Guerrilla Warfare

This week we are comparing interviews between The Guerrilla Girls and Suzi Gablik and also with Mary Jane Jacob and Suzi as well. The first interview was with the Guerrilla Girls who began in 1985 call themselves “the conscience of the art world”. They are famous for wearing guerilla masks and fish net stockings and running around at night putting up posters slamming the stereotypical white male for being racist and sexist.
Their interview took place in Suzi Gablik’s home in Blacksburg in 1993. It was with two members of the Guerilla Girls who referred to themselves as Romaine Brooks and Guerrilla Girl 1. Something they referred to quite often in the interview was the Whitney Biennial. It was an event that originally took place in 1987 where the Whitney Museum Biennials were targeted by the Guerilla girls for always being racist and sexist. Things finally changed in 1993 when the entire art show consisted primarily of art form women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and homosexuals. This was all due to the efforts of the Guerilla Girls relentless attempts to pressure the people they thought were responsible for creating the segregation in the art world. One person who they deemed highly responsible was a senator named Jesse Helms. In fact they made a poster specifically for him saying, “The art world is your kind of place. The number of blacks at an art opening is about the same as one of your garden parties.” (Gablik 204). It was this style of delivering a message that made them so famous for making a difference for the segregated community in the Art world.
The other interview with Gablik was with a woman named Mary Jane Jacob. Her believes about art were slightly different from that of the Guerilla girls in a sense that she wanted new contemporary art to have less to do with being in a museum and more with being in the real world. This is supported when she said, “It was a matter of starting to see that, from the artists point of view, and for the reading of the art we could really understand art’s meaning better within the context of the real world, as opposed to hat artificial world that the museum creates...The museum is yet another artificial box that separates art from its existence in the world…” (Gablik 301). However they were both similar in the way that they both see art in multiple ways and have a broad idea of what art can be. For example, Mary Jane said, “I think, generically, that art can be just an interaction, or it can be something physical like an object.”(Gablik 311). As for the Guerilla Girls, they brought the different style of artists to the big venues and with that came many different varieties of art such as videos, boom boxes blaring loud music, texts, and photographs were the primary forms of art found in the 1993 Biennial.

Here's a video that doesn't help the cause for those of us with a Y chromosome..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pdbnzFUsXI