Cases for Political Art | The Art Assignment

The Guerilla Girls Guide to Behaving Badly

  ​A group called 'Guerilla Girls' uses the 'Guerilla' tactic, a tactic adopted by small and powerless resistance forces against large-scale regular forces, to attract the attention of the media and the public to resist the power of the Museum of Modern Art. Leading a movement that constantly complains.

  In this way, Guerrilla Girls, who started to criticize the male-centered power structure in the art world while hiding their identity, have been exposed to the male-centered view involved in the selection process of artists in art galleries and galleries around the world for over 30 years, starting with New York, USA.

​  A representative example is a poster borrowing the nude painting “Grande Odalisque” (1814), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a master of neoclassicism in France in the 19th century. This poster, which puts the gorilla mask used by Guerrilla Girls on the model's face, points out the prejudice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another representative art museum in New York. ‘Only 5% of the artists featured in the contemporary art section (of this museum) are women, and 85% of the nude figures featured in that section are women. (After all) Does a woman have to take her clothes off to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art?’

A poster of Guerrilla Girls (1989) pointing out that 85% of the nude figures are women, although 5% of the artists introduced to the museum are women.

  ​This is because the core of the problem was intuitively shown with the shocking numbers of 5% and 85% without a lengthy explanation to point out the problem of the gender-centered view. And the core of the problem is the discriminatory prejudice deeply entrenched in human history that “women are the object of observation, not the subject of creation.”

  ​Guerrilla Girls invites readers to ‘let’s join us’ in the epilogue. “Tell us how the galleries and art galleries where you live behave. Write letters, make posters, let's make trouble!” Readers who want to connect with the guerrilla girls who claim to be the 'conscience of the art world' can contact [email protected] (www.guerrillagirls.com).