‘Dearest art collection it has come to our attention that your collection, like most, does not contain enough art by women. We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately.’ (Guerrilla Girls, 1995, p.41)
The following quote taken from the anonymous group of art world feminists, who go by the name; Guerrilla Girls, illuminated our thought process, and became the key stimulus to our performance. They take hard hitting text and ‘use a rapier [of] wit to fire volley after volley of carefully researched statistics at art world audiences, exposing individuals and institutions that underrepresent or exclude women and artists of colour from exhibitions , collections and funding.’ (Guerrilla Girls, 1995, p.7) Their tongue and cheek approach to alerting the public to such a serious and on-going issue in the art world ‘is a great, blunt edged weapon against evil’ (Chadwick, 1995, p.96) and we plan to continue this on a smaller scale within our own performance. We aim to do this by incorporating facts taken from their book Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls and keeping our appearance to a minimum, so that the attention is primarily on the text itself to juxtapose how the focus of these women by society and men was on their physical beauty.
Another influence in which we took inspiration from was Antony Gormley’s One and Another people in the UK were invited to stand on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Participants were able to do whatever they wished on the plinth for however long they felt was necessary. The project immediately sparked interest and conversation in the group of us our selves inviting staff and visitors of the gallery to take part in a similar activity, however with the site acquiring a certain type of spectator we felt it would be a challenge to try make participants feel comfortable humiliating themselves in public. The idea was soon dismissed and replaced with the three of us standing on plinths of our own, as though we are now a part of the exhibition in the gallery. ‘Through putting a person onto a plinth, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol’ (Gormley, 2013) and this is exactly how we wish to be portrayed, as a symbols of the women that once existed in the space we are now inhabiting. We felt expressing yourself on a raised level was particularly interesting and granted us a sense of authority. All in all we are expressing the voices of the previous women in the artwork through the present female voices that are our own.
Works Cited:
Gormley, Antony. (2013) Antony Gormley- One and Another. [online] Available from: http://www.antonygormley.com/show/item-view/id/2277 [Accessed 29 April 2014].
Guerrilla Girls (1995) Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls London: Pandora.