Uncaged

A naked woman stretches and she wears a gorilla’s head. I stood in front of her, resting my feet from the endless stairs I climbed in lieu of waiting for what I imagined were slothoperated elevators. (This, those beautiful, silvery, snailinspired elevators, is the only complaint I will launch against London’s Tate Modern Museum. The biggest, noisiest chef’s kiss to everything else.) It was then that the humpbacked old man next to me decided to read, in a slow and warbling voice, the entire gorilla-woman poster out loud to an unsuspecting audience, which consisted of me, my tired feet, and a young man staring at the wall opposite.

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” He turned and smiled at me, before nodding impressively at the boy next to me, who had the sense to understand he was being, somehow, rebuked.

“Hm. Oh! Yeah, I…yeah, that’s fucked.”

The old man nodded again and left, as mysteriously as he had appeared, allowing me and the boy the chance to exchange an awkward smile-grimace before turning to the exhibit together.

There were several posters: a list of art galleries that showed “no more than 10% women artists or none at all,” a detailed code of ethics for art museums, and amongst others, a letter on the side reading, “Dearest art collector, it has come to our attention that your collection, like most, does not contain enough art by women. We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately. All our love, Guerrilla Girls.”

The Guerrilla Girls, who brand themselves as feminist activist artists, are unfortunately correct. The group — think Anonymous but replace Guy Fawkes with gorillas — formed in New York City in 1985 and are once again on the rise as they wage art war via “culture jamming” within the community in efforts to highlight the dichotomy between the consumption of art created by marginalized communities and that of their white male counterparts.

This culture jamming, which includes the reconfiguration of fashion statements, memes, and other modern artifacts of commercial culture, brings up statistics that range on a scale from unsurprisingly depressing to alarming: for the same work, female artists make 81 cents to the male artist’s dollar; 87% of permanent collections of the most prominent art museums which feature over 10000 artists are men. 85% are white; only 13.7% of living artists in North American and European galleries are women; the list goes on. One book published by The Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum Activity Book, (which also has fun little quizzes, if you’re that type of person) details “artrageous” ways of how the everyday person can shine a light on these statistics, and make a trip to their favorite (probably sexist) museums into a socially conscious jaunt worth its own exhibition. (Worry not, it’s all legal, which adds to the fun. Or takes it away, depending how you look at things.)

I watched the boy read the posters. “That’s fucked.” It was an easy, universal, and almost cop-out, way to show support: “That’s fucked,” read the wall, move on. But I wonder now, is it his fault, really? Could it be mine, too? When I really thought about it, isn’t it the old man’s fault more than anything? The people who set up these museums in the first place had more in common with him, after all. But placing blame, albeit accurate and instrumental in making me feel a whole lot better about myself, has little value in terms of moving forward. To encourage women as artists, not only as objects of study for seemingly altruistic or snobbishly aesthetic purposes, will require more than just equity in the minds of exhibit curators and museum goers. It will also require the undoing of a widespread social thinking that regards female art as a household hobby and male art as highbrow. If you’re discouraged or intimidated, you’re not alone; this is a lot to ask of a single person. Frankly, I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing it. But while we’re figuring it out, what art lovers can do is take a leaf or two out of The Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum Activity Book the next time you hop on over to the Met or another museum on the Guerrilla Girl’s Hit List. And, you never know, maybe you don’t need to be naked to get into the Met. Maybe you just need a gorilla mask. There’s only one way to find out.