Laugh, Cry, Fight...

While researching for this interview, I came across a quote by Yayoi Kusama, “Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the axe of art.” So simply put, this statement perfectly sums up for me the immense power that art holds, its mind opening and altering capabilities. It struck me that this is what the Guerrilla Girls collective have been doing for almost 40 years, using the axe of art their way. With a playful, yet unapologetically direct fierceness, Guerrilla Girls utilize unforgettably bold advertising-style imagery, statistics, and humor, to illuminate not just the discrimination and injustice in the art world itself, but in the wider world. At the time of this interview, the election in the US is yet to take place and much of the world is in conflict. It's a time when speaking truth to power, and seeking facts in the face of misinformation, is as vital as ever. 

 

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of activist artists, who hide their real identities by using the names of late, great women artists. It was an honor to speak with two of the founders, Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, on the run-up to their exhibition in Los Angeles at BEYOND THE STREETS.

Käthe Kollwitz: That's a great question. Our work is always about trying to tell people something they didn't know before, in the hope of changing their minds. We don't do political art that just says, “this is bad.” We try to twist it, put it in a new way with crazy visuals, headlines, and always, almost always, statistics. There's no lack of what we need to do today.

Frida Kahlo: When we started, we were young, and we had a very idealistic idea of what it was to be an artist. And we just thought if we were good artists and true to ourselves, that we would somehow make a way in the world. We had a Panglossian view of the art world, we really didn't know what we were dealing with. And every time we asked a different question, we turned another corner, and we saw some other part of the system that needed to be called out or critiqued. 

 

Frida: There was a time when you had to go to a library, look at a database, we looked through microfiche. It was really hard to get information about museums in 1985, what their acquisitions were, who was on their board. We once had someone working with us who was an intern at The Whitney and one day she walked out with a printout about all the trustees of the museum, and that was really eye opening. The amount of money they gave to the museum, what their corporate connections were, it was mind boggling. It’s easier to do that now because museums have websites and, not that they're transparent, but you get an idea of who's on their board, and then you can do a little Google search and find out what that person does. Of course, you have to double check everything you find on the internet, but at least you have a quicker in.

Käthe: Well, as you know, we started out as street artists, and it's very gratifying for us to be in so many of these street art shows with all those great graffiti and street artists, that's where we belong. Our whole idea was to do street posters. We brought the first poster to the first meeting, and I remember feeling, no one's going to like this, it's so different, but everyone loved it. We passed the hat around to pay for printing and we put it up a few weeks later, the rest is history.

 

Frida: We would go out on a Friday night late and put up the posters and then try to get a little bit of sleep, and the next day we’d go and hang out around the posters, just to see what people's reactions were. That was a lot of fun. It was also very useful to see the reaction to what we were doing, we got lots of new ideas. It was fun to go to openings and museum exhibitions and parties, and bring up the topic of the Guerrilla Girls, and hear what people said without knowing who you were. It was a great form of espionage.

 

Käthe: We decided to be anonymous because we were worried that this activism would cause people not to show our work. But, very quickly, we understood that this is what makes us a success, the mystery attracted people. We were fierce and mostly you can be a lot fiercer when you're anonymous than when you're yourself. Once it got going, people were really excited about it, it was like a breath of fresh air. The system sucked and people felt they couldn't do anything about it, and so they didn't, but we figured out a new way to do something about it that was unignorable. The Guerrilla Girls themselves are bigger than any of us, it's like an artist in its own right, who does its own thing, always trying to push the envelope. And it really doesn't matter who the people are. I feel that it's an honor and an incredible life to be part of the Guerrilla Girls. There's always so much to do, I just love being able to do this work.

Frida: Well, we were embraced almost immediately by educational institutions, by schools, they really kept us alive by inviting us to give talks, workshops, and artist visits. So we had institutional support from the very, very beginning, but the museum support came a lot later.

Käthe: When the museums started calling in 2005, we had to think about it because then we would be in the belly of the beast. What we decided was it was the best place possible to criticize art museums, the art system and how artists are treated, the discrimination, the racism. So we decided to go for it. 

Frida: There's one part of the art world equation that we skipped, and that is the art market and the world of art collectors. We went from being appreciated by educational institutions and by artists themselves, to jumping directly to museums, bypassing the whole gallery world. I think it's interesting to think about why that might have happened: what is it about our work that never really appealed to the world of art collectors, before museums recognized it as being significant and part of history? 

Käthe: Well, the fact that it costs $35 for a poster has something to do with it!

Frida: You mean art collectors want to spend a lot of money on something? 

 

Käthe: Absolutely. Bragging rights. 

 

Frida: We're proud of our merchandise because we really think of it as our work too, not just promotion of us. When someone wears a T-shirt with the advantages of being a woman artist, that's like wearing the art itself. It's a way of being in millions of places at one time rather than sitting over the sofa of one super rich art collector.

Käthe: Sometimes it comes from something going on that we just feel we have to attempt to find an effective way to address. Sometimes people just ask us. For instance, we've done a lot of work at museums criticizing the museums themselves, and in those cases, the museums have actually asked us to do it. They open the files and information to us; some of it, not all of it. 

 

Frida: We can't deal with everything, even though we have opinions about broader, larger political issues. We have an audience that we know we can influence and so we tend to stick with that. Although, we have done several projects, national and international, about the election and the past election. 

 

Käthe: For decades, we've been working on issues around abortion, we’ve made work about the Supreme Court, human rights, civil rights, homelessness, war… We're best known for our art examination work, but we've taken on so many other issues. I wish we could have taken on more, but when we find a way into an issue that we know might be able to convince people, we just go for it.

 

Käthe: Without that poster, we wouldn't be doing this interview. That is the one. Someone else would've done a poster saying, “There aren't enough women in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” but we did something totally different. If you spend time reading it, you won't forget. You could never walk into a gallery or a museum again without thinking about what's on the walls and why. 

Frida: Something else that would make our work take on a larger importance in the world of politics is that the art world is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with our late capitalist colonialist society. Everything that's wrong with an art museum you can see is wrong in society at large.

 

Käthe: There’s something else, too, which we really can't forget. It’s totally true, the system sucks, but what's also true is that artists are fantastic. You cannot stop them from making their work, people are creating game changing work and spending their whole life doing it. And it's not just true in art, it's true in other creative fields, too. And without that, we wouldn't have a culture. So, part of our work has always been to make it clear that you can't let institutions define what our culture is.

Käthe: It’s very important in any critique of the system to present facts that can really change people’s minds. Our little secret is we've never been a huge group at any one time, because whoever's in our group has to function basically as an artist, and that's really hard if you have lots of people, so we've always been more like a cell at any one time. I advise other people to get a bunch of friends together and see what you come up with to change something you want to change, and then go from there.

Frida: I would just say, don't ask for permission and don't apologize. I think that applies to artists doing their own personal work too. Dealing with rejection is not easy, but you have to believe in yourself to get past it. There's some criticism that's useful and some criticism that's not useful, it's a very difficult process of deciding which is helpful and which is not. 

 

When we first started, women artists and artists of color were getting rejected right and left by the art world establishment and that was because of bias. We had to encourage women artists and artists of color not to take it personally because it was a problem of institutional bias. Plus, the world of galleries, museums and the art market isn’t always right, they've been wrong a lot in history. So, artists must believe in themselves and believe in the work that they're doing and just keep going. It’s also a western tradition, artists have always been mild rebels, it's part of our culture.