Why the
GUERRILLA
GIRLS to get into the Met
don’t have to be naked
Founding members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz with Laura Castagnini
E
xperimental practices are inextricably tied to
feminism. Women artists in the 1960s and 1970s
were widely under-represented in museums and
galleries, so were forced to develop modes of art
making that functioned against and outside the
white cube. Many of the practices that existed in
this domain – public and social interventions, participation,
performance and site-specific projects – continue to be
evolved by local contemporary feminist artists in refreshingly
innovative ways. As these practices have gained popularity
with a younger generation of artists, institutions have slowly
subsumed the resistance of previous generations. Nowhere
has this phenomenon seemed more unlikely than in the
embrace of the iconic feminist collective The Guerrilla Girls.
What began in 1985 as a raucous group of activists, exposing
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the inequality of the New York art world through anonymous
posters and statistics, has since been celebrated by the very
institutions it set out to attack. The Guerrilla Girls’ posters
hang in the collections of many prominent museums
(although this doesn’t actually include the Metropolitan…
yet) and they are now regularly invited to critique institutions
such as the Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern in London
and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two of the
founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, who work under the
pseudonyms Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz, were recently in
Melbourne,1 so I took advantage of this close proximity to drill
the (unmasked!) artists about the legacy of feminist activism
and the institutionalisation of experimental practices.
Laura Castagnini: The Guerrilla Girls began as a collective
that deliberately worked outside the gallery system in order
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 to expose the hierarchies within it. Yet almost three decades
later, your work is embraced by the very institutions it seeks to
criticise. You’ve acknowledged this has been "a big dilemma"2
but for now have decided to accept institutional invitations in
order to reach out to as large an audience as possible. Can you
please explain in more detail your hesitations and decisions
concerning the recent institutionalisation of your work?
Frida Kahlo: Every request we get we scrutinise, and we only
agree to do it with no strings attached. There are invitations
that we turn down, that aren’t right. The decisions are not
easy to make. For example when we were asked to speak at
the Feminist Futures symposium at the Museum of Modern
Art, we particularly didn’t want to seem like we were…
Käthe Kollwitz: …fawning over the museum like everyone else
speaking at that thing was. They were like (breathy voice):
“Thank you Museum of Modern Art…”
FK: We dissed the museum, we criticised their collection, we
did a whole thing about the museum itself. We did that also
at the Brooklyn Museum, we did it at the Tate Modern. So we
usually use those opportunities to criticise the institutions
and that’s part of the deal.
KK: Also when our work is shown in museums like the
Pompidou or the Tate or MOMA, we get letters from people
from all over the world who went to that museum telling us:
"I didn’t know this stuff before." There are still so many people
who haven’t seen our kind of institutional critique, have never
thought about the system of art. They just think whatever is in
the museum is the right stuff, and "far be if from me – a mere
mortal – to criticise the wonderful museum."
LC: A case in point would be your work at the 2005 Venice
Biennale – a series of 17-feet banners positioned at the
entrance to the Arsenale that highlighted the Biennale’s
appalling under-representation of women artists. That year
was also the first time ever that women had been appointed
as curators. Can you tell me more about working in this
context?
KK: They split the show that year, so Maria de Corral curated
one show and Rosa Martínez curated the other main show
and we were in Rosa’s show. She is a phenomenal person,
really great to work with.
FK: And she was furious.
KK: Yes, tell that story!
FK: Well, Rosa and Maria were hired to do the Venice Biennale
very late, because Robert Storr was supposed to do it that year
and he didn’t get it together, so they were hired at the last
minute, treated very badly. And then at a press conference
they were introduced as “the Spanish girls”. Just after this
happened I met Rosa in New York to talk about our project
for the Biennale and she was furious. She said (Spanish
accent): “Frida, make me some trouble, yes you make me
some trouble!” So we did! We were encouraged to critique the
Biennale. We were given researchers to look into the Biennale
and other institutions in town because we did a work about
that. It’s great we can do this kind of dirty work. The curators
can say: “Oh I just curated this show and look what the artists
did!”
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KK: Yeah but she has total guts, she wouldn’t give a shit
anyway.
FK: Yeah, she’s terrific.
LC: Since women artists have long been denied access to
dominant structures of display, artists pursing feminist
themes often search for alternative ways to make and exhibit
work. Has the link between experimental methodologies
and feminist practice occurred solely due to necessity, or are
there other reasons why feminists are drawn to these ways
of working? How do you explain or reflect upon this legacy of
public interventions as a feminist strategy?
