Guerrilla Girls, Advantages of Being a Woman Artist
Getty Conversations

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0:00:06.6 Beth Harris: We’re at the Getty Research Institute looking at a poster by the Guerrilla Girls together with some documents.

0:00:14.2 Alex Jones: The Getty Research Institute archive is the repository for many of the working documents, the drafts, the internal memos, etcetera, that the Guerrilla Girls coordinated as a collective. It was very clear to them as women artists that the discrimination in the art world was something that needed to be addressed. And so the poster in front of us is titled the Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. You have to be up for fun. When you read a Guerrilla Girls poster, they’re playing with you. They’re joking. Right. So, “Working without the pressure of success” is an advantage of being a woman artist. “Not having to be in shows with men.”

0:00:52.1 Beth Harris: “Having an escape from the art world and your four freelance jobs.”

0:00:57.6 Alex Jones: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80.” That’s one of my favorites, actually.

0:01:01.6 Beth Harris: “Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make, it will be labeled feminine.”

0:01:05.4 Alex Jones: You’re not a great artist, you’re a woman artist. “Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.”

0:01:10.9 Beth Harris: What a relief.

0:01:12.8 Alex Jones: Yeah. You know, many don’t understand that it is the academic world that helps keep artists afloat.

0:01:17.6 Beth Harris: “Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.”

0:01:20.3 Alex Jones: “Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.”

0:01:24.6 Beth Harris: Yeah, that one makes me very sad. “Not having to choke on those big cigars or paint in Italian suits.” This macho image of artists.

0:01:34.6 Alex Jones: “Having more time to work after your mate dumps you for someone younger.”

0:01:38.2 Beth Harris: “Being included in revised versions of art history.” That idea of, even if you make it into the textbook, you got into the revised version, so there’s immediately a sense of, you’re probably not quite as good.

0:01:50.5 Alex Jones: This is a great one. “Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.”

0:01:56.4 Beth Harris: What a relief. “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.”

0:02:03.5 Alex Jones: The gorilla suit was their costume, their mask that helped them maintain their anonymity. They’re like marauders, like superheroes, with those masks on. And it protects them because they were putting a lot of risk in their own careers as artists by making these claims. This poster is one of their most famous, surely, and effective.

0:02:22.2 Beth Harris: And it’s just white paper, this type that reminds one of advertising.

0:02:27.6 Alex Jones: A poster like this would have been plastered over the SoHo neighborhood of New York City just like any other poster that you see. Stapled, glued, whatever. They were very renegade in their approach to showing their posters.

0:02:39.4 Beth Harris: And I feel like this is being addressed to women.

0:02:40.5 Alex Jones: Well, and you can imagine that if you were a woman artist, people weren’t really speaking to you directly.

0:02:46.8 Beth Harris: Yeah. I think it’s hard for us to remember just how little women were represented in the art world and how they were not taken seriously. All of these institutions supporting a system that regularly, systematically discriminated against women.

0:03:05.3 Alex Jones: And the severity of that should not be lost. So even though their language is cheeky, even though they’re playing with irony, they’re actually extremely serious.

0:03:14.6 Beth Harris: And that’s what’s so fun about being in the archive, is that we can see all of these different versions of this poster.

0:03:21.5 Alex Jones: We’re only looking at a few here. But the most interesting thing is that we’ve learned that the Advantages of Being a Woman Artist poster started as a poster that split between the advantages of being a male artist and the advantages of being a woman artist. And so that was their original idea, which we would not have known if not for these working documents in the archive.

0:03:41.3 Beth Harris: And I think the final version of just these ironic points is typical of their approach of going with humor and direct communication.

0:03:53.4 Alex Jones: And that’s the fun part about working documents is that you’re seeing how the idea started and then how it grew. It goes between things that I think are obviously meant to be extremely humorous and not. So something like, “Letting your grey hair show, ” versus, “Playing racquetball with male collectors, ” is one of the advantages of being a male artist. Now, we don’t know how factual that is, except that it’s easy to imagine that if you’re a male artist, you get to buddy up to male collectors. And directly across it is, “Sleeping with important people and not having to ask for anything.”

0:04:30.1 Beth Harris: They’re simultaneously very sad and very poignant, but also funny. And this other document that’s typed.

0:04:39.4 Alex Jones: So we’ve gone from the pen and marker to a typed version, which leads me to believe, as we’ve heard from the Guerrilla Girls themselves, that poster ideas were passed around to the group members for consideration.

0:04:51.0 Beth Harris: And at the very top, being considered a good investment. And it reminds me of the emerging power of the commercial art world in the 1980s.

0:05:01.8 Alex Jones: And I’m gonna go down to point 24 just to emphasize that, because it’s both the collectors and then the people who write about you. So 24 says, “Being reviewed by, ” and then there’s a scratched out name, “a senior New York Times critic, without your personal life being mentioned.” Another way that they’re drawing attention to the culture of influence that allowed male artists to be prioritized and preferenced. Real watchdogs.

0:05:26.5 Beth Harris: The conscience of the art world.

0:05:27.3 Alex Jones: Yes, the conscience, yes. So this poster, I think, is one of their clearest examples of speaking to women artists because there are many instances where the Guerrilla Girls are calling out the art world, but there are few where they are really addressing what it feels like to be a woman artist. And these documents show a really beautiful way that you don’t have to bring up men to talk about women.

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This work at the Getty Research Institute

Exhibition “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” at the Getty Center

View the Getty Conversations series

The Guerrilla Girls’ website

Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020).

Contemporary art, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Popular, transient, expendable: print culture and propaganda in the 20th century