The Weekly Volcano, May 1, 2014
The biting, satirical, outrageous feminist art group
Guerilla Girls will present a live performance sponsored by Tacoma Art Museum and
University of Washington Tacoma. The event is called Guerilla Girls: Not
Ready to Make Nice. What they will
do is anybody’s guess, but rest assured it will be provocative, entertaining
and educational. It happens Saturday, May 10 at Phillips Hall, UW Tacoma.
Plastering New York in the mid to late 1980s
with provocative posters, billboards and banners and putting on in-your-face
performance art pieces while wearing gorilla masks, the Guerilla Girls stunned
the New York art world by skewering the establishment with outrageously
humorous presentations of undeniable facts — a typical example being a poster
plastered all over town with a picture of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ famous
nude “Grande Odalisque” wearing a gorilla head and holding a phallic feather
duster and with the headline “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get in the Met.
Museum?” and in smaller type, “Less than 5% of the artists in the modern art
section are women but 85% of the nudes are female.”
Another famous poster is the one listing the
advantages of being a woman artist, which include, among others, “Having an
escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs, not being stuck in a
tenured teaching position, seeing your ideas live in the work of others,” and
finally “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing gorilla suit.”
Protecting their identities with the masks, the
Guerilla Girls use the names of deceased female artists. One of the girls going
by the name Georgia O'Keeffe said, “We wanted to play with the fear of
guerrilla warfare, to make people afraid of who we might be and where we would
strike next. Besides, ‘guerrilla’ sounds so good with ‘girl.’”
They
are known for wearing short skirts, high heels and fishnet stockings in
addition to the gorilla masks. One of the girls using the name Emily Carr said
they wear those clothes with a gorilla mask in order to confound “the
stereotype of female sexiness.”
The Guerilla Girls’ website describes their
philosophy on activist art: “We try to be
different from the kind of political art that is angry and points to something
and says ‘This is bad.’ That's preaching to the converted. We want to be
subversive, to transform our audience, to confront them with some disarming
statements, backed up by facts —and great visuals — and hopefully convert them.
We carefully craft everything we do. We try to twist an issue around and
present it in a way that hasn't been seen before.”
In Gloria Steinem’s words, “If I had to name a group that symbolized the best of
feminism in this country, I would say, 'The Guerrilla Girls.' Smart, radical,
funny, creative, uncompromising, and (I assume) diverse under those inspired
gorilla masks, they force us to rethink everything.”
Guerilla Girls will
be selling merchandise at the event. They’ll have a selection of books and
posters outside the auditorium.
Tacoma Art Museum anticipates a sold-out show and recommends
purchasing tickets in advance. Tickets will be sold at the door only if the
event has not sold out. Cost: $20 ($15 for Tacoma Art
Museum members, students, senior, and military).
The show starts at 1 p.m. at Phillips Hall at University of Washington Tacoma.
No comments:
Post a Comment