Guerrilla Girls, National Gallery of Victoria: taking on art patriarchy
The small number of women in art history goes much deeper than the exclusion of female artists by male historians.
Those familiar with mythology as represented in art will know of the story that Aphrodite had an illicit affair with Ares — Venus and Mars in their Latin names — and were caught in the act by his brother Hephaestus or Vulcan. The tale has an ancient source, told by the bard Demodocus in Book 8 of The Odyssey, but if we read it in its original context we will see that it is clearly presented as a comic performance; the ancient myth of this burlesque version is related in Hesiod’s Theogony.
In this primary version, Ares is married to Aphrodite: the god of war and strife is united with the goddess of love and attraction. The opposites balance each other and this is expressed in the birth of their daughter, who is named Harmonia. All abstract ideas start as metaphorical extensions of concrete ones; the word harmony derives from a verb meaning to join together, as in carpentry. This became a natural metaphor for the mysterious joining of sounds that we call harmony, and musical harmony in turn became a second-degree metaphor for a condition of equilibrium and sympathetic correspondence between different people and within the heart and mind of an individual.
This philosophical myth is, on the face of it, about the differences between men and women, but more deeply between the male and the female principles, or what the Chinese call the yang (masculine) and yin (feminine). These terms allow us to distinguish ideal gender qualities from the physical differences of the two sexes. Yin qualities may be more prominent in women and yang in men, but in reality all people partake of each in varying measures.
Both, in fact, are necessary for internal equilibrium as well as for success in many vocations: the yin qualities of receptiveness and empathy and the yang qualities of energy and decisiveness are as necessary, though perhaps in different proportions, for a general as for a composer, for a banker as for a doctor. And individuals in whom one of these qualities is overwhelmingly dominant and unmatched by the other can be unsuccessful as well as unappealing.
It is also because of the significant degree of correspondence between these qualities and the two sexes that men and women can become better and more balanced in their relations with the opposite sex, discovering new and complementary qualities in their relations with individuals different from themselves.
Men and women each have their own ways of being interesting, intelligent and admirable, and their own ways of being dull, stupid and deplorable. But the interesting thing is that they are often — though not always — at their best in the company of the other sex: think of a successful dinner party conversation, as opposed to one in which the sexes split into separate groups and fall into caricatural conversational routines.
The differences and complementarities between male and female are the deeper issues that lie behind the polemics of the Guerrilla Girls posters but are never addressed in them, which is why, although often amusing and memorable, they are so repetitive and ultimately rather disappointing. Indeed, the more they rehearse the same complaints, the more we are forced to realise that they simply haven’t got to the bottom of the question.
The Guerrilla Girls is an art collective, formed in New York in 1985, whose original aim was to protest against the underrepresentation of female artists in art museums. Its members are anonymous and, in a play on homonyms, wear gorilla masks to conceal their faces. They also use the gorilla mask as a kind of brand or logo, attaching it to various paintings of the past, such as Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), used in their first colour poster, produced in 1989 and still their most famous work.
Although the Grande Odalisque is in the Louvre in Paris, the poster is a criticism of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and asks the question: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” It goes on to make the claim: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” As an advertisement, the combination of message and image is effective; but like all advertisements, it is also tendentious and question-begging.
It is interesting, for one thing, that it is the modern art section that is in question, for in the Renaissance and Baroque periods male nudes were far more common; the rise of the female nude as a quasi-subject in the 19th century corresponds to the breakdown of history painting in the absence of shared stories of common cultural significance.
This claim about the female nude, with its insinuations of male prurience, distracts us from the far more important assertion that only 5 per cent of artists represented were women. This complaint is essentially the same one that is repeated in all of the group’s work, and the only difference is that it also incorporates, as allies in dispossession, “people of colour”, which presumably mainly means black, although in the US the expression seems to be used opportunistically to include anyone considered disadvantaged: thus a Latin American might qualify as a person of colour, while Picasso no doubt would belong to the reviled category of white male, endowed with inherent privilege.
Such complaints about under-representation have been rendered obsolete to some extent in an age of compulsory quotas, when hardly any curator would dare to put together an exhibition based on merit alone, without ensuring that a sufficient number of women and black or at least mixed-ethnicity individuals were included. But such quotas simply may serve to mask the deeper and more enduring difficulties that face female artists.
We are still left with the very small number of significant women in art history, even up to the modern period, as the poster points out. And the first thing to make clear is that this is not the result of the exclusion of female artists from art history by male art historians. The problem is much deeper than that. In fact, when we study the careers of the relatively few female artists of the early modern period, we find they were often highly regarded and even considered — in a way that is admittedly not altogether flattering — as wonders.
There were serious obstacles for a woman who wanted to become a painter, and the first of these was access to the apprenticeship system. Boys were sent to live in the house of their master and shared accommodation with other apprentices of various ages. What went on among the boys was often bad enough, though some masters were praised for running houses with high standards of behaviour, but clearly there would be no question of sending a 12- or 13-year-old girl to live in such an environment.
Later, with the rise of the modern art academy from the 17th century, the social environment was far safer, although in practice young artists still were also apprenticed to a master until the later 19th century, but the core academic study was drawing, first from prints, then casts, then the life model, and the last of these stages was initially considered unsuitable for female students, even when they were admitted.
The Royal Academy in London had two female founder members in 1768, but because the group portrait of these original members (1772) was set in the life class, the two women had to be included, for the sake of decorum, as portraits hanging on the wall behind.
For all this, the fact remains that even Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun — or in the following century Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and others — were not artists of the first rank. They are interesting and appealing figures whose work certainly deserves to be studied and undoubtedly reveals nuances of experience that we do not encounter in their male counterparts. But they have not shaped a new vision of the world in the same way as Caravaggio, David, Manet, Monet or Degas — to cite a handful of their great contemporaries — and their inclusion in the narrative does not fundamentally change the course of art history.
It is not clear why this is so, but it is certainly not the result of a conspiracy. The role of female artists in the 20th century, in the various waves of modernism — cubism, early abstraction, expressionism, futurism, dada, surrealism, American abstraction, pop and so forth — is also an important question to consider, especially when social conditions and attitudes become far more favourable than in earlier periods. But the implicit pugnacity and aggression of the avant-garde — a military metaphor — are far more yang than yin, the work of Ares rather than the expression of harmony.
However, if all of this is ignored in the Guerrilla Girls’ predictable and repetitive slogans, they are on to something more interesting with their other more recent target, the private museums that billionaire collectors have been opening around the world. These would be a welcome addition to the world of museums if only they contributed to a greater diversity in collections, taste and museological philosophy.
It would be useful if some billionaire opened a museum devoted to a specialist period, foreign culture or unusual category of cultural material. But, as it happens, the new museums are usually collections of contemporary art.
Even here it would be useful if these private collections espoused clear and distinctive aesthetic philosophies, especially if these were contrarian rather than conformist. Imagine if one of these institutions focused on painting, which tends to be short-changed in current official exhibitions, especially if it looks in any way traditional. The rich could thus be useful as patrons if they represented an alternative to the bureaucratic taste of the contemporary art establishment and the state museums that take their cue from that establishment.
But unfortunately the rich and the museums have tended to merge, since the boards of the latter are dominated by members of the former, and official contemporary art is now essentially a vehicle for corporate branding and a symbol of cultural prestige, even among those who in reality know nothing about art.
In these circumstances, private museums are little more than vanity projects with attractive taxation benefits.
Guerrilla Girls
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Until September.
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