{"id":51224,"date":"2020-03-04T11:52:21","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T17:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=51224"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:54:15","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:54:15","slug":"if-the-guerrilla-girls-were-to-come-to-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/if-the-guerrilla-girls-were-to-come-to-town\/","title":{"rendered":"If the Guerrilla Girls Were to Come to Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\u201cWorks by famous men upstairs, and feminist art that will get you mad at the patriarchy (though hopefully not your patriarch) downstairs.\u201d That\u2019s the text message I sent to my teenage daughter, telling her that if she and her friends were looking for something to do that Friday evening, they might visit the exhibition openings at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.<\/h4>\n

My description of the upstairs exhibition wasn\u2019t completely accurate. Of the 13 artists featured in Utah Collects: Contemporary Collecting Practices<\/em>, two are women. Tauba Auerbach and Mira Lehr will not be household names to the average patron, however, not in the way Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami and Robert Motherwell \u2014 three of the men whose works are on display \u2014 would be.<\/h4>\n

If you\u2019re wondering why that is, you should step downstairs, where Guerrilla Girls includes works spanning a quarter-century from the subversive collective of anonymous artist agitators. They burst on the New York City art scene in the mid-\u201980s with a series of posters decrying the racial and gender imbalances of the art world. To protect themselves from backlash, they donned gorilla masks and took on pseudonyms from famous women artists like Frida Kahlo and K\u00e4the Kollwitz. If they were to see UMOCA\u2019s upstairs show, they might create a poster that reads, \u201cOnly 15% of the artists in private Utah collections are women.\u201d<\/h4>\n

There is plenty that will get you mad at the patriarchy in this exhibit. It might be the art critics who don\u2019t write enough about women: Peter Schjeldahl, Hilton Kramer, Donald Kuspit, Calvin Tomkins, Peter Plagens and others were called out in 1985 for writing less than 20% of the time about one-person shows featuring women. Galleries like Mary Boone, Leo Castelli, Dia, and Marlborough received similar opprobium for showing no more than 10% women artists. The most effective of the Guerrilla Girls\u2019 works is probably the billboard that remains etched in people\u2019s memory for the visual of a gorilla mask on the top of Ingres\u2019 Grand Odalisque, and the question \u201cDo women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?\u201d Less than 5% of the artists in the museum\u2019s modern art section are women, a smaller font explains, but 85% of the nudes are female.<\/h4>\n

Over the years, the Guerrilla Girls expanded their critiques to include larger issues like rape and domestic violence, though the art world remained a principal focus: one poster pairs minimalist artist Carl Andre, who was acquitted for the murder of his wife and fellow artist Ana Mendieta, with O.J. Simpson.<\/h4>\n

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Working your way around the exhibit \u2014 it begins in 1984 and ends in 2016 \u2014 you may be struck by how much what was happening in the mid-’80s is still going on today. Thirty years later, issues brought up by the Guerrilla Girls are front and center in our national discourse. Their methodologies have also proven to be prescient: Their pithy posters are an analog version of internet memes; their use of anonymity has become a prominent part of our social discourse; and their 1985 poster calling out individual artists for being represented by galleries that showed few, if any, women artists, prefigures aspects of our current call-out culture.<\/h4>\n

What may also strike you when you reach the end of Guerrilla Girls is how much has or hasn\u2019t changed. In 1985, 18 major galleries were called out for featuring no more than 10% women artists. In 2014, for a similar though not completely identical list, it was 20%. In 1985, of the four major New York City museums, only one featured a one-person exhibition for a woman artist. In 2015, at the same museums, the number had risen to 5. Depending on whether you\u2019re a glass-half-full- or glass-half-empty type of person, you may see this as positive change or continued reason for rage.<\/h4>\n

What you may also notice is that the Guerrilla Girls critique is, for the most part, local. It\u2019s principally about New York City, which, granted, in the 1980s, when Guerrilla Girls began their agitprop, was the art world (and their home turf). Since, the art world has become more dispersed if not necessarily more diverse. One suspects if local chapters sprung up in London, Tokyo, or Buenas Aires, its members would not be lacking in material. One of the posters at UMOCA reads simply \u201cIt\u2019s Even Worse in Europe.\u201d<\/h4>\n

What about a Utah chapter?<\/h4>\n

A local chapter of Guerrilla Girls might point out \u2014 as we noted at the top \u2014 the disparity found in Utah collections represented by UMOCA\u2019s upstairs exhibit. As a rejoinder, however, someone (probably a member of UMOCa staff) could point out that the museum\u00a0did give the Guerrilla Girls the main space. Or that of the three other exhibits currently at the museum, two focus on women artists. And digging a little deeper, a look at the titles found on the first four pages of UMOCA\u2019s \u201cpast exhibitions\u201d section of their website indicates more women have been exhibited than men. There are many ways to count an issue of this nature (and we invite you to add your own calculations in the comments), but at least at UMOCA things are not looking too bad.*<\/h4>\n

