Guerilla girls

ARTWALK

You're bound to have seen their work, flashy posters with straightforward messages: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 3 per cent of the artists in the Modern section are women, but over 83 per cent of the nudes are female."

These are the guerilla girls, America's best known public monitors of women's spaces in mainstream art. No one really knows who these women are, (though by their own admission, they are only women) but you see them every now and then.

In their gorilla masks, and with pseudonyms adopted from dead women artists, these women in black are something of a witty Greenpeace of the American art world.

Last week, I attended a discussion with guerilla girls Frida and Kathe; them offering a skit and a power point, and the audiences supporting them with laughter and applause.

Although they spoke of the absence of women, the agenda had clearly broadened to include men of colour, corruption in the arts and even a hint of American politics.

"Drop an estrogen bomb," they laconically suggested as a solution for handling DC, in response to their own work at the Venice Biennale this year. This was one of several 17-feet-tall billboards about security threat levels.

The poster, US Homeland Terror Alert System for Women, pointed out that the "President says women do have rights. They can join the army, join unprovoked war, kill innocent people."

The discussion was held in the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Would anyone else have welcomed them? Many of the other venerated art institutions in Washington DC have come under the girls' scanner.

In a recent issue of Washington Post, they created a mock tabloid cover with the screaming headline: "Horror on the National Mall". The mall is the strip of green in the heart of the city which houses the country's prestigious museums.

The subtitle was: "Thousands of women locked into basements of DC museums". As it happened, the girls discovered that despite having some works of women artists, the museums just didn't put them up on the walls.

Instead, like most other mainstream museums in the USA, they were dominated by white male artists. This illustrated what they point out over and over again "" that at the top, women remain underrepresented.

Luckily, that is not the case at the entry level. There is no doubt that the presence of more women in the arts in one-person shows, important exhibitions and, simply, on the walls will impact the way art is seen and the kind of ideas sown into the public mind.

From our own Indian experience, we know that not all will frame their concerns as feminist ones. Many will cater to the market. But having them is important in any case, simply because it is unjust not to, regardless of their art-politics. That dialogue is separate.

But can we assume that having more women in positions of power will change the macro-structures?

In one of their postings, the girls lament the absence of women in corporate power, citing that less than 2 per cent of the CEOs in Fortune 500 companies are women.

Yet, are such companies more likely to fund women's art, or even push the broad feminist agenda? Do women on museum boards equal more interest in women's art?

In fact, do women buyers (which means women with large disposable incomes and the freedom to spend it), or purchases made jointly by women and men, strengthen the market for women's art? Unlikely. The power and the politics of the art market contour such decisions as does the trend of retrospectives.

Every retrospective is the progenitor of an art hero and, occasionally, heroine. This only reflects the creation of art and artist as a brand, something that automatically displaces a majority and creates space for few boutique names/brands.

Their innovation notwithstanding, this is also where you see the limitations of the guerilla girls' strategies. The grey areas of institutional structures, the art market, now booming internationally, and the sheer hype and packaging behind names does limit the space for women artists at the higher levels.

The in-your-face poster-slogan can't serve these nuanced, complex issues. It is unreasonable to even expect the guerilla girls to lead to direct change, regardless of their success till now. Fortunately, their strategies can compel more people to think, hitting either a critical button or a critical mass that impacts the art market.