, but it's not easy to find men willing to work without getting paid or getting credit for it."

We're glad these women are willing to do it.

* Elsie Hambrook is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Her column on women's issues appears in the Times & Transcript every Thursday. She may be reached via e-mail at acswcccf@gnb.ca