KK: I think the economy of means was, and is, necessary for
most artists, but in addition to that many women artists felt
like outsiders and wanted to make a different kind of art. A lot
of this kind of work emerged from hippy culture and protest
culture; there were all these other things going on in culture
that engendered a lot of the performance and interactive
practices you are referring to. Artists were engaged in a lot of
ways, you couldn’t just compare art to art. They weren’t just
influenced by other art. And that’s true for us, too – we were
influenced by activist movements, social satire, and political
comedy in the culture at large. You can’t only compare what
any artist does to previous works of art.
LC: And therefore your work as feminist artists inevitably
relates to the models of protest that emerged before The
Guerrilla Girls were formed. Your signature blend of humour
and fact was (and remains) a refreshing technique of feminist
activism. How and why did you feel it was time to look for
new activist strategies?
FK: We felt the old forms of protest weren’t working anymore,
so we used humour as a way to get people’s attention. We
realised that if you try to speak reasonably about these issues
that nobody listens, so we developed a shtick – we did the
anonymous thing, we did the name The Guerrilla Girls, we
wore gorilla masks – it was all to get people to stop in their
tracks and listen. And humour is a great way of levelling
a situation. If you can get someone you disagree with to
laugh then you’ve got a common ground. If you truly want to
change his or her mind, then that’s the moment you can start
chipping away.
KK: And prove your case. That’s why we always use statistics
and facts.
FK: But also we have so much fun at our meetings making fun
of the art world! To mock your oppressor is really empowering
and in some ways it’s the only power that a marginalised
group can have over the class that marginalised them.
Ridicule has always been used in times of political oppression.
Before the Guerrilla Girls formed, we would often sit around
and make fun of the art world and then all of a sudden we
thought: why don’t we make fun of the art world in a larger
way? Why don’t we put it out on the street and see who else
will laugh at this? It’s not like we debated (deep voice): “shall
we be dour, shall we be funny?”
KK: Although we always had people in the group who
questioned the humour, who hated humour and thought
you shouldn’t talk about serious issues with humour. So the
question is: why did they join the group? (Laughs). But also,
we were funny people I think. It was deeply ingrained in our
personalities. Some of us were already doing satirical work.
LC: Do you feel that feminism has been institutionalised and if
so are there dangers in institutionalising this kind of practice?
FK: I think there’s a danger in institutionalising anything. So
yes, I think that is true. And although there are many forms of
feminist art and work that has been informed by feminism,
I think right now that there is a particular period of Feminist
Art from the 1960s and 1970s that has been wonderfully
rediscovered. That’s fantastic, it hasn’t been institutionalised
enough for there to be a downside. But in general, the minute
you put something in a museum it doesn’t have the power
that it has when it’s not in the museum.
FK: Although not everything in an institution has been
institutionalised.
KK: So you mean just because it exists once in a museum
doesn’t mean it’s codified in the same way some other work
is? Is that what you mean?
FK: Yeah.
KK: Like when you go into a museum and see the same
signature work of certain artists over and over again it
becomes hard to even look at it anymore. It’s like: “Oh yeah
that’s that.”
LC: I just want to pick up on something Frida just said in
passing, about the institutional ‘rediscovery’ of feminism
in the past few years. How would you explain this recent
interest?

FK: I think it’s about looking for something new, a new take
on things. This work was dismissed when it was made and
it wasn’t collected and didn’t become part of the standard
textbook history.
KK: But early feminist art has been studied. It wasn’t part
of the museum world until recently, but it was taught in
universities, and a few curators who studied and appreciated
it are now doing exhibitions to show how important this work
really is. For example, Camille Morineau at the Pompidou and
Connie Butler at MOMA. Curators also want to redress the
unfair dismissal of this work during the ‘theory wars’ as being
too direct, too simple.
FK: I think any true writing of history is always revising Laura Castagnini is an independent curator working on a curatorial project (with
Vikki McInnes at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery) about humour in feminist art, for
itself. So this is a revisionist history – it’s the 1970s and 1980s
which the recent Guerrilla Girls public lecture was the first event.
through another lens. History is an ongoing argument about
the past. Now whether it will become part of the greater 1 The Guerrilla Girls presented a lecture on 17 May 2012 at the Victorian College
of the Arts in Melbourne. The event was the first public outcome of a project,
archived history is yet to be seen.
curated by myself and Vikki McInnes, exploring humour in feminist art, which
will culminate in a group exhibition at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery in April
KK: Probably not, because the museums are doing what they 2013.
always do. They’re buying only a few of the great number of 2 Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz, ‘Transgressive Techniques of the Guerrilla Girls’,
Getty Research Journal, No. 2, 2010, p. 208.
women artists.
FK: And it becomes the history of a few rather than the history
of many. But that’s part of the problem of an art history that
anoints a few and dismisses the rest, rather than say: well
all these artists were working, lets see what all of their work
together looks like, what kind of a tapestry it makes, rather
talk about only a few who rose to the top.

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