“Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?” Guerrilla Girls, 1989 © courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com
Introduction
“Guerrilla Girls” is an anonymous group of feminist female artists formed in New York City in 1985. They express opposition to the socially constructed gaze of gender and racial inequality in art, pop cultures and politics under the theme “Reinventing the “F” word: feminism!”. They aim at the liberation of women, people of colour, and minorities from oppression and restraints, and their redress. I have been working on a series of projects in collaboration with a number of artists, including the Guerrilla Girls. In this essay, I would like to introduce the intentions of this collaborative project and consider how we can face the issue of gender politics during the coronavirus crisis.
Education and contemporary art
Today’s society tends to prioritize economic rationality at the expense of ‘play’. It is difficult for an artist to work in this situation, and it is also not easy for an art school student to become a professional artist after they graduate. On the other hand, there is a rapidly spreading need for artistic elements in society, such as design thinking and art thinking in ordinary companies, or socially engaged art overseas, and relational art, in the sense of involving local people, attracting public attention, and regional vitalization in Japan. In this context, how should art relate to society and education?
After graduating from high school, I moved to the UK to study art and worked as an artist. After that, my life was unrelated to education or academia before my first steps into a Japanese art university in 2013. I was surprised to find how different the art educational environment was from the UK. Of course, this is not a matter of superiority or inferiority. It is literally about the difference in environment. My experience of the educational environment in the UK was that there was great emphasis on the concept of a work, and students considered the development of work in relation to art history; whereas in Japan, the students develop their work through individual sensibilities, and emphasis is on the technique. I had to find meaning in an education that taught only technique. For example, students can learn to draw the world mimetically from the practice of basic drawing, but I realized it was necessary to develop my programme to adapt the Japanese approach to education, by synergizing it with the art history and aesthetics taught in international contexts: to translate thinking processes into practices, not mere techniques.
History of contemporary art
Contemporary art is broadly defined by Midori Matsui as “art that originated in the conceptual art of the 1960s and has been influenced by it since the 1980s.” It is based on modernism, which sprouted around the great cities of Europe during the modern civil revolution, itself based on the embryo of the autonomy of the artist that emerged in romanticism. In modernism, art began with being “explored for colour and form” in pursuit of “newness”. Then, after the Second World War, the resistance to the mystification and authoritarianism of art, and artists themselves, and the impulse to link Futurism to fascism, led artists to turn their sensibility to the outside world. Not only did they need to strip away the ‘aura’ of ‘authority, the traditional weight of things’ and ‘one-offness’ that had previously covered art, they also needed to respond to the Futurists’ ‘aesthetic perception’ of the fascist regime by ‘politicizing art’. Art, which had been, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “the mirror of reality”, was transformed into “the hammer that shapes reality”. This was against a background of reflection on the world wars and the Holocaust i.e., on ‘enlightenment’ and ‘reason’ – and on the conflict between two post-war political ideologies: ‘liberalism’ and ‘socialism’.
The ‘liberalism’ which the Western world relied on had in mind the development of a ‘civil society’ which had been formed around the ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ won in the modern civil revolution. On the other hand, Marxism, the ideology of the “socialist” camp, led by the Soviet Union, held that civil-social “freedom” was an ideological apparatus to conceal economic exploitation and inequality. For artists in “liberal” countries, the question of how to respond to this “revolution”, which aimed to “liberate” them in the true sense of the word has become a major issue in the post-war period. As a result, the value of art tends to shift from a focus on the individual work itself, to a focus on the overall impact of artistic activity as it triggers a new wave of influence. Consequently, since the advent of conceptual art, contemporary art has incorporated a variety of Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines into its art.
My series of collaborative projects with artists have focused on artists in this vein, albeit from a conceptual art perspective. This is because, by capturing the image of contemporary society that their work illuminates, they reveal that issues that at first glance seem to be developing globally in a world separate from our own are in fact universal and connected to our own daily lives and familiar problems. Through art the conventional worldview is shattered and a different side is revealed to us. This kind of art avoids being incorporated by capital and the economy and uses art to revive and represent figures and voices buried in history and society. By shedding light on society from different angles and shaking us up, it raises new questions which in turn motivate us to learn. This was the intention behind the project, and the Guerrilla Girls, with whom we collaborated, are part of this process.
