The Artist and Challenging the Patriarchy

The Guerilla Girls’ How Women Get Maximum Exposure in Art Museums was designed in response to a request in 1989 from the Public Art Fund in New York to design a billboard that would appeal to a general audience [Hanson 2013] . The image shows a reclining nude wearing a gorilla mask with excessively large teeth, similar to those worn by the group to hide their identities, holding a fan that appears phallic. The slogans on the work read “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” and underneath, “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”. The Guerrilla girls appropriated Auguste Dominique Ingres’ painting Grand Odalisque in this image in order to comment on the history of the female nude and the voyeuristic male gaze as the privileged viewpoint within art. “The Public Art Fund rejected the design with the reasoning that it was not clear enough. The Guerrilla Girls instead rented ad space on New York buses until the company cancelled their lease” [Hanson 2013] as they believed the work to be too suggestive.The work exaggerates the role of women in the art world as the subject of the voyeuristic gaze through the appropriation of a well-known work and the confronting bright colours of the poster. Their use of the nude facing the viewer challenges the male gaze as it directly confronts the voyeur and challenges the idea of ownership and the right to take possession of the image and the woman in it. In the artwork, the face is covered by a mask with the face of a seemingly aggressive gorilla, to present the idea that the figure in the image is refusing to acknowledge the audience and the male gaze, refuting the idea of subservience within the work, emphasised as the figure is harshly brandishing a phallic fan while the mask presents its fearsome teeth. Using the nude in an exaggerated way allowed the Guerilla Girls to show the problematic nature of the privileging of the male gaze, offering an alternative to the voyeur being the prevailing viewpoint in artworks of the female form. The use of the striking and saturated colours of pink and yellow, stereotypically seen as feminine, contrasts with the muted tones used in historical works of the female form, expressing “an action of reclamation as the colours become abrasive and attention grabbing” [Hanson 2013].