Taking a slightly broader view, Guerrilla Girls SLC would find that at Salt Lake City\u2019s February Gallery Stroll, 45% of the artists mentioned in listings by name are women. Outside of Salt Lake City, looking at the main exhibition venues with shows by individual artists, the genders came closer to parity.<\/h4>\n

Several of the Guerrilla Girls’ attacks are directed at art critics and publications, so we took a look at our own work at 15 Bytes. For our Artist Profile, our main monthly feature, 48% of the articles over the past five years were on women. A quick look at the titles of our exhibition reviews over the past two years indicates women were written about 46% of the time. For the literary arts, that gender imbalance is flipped, with 51% of the reviews since we began running them about female authors. For our Utah\u2019s 15<\/em> projects, 57% of the artists selected by our readers as the state\u2019s most influential have been women.<\/h4>\n

These numbers for the Utah art scene don\u2019t always reach parity, but they\u2019re nothing like the numbers in New York. Is this the result of the matriarchy in Utah?<\/h4>\n

At first blush, that seems an odd way to describe our state, but taking a look at our institutional venues \u2014 from government institutions and university museums to galleries and nonprofits \u2014 only three, by our count, have male directors: Gallery East in Price, the BYU Museum of Art in Provo, and the Utah Arts Alliance in Salt Lake City. Sears, SUMA, The Granary, Woodbury Museum, UMFA, UMOCA, UDAM, Salt Lake Arts Council, Shaw Gallery, NEHMA, Art Access, BDAC, St. George Art Museum, Saltgrass Printmakers, Springville Museum of Art, Kimball Art Center are all led by women. A majority of the commercial galleries in the state are also run by women.<\/h4>\n

We shouldn\u2019t get too congratulatory, however. The art departments at our colleges and universities are a different matter: 73 percent of faculty are male (a number that might be ameliorated if one took into consideration all adjunct faculty or included art history faculty). And that\u2019s in departments where the students are predominantly female.<\/h4>\n

Institutional imbalances of this sort are never due to causes that are black and white. As even the Guerrilla Girls point out, the problem cannot be ascribed solely to men: The gender imbalance coverage at Artforum (in the Guerrilla Girls\u2019 poster, \u201cArtforhim\u201d) wasn\u2019t much different (and in some respects was actually worse) under female editors. Locally, while two-thirds of the acquisitions board at the Utah Division of Arts and Museums is female, recent acquisitions and commissions are still dominated by men (73%). And, at the risk of delving into the anecdotal, one female art professor in Utah discussing the issue remarked that her female students are much more critical of their female professors than their male ones.<\/h4>\n

Is our recurring 35×35<\/em> exhibition, which has always been dominated by women, bias against men? Or is it because the majority of submissions (which are judged blindly) are by women? If a 15 Bytes feature like \u201cWhat\u2019s New\u201d or \u201cWho Do You Love?\u201d includes more responses by men than women, is that because the editor or the questions posed are sexist? Or could it be because more men than women responded to an email?<\/h4>\n

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As the Guerrilla Girls have pointed out, however, passing the buck is a frequent response. A critic can only write about what is exhibited, and if most galleries show work by men, coverage will reflect that, the argument would go. And then continue: a gallery is a business, and if they predominantly show art by men, it may be because they sell better; a collector can only buy what is on offer; and a museum relies (in part) on donations by collectors.<\/h4>\n

It’s also a dangerous response. The problem, as one poster at UMOCA points out, is that if museums reduce what our sense of art is to the \u201csmall number of artists who have won a popularity contest among big-time dealers, curators and collectors \u2026 they\u2019re not showing the history of art, they are just preserving the history of wealth and power.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Is it possible that the Utah art world doesn\u2019t have as much of a gender problem because there\u2019s not as much money involved? Are the poor flyover states a better representation of what\u2019s going on in the art world than the rich coastal behemoths?<\/h4>\n

Systematic imbalances are driven by a number of complicated factors and a guerrilla organization trying to overthrow a system is not going to do the same work as a sociologist, with peer review and footnotes and complicated algorithms. But, as the Guerrilla Girls exhibit makes clear, there is definitely a problem. Especially in New York.<\/h4>\n

Guerrilla Girls, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through June 6.<\/p>\n

The Guerrilla Girls are<\/em> coming to town. Or at least one is.\u00a0Guerrilla Girl K\u00e4the Kollwitz Artist Lecture Monday, March 9th, 2020 at 7:30pm Jeann\u00e9 Wagner Theatre Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center Salt Lake City, Utah. Tickets available at arttix.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*The numbers indicated above have not been subjected to peer review and should be considered a rough count. We invite our readers to do their own tabulations and analysis and include their results in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWorks by famous men upstairs, and feminist art that will get you mad at the patriarchy (though hopefully not your patriarch) downstairs.\u201d That\u2019s the text message I sent to my teenage daughter, telling her that if she and her friends were looking for something to do that Friday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/guerrilla_girls_naked.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 09:38:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51224"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70675,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51224\/revisions\/70675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}