What is this artist collective, who are individually named after some of the greatest female artists of all time masked as a gorilla, that began as a guerrilla movement using art in the streets? Relying on “Art and Feminism” by the curator Helena Reckitt and “Art Activism” by the art historian Megumi Kitahara, I would like to give an overview of these artists and their activities.
Founding of the Guerrilla Girls
In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York organized an exhibition called “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture”, which claimed to show all the important art of the time. Of the 169 artists exhibited there, 13 were women and none were black, even though women and black artists were just as present and active as white male artists at the time. This led to the founding of the Guerrilla Girls, who made protest posters and put them up in the streets of New York around the museum to raise objections.
As Helena Reckitt has claimed, these actions were in the context of the liberation movements based on pluralistic differences such as women, race and sexuality, which were inspired by “the civil rights and anti-war movements in the United States, the student revolts in Europe, and the intellectual and aesthetic activities that came to be known as post-structuralism and postmodernism” that emerged in the early 1960s, and then spilled over into the art world. By the time the Guerrilla Girls were formed in the 1980s, the activities of women artists were already well established, following the Woman’s House exhibition in 1972, in which many of the leading artists of feminist art participated, and the establishment of the women’s art cooperative AIR in the same year. Also, when the Guerrilla Girls emerged in the 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism and conservatism led to criticism of the dominance of white women in academic feminist theory. In other words, an “intersectionality” was proposed which sought solidarity in order to overcome racial problems within the movement and the negative effects of the “principles” opposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, such as heterosexism and classism. In this environment, the Guerrilla Girls wanted to use art to drive a wedge between the machoism, essentialism and dichotomous values of modern society and the art world that they strike at.
The work of the Guerrilla Girls and its transformation
In the early years of the group’s founding, up until 1989, their work was often visually minimal, using only text and statistical figures, perhaps influenced by conceptual art and minimalism in the US at the time, and by the fact that many of the white male artists they criticised were visual artists. However, in the 1990s, beginning with the 1989 work ” Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, works with a slightly more visual impact began to appear, albeit mostly in monotone. At the same time, the work, which until then had been occupied by issues of gender inequality in the art world, began to take up the issues of poverty, inequality and the environment.
Furthermore, in the 2000s, the imagery used in the work was subjected to techniques such as “Détournement” used by the Situationists and ‘Subvertising’, a term coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery. It served to renew the discourse of criticism of the art system, which they had repeatedly and routinely used, by transforming and reappropriating the images of hype that flooded the mass media. Their catchy, visually impactful work has a compelling message that can appeal to those who tend to shy away from contemporary art. Indeed, one non-arts student told me that she was interested in the work from a visual point of view. Let me now consider what meanings we can find in the Guerrilla Girls’ work in the context of the coronavirus crisis, which has normalized the ‘state of exception’.
What the Corona disaster reveals / about Art
In “Guerrilla Girls Explain the Concept of Natural Law”, one of the works shown in the exhibition, they poignantly and ironically presage a society in which the weak are devalued by the coronavirus crisis, saying that “The people who have the most money are entitled to the best health care” and “Anyone who is unemployed or homeless, deserves it”. Historically, disasters have frequently highlighted the inequalities inherent in society. In the current coronavirus crisis, inequalities exposed by indicators such as age, gender, race and income are masked by being reduced to a monotonous number of people infected, whilst vaccination is dictated by economic dynamics. In this context, it was an important part of the collaboration to address through art the need for a space to examine the position of women in the coronavirus crisis.
On 19 November 2020, during the Guerrilla Girls exhibition, the Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office announced, “An emergency proposal of the study group on the impact and task of the coronavirus crisis on women.” According to the report, “The number of people in employment, particularly women in part time work, fell by around 700,000 month-on-month (almost twice as many as men) in April 2020.The unemployed population of women increased (more than double that of men). There are concerns about the increase and seriousness of domestic violence and sexual violence, as well as an increase in unexpected pregnancies. The number of suicides among women in October was 851 according to preliminary figures, an increase of 80% compared to the same month last year.
In addition, “the closure of schools under a declared state of emergency has a significant negative impact on women, particularly in terms of living and working conditions” and “We need to pay attention to the increased burden of housework and childcare on women, as well as taking into account the situation of essential workers for whom telework is difficult due to limited access to the internet and computers.” The coronavirus crisis has thus exposed the enormous and long-lasting impact of the disease on vulnerable groups such as women (especially foreign workers).
