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Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality in the fine arts into focus within the greater community. Members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to remain anonymous. They wear the masks to conceal their identity because they believed that their identity is not what matters as GG1 explains in an interview "...mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work." Also, their identity is hidden to protect themselves from the backlash of prominent individuals within the art community. ==History== Guerrilla Girls were formed by seven women artists in the spring of 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", which opened in 1984. The exhibition was the inaugural show in the MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, and was planned to be a survey of the most important contemporary art and artists in the world. In total, the show featured works by 169 artists, of whom only 13 were female. Guerrilla Girls claimed that a comment by the show's curator, Kynaston McShine, further highlighted the gendered bias of the exhibition and of MoMA as an institution: “Kynaston McShine gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink ‘''his''’ career.” In reaction to the exhibition and the prejudice McShine displayed and decided to protest in front of the museum. Thus, the Guerrilla Girls were born. The protests yielded little success, however, and so the Guerrilla Girls embarked upon a postering campaign throughout New York City, particularly in the SoHo and East Village neighborhoods. Once better established, the group also started taking note of racism within the art world, incorporating artists of color into their fold. They also began working on projects outside of New York, commenting on sexism and racism nationally and internationally. Though the art world has remained the group's main focus, challenging sexism and racism in films, mass and popular culture, and politics has also been part of the Guerrilla Girl's agenda. Tokenism also represents a major group concern.〔 When asked about the masks the girls answer "We were Guerrillas before we were Gorillas. From the beginning the press wanted publicity photos. We needed a disguise. No one remembers, for sure, how we got our fur, but one story is that at an early meeting, an original girl, a bad speller, wrote 'Gorilla' instead of 'Guerrilla.' It was an enlightened mistake. It gave us our 'mask-ulinity.'". In an interview with New York Times the Girls were quoted, "Anonymous free speech is protected by the Constitution. You'd be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you wear a mask." In an interview with Interview Magazine, in March, 2012, they were asked many multifaceted questions; "To interview this radical guerrilla group, we asked 21 women artists working today to each pose a question, in a sense gauging and interrogating a movement that has come so far only to find that there is still such a long way to go." "...MARINA ABRAMOVIC: Who creates limits? GUERRILLA GIRLS: That sounds like a trick question! We could spend hours answering it, but for now we’ll answer with another question, why are the rights of women and LGBT people so limited around the world? AMY SILLMAN: How and why have the GG tactics or actions changed over the time you’ve been working together as a group? GUERRILLA GIRLS: We like to think our critique has deepened and our visuals have become more outrageous, but we still have the same philosophy about how to construct political art. We believe that some discrimination is conscious and some is unconscious and that we can embarrass the perpetrators into changing their ways. We don’t do posters and actions that simply point to something and say, “This is bad,” like a lot of political art. We try to twist an issue around and present it in a way that hasn’t been seen before, using facts and humor, in the hope of changing people’s minds. We use information in a surprising, transgressive manner to prove our case. We take on issues we are passionate about, but we don’t always succeed. If we don’t come up with something we think is worth putting out there, we don’t. We’ve never been systematic; we just go after one target after another. There are plenty to choose from. JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER: I am curious about the spectacle quality of your actions and whether they might inadvertently perpetuate the notion of the artist as an inconsequential entertainer. Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, the female leaders of the RAF group, were role models for us growing up in Germany in the ’70s. Does the persistent inequality in our society/art world ever provoke you to consider a less performative but more direct approach? GUERRILLA GIRLS: Are you sure you’re talking about us? We do dress in jungle drag, but we’re not performers. We’re visual artists and culture jammers in the world of art, film, and politics. Our m.o. is to be as direct as possible. In fact, we get grief for being too in-your-face. We’ve done tons of posters, billboards, street banners, and stickers. We’ve criticized museums on their own walls—and on streets nearby. We put up anti-Hollywood billboards in L.A. at Oscar time. We attacked hate speech and sexual violence on the streets of Montreal. We’ve done hundreds of talks and workshops at universities and museums around the world. Our five books are standard textbooks in art, gender studies, cultural studies, and political science classes. We get thousands of letters from people telling us our work has inspired them to become activists, too. Please, Josephine, tell us how we can be more direct than this." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Guerrilla Girls」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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