Artists Bringing Activism to Gallery Spaces and Beyond


One of the more iconic ancestors of today’s data-driven activist art collectives, guerilla girlsEmerging in 1985 amid a disillusionment with the commercialization of art . Guerrilla Girls, who wore gorilla masks and used the names of deceased female artists as pseudonyms, targeted the public with posters and slogans that challenged the status quo, using the language they borrowed from advertisements. “Do women have to be naked to enter the Met Museum?” Asked a poster in 1989, alongside a graphic of a chambermaid with a gorilla mask in the text, noted that although less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern episode were women, 85 percent of the nudes were women. At that time, as now, critics of these movements argued that there was a certain amount of hypocrisy, given that many artists involved in institutional criticism finance and exhibit their work by these institutions. But for artists, that’s always been the point: it’s about liberating the art world rather than purifying it.

“We still diss street posters and banners in museums, but we also distribute them on their own walls,” Käthe Kollwitz, a longtime Guerrilla Girls member, told me in an email (her name is a pseudonym). Recent projects,male grazing” (2021), a series of billboards revealing the history of the exploitative behavior of male artists. Their focus remains largely unchanged: “We say to anyone who cares about art: ‘Don’t let museums reduce art to the few artists who win a popularity contest among major dealers, curators and collectors’,” writes Kollwitz. . “Unless institutions are as diverse as the cultures they represent, they don’t show the history of art, they just preserve the history of wealth and power.”

Revolutions, like art, begin as a figment of the imagination: the reshaping of the world in a new image. Nitasha Dhillon, co-founder of Decolonize This Place with Amin Husain, directs me to a 1941 article by the surrealist theorist Suzanne Césaire, in which she “imagines a strange, wonderful, fantastic space. … Here is the poet, painter and artist who presided over the metamorphoses and reversal of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness.” We can all agree that the world is crazy; Can the art of reckoning and trauma show us a way?

The truth is, there is no plan for decolonization; Nothing that involves people working together for more justice is particularly utopian or wonderful. There will always be disagreements, faults, more to learn, more work to be done. This kind of art is nothing if not laborious; comes at a personal cost. And so, while groups like Forensic Architecture and Decolonize This Place have had proven success – in law courts, in the arts – I can’t help but think that this may be the less measurable impact. more powerful as models of cooperation and correction in a world that is cynical, self-seeking and often violent. If nationalism and greed are contagious globally, then perhaps idealism is too. Accountability ultimately means paying attention to who is paying for our lifestyle, our comfort, and even our beauty. After all, the fear of being annulled is related to the fear of facing these harsh realities and being complicit. Perhaps the question is not whether art will heal us, but to what degree we have the courage to heal ourselves.



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