Moreover, COVID19 highlights the message of the Guerrilla Girls by illuminating previous policies and an historical focus on women that we have neglected. The “Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace” law for the promotion of “A Society where women shine” promulgated under the Shinzo Abe administration on 4 September 2015 and enforced on the same day, has been announced as resulting in the highest ever number of women in the workforce. However, Takashi Horie (2017) of Tokyo Metropolitan University points out the following issues that:
“many commentators point to the bipolarization of women who can be active or not. The increase in female employment under the Abe administration has been mainly part time workers. The number of women in employment increased by nearly two million between the early days of the government in January 2013 and September 2016. But while the number of full-time workers rose by 660,000, the number of part-time workers nearly doubled to 1.25 million.”
The government statistics are far from the truth, then. This was because the government focused on economic aspects and appropriated women in the market as cheap workers. They did not consider the underlying factors of the gender gap and the need to respect women’s human rights. What we can see when we trace these factors back is the fixed gender wage gap so far. Japan’s Gender Gap Index (GGI) is 121st in the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 published by the World Economic Forum. In other words, COVID 19 exposes the distortion of “A Society where women shine” and how market fundamentalism has neglected to improve the gender wedge gap. The Guerrilla Girls satirize this in the work above: ” Women are paid less in the workplace because they have no business being there”. This stereotypical discourse that seeks to maintain patriarchy suggests that a double structure of discrimination against women is masked. One is that the capitalist profit principle of unpaid household work by women that supports the work of men and thus reduces overall wages continues to be reproduced. The other structure is the supposed reduction in men’s wages due to “women’s participation in society”, which must be denied from the side of women who are subsumed in domesticity. Karl Marx, the German philosopher, pointed this out more than 100 years ago.
Conclusion
As we have seen, the Guerrilla Girls’ discourse and activism in promotion of diversity challenges us to rethink the dynamics at the heart of democracy when economic growth has already stalled, and nationalism, inequality, and racial discrimination has been laid bare and accelerated by the COVID 19. Humans are weak, powerless, and small in the face of unprecedented disaster. That the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, two of the world’s most powerful military forces, were infected by COVID 19 says a great deal.
Essential workers continue to work, and some elderly people voluntarily waive their ventilators for the younger patients at this critical time of the pandemic. As Gramsci claimed, we all have the potential to change from being isolated individuals to being actively involved in social relations and commit to caring for others. Artists like the Guerrilla Girls have been presenting people with the art of creating from everyday life the potential to transform human relationships. In other words, they have used art to create an opportunity for reflection on the society where we belong to show possibilities to care for others, and how universal social justice can be achieved through our actions.
Here is a glimpse of one of the ideals that the universal human activity of art aims for.
It is the empathy that drives the creative thought and action that underpins art with such power; artists such as these inspire us.
Reference
Matsui, M., Art: After the end of Art, Asahi press, 2002.
Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,1935.
Kitahara, M., Art Activism, Impact press, 1999.
Rakkit, H., Art and Feminism, Phaidon Press, 2005.
Horie,T., No 700, Journal of Ohara Institute for Social Research , 2017.
Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, Gender Equality, 2020.
Marx, K., Capital Vol.2: A Critique of Political Economy, 1885.
Gramsci, A., The Prison Notebooks, between 1929 and 1935.
Kounosuke Kawakami was born in Yamanasahi in 1979, he is an artist, researcher, curator, and currently lecturer at the Kurashiki University of Science and The Arts. Kawakami holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, His curatorial approach focuses on: artist’s and collectives’ practices; re-interpreting historical contexts into the contemporary via the exhibition format; and looking at artists who question current political and social conditions and perceptions through art. In particular, his research on Gekijo no Sanka, the first avant-garde art movement in Japan of the 1920s, along with Japanese proletarian art movements from the 1920s to ’30s, examine how overlooked pre-war art has relevance today. Exhibitions include: Reinventing the ‘F’ Word – Feminism!, 2020; Guerrilla Girls, Solar: A Meltdown, 2020; Ho Rui An, Russian Cosmism: Trilogy, 2019; Anton Vidokle, Radical Democracy, 2016; Thomas Hirschhorn, Santiago Sierra. The Third Entity, 2015; with Mikhail Karikis, Héctor Zamora, Taka Atsugi, Toki Okamoto.