COURTESY OF THE GUERILLA GIRLS

ART:

                Casey Acierno

t is unfair to say that women do not play a large role in modern art. After all, many of the most important and iconic works of modern art depict female subjects, two notable examples being Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's Marilyn series. In any room in the Museum of Modern Art, or even the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a visitor feels surrounded by female eyes; in fact, the average gallery in New York City is usually composed of far more pieces featuring women than men. Once the viewer takes a minute to get up close to the artwork, though, the gender balance changes dramatically. Despite the fact that the pieces' subjects touch on all aspects of women and their sexuality, the artists themselves are unfailingly male. It is difficult to say which aspect of gender diversity in modern art is more disturbing — the fact that so few female artists are recognized as worthy heirs to the Western artistic tradition, or that the ones who are acknowledged end up being pegged as “the Women Artists.”

A lengthy catalogue of societal pressures has historically prevented female artists from making their way in the world. Women were prevented from gaining recognition because of limitations ranging from a lack of patronage to the deeming of certain subjects, such as street life, as taboo for “delicate women.” However, two contemporary female artists, Tracey Emin and Marina Abramovic have beaten the odds; they have displayed their work at exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (Abramovic) and received nominations for prestigious awards like the Turner Prize (Emin). Yet beating the odds does not by any means signify that they are looking to enter the boys' club of the art world. Instead, both women create work that is rooted in the female identity.

Emin, a Londoner who was part of the mid-1990s “Young British Artist” (YBA) movement, along with Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread, trades in confessional art — that is, art frequently linked to her sexuality. Among her best-known works are Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, a tent embroidered with the names of sexual partners, family members, and aborted fetuses, and Exploration of the Soul, notes from her autobiography that detail her rape at age 14. The overt sexuality of her works — everything from obscenities scrawled in neon to explicit descriptions of her sexual experiences — contrasts dramatically with the other successful YBA artists, who prefer grand concepts to the personal: Hirst is best known for sticking a dead shark in formaldehyde, and Whiteread's current installation in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is made of hundreds of plaster boxes.

Similarly, Abramovic, a Yugoslavian performance artist, focuses on the body and is unafraid to use her own body as the subject. Many of her best-known performances, such as the Rhythms series, involve her pushing her body to the limits: passing out in the middle of a flaming five-pointed star, for example, or permitting audience members to use everything from a pen to a loaded gun on her however they choose. Her most recent work, Balkan Erotic Epic, was shown in New York City this past winter. It veers from the self-destructive theme of many of her earlier works but takes on an even more explicit sexual dimension. The three-room, five-screen video installation allows the viewer to explore Abramovic's own vision of Balkan folklore. One room features a topless woman, identity obscured by her long hair, beating herself between the breasts with a skull. This image only becomes more disturbing when the rhythm and her physical reaction take on aspects of a sexual experience. Another features three simultaneous videos graphically illustrating three traditions explained by an officious woman: a pretty, young peasant fondling her exposed breasts to distract the enemy in battle; a diverse group of peasant women exposing themselves in a rainstorm to persuade the rain to go away; and a group of naked men, seen from above, thrusting into the ground to ensure a good harvest. The contrast between the three screens is dramatic. They flow from an image straight out of a pornographic version of The Sound of Music, to a much more realistic portrayal of unattractive peasants, to a group of men, seemingly ridiculous in their synchronized sexual motions. Viewers are left pondering everything from the absurdity of sexuality to sex as power rather than as mere procreation. It is curious to wonder what these two women would apply their artistic talent to if it not the female body and its various incarnations.

“It only makes sense that women would deal with their own experience and sensuality in art; men have been doing it for centuries,” contends a woman who goes by the ironic name Frida Kahlo. She is a member of the New York feminist artists collective known as the Guerrilla Girls, a group founded in the 1980s as a response to discrimination against women artists and artists of color. Members adopt alter egos of famous women artists, are only photographed publicly wearing gorilla masks, and satirize the status quo through the “subversive use of information.”

CASEY ACIERNO

The Guerrilla Girls specialize in professional rabble-rousing. As a collective, their art tends to be of the public sort, with billboards, posters, and books that expose inequalities in the art world. Their most recent large-scale exhibition occurred at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where their art was prominently displayed in the first gallery. Visitors to the Biennale were immediately confronted with wall-size posters spoofing the Metropolitan Museum of Art's predilection for female nudes over female artists and the Biennale's hypocrisy in lauding its support of women artists when it has been historically male-dominated.

For the Guerrilla Girls, it was not just the Biennale that was omitting women artists. “The idea of an artist has been defined as being male for a long time,” Kahlo said in response to the concept of “the Woman Artist.” For centuries, it was difficult to find a prominent female artist, let alone one who would be addressed in the same breath as just-plain-artists, who were inevitably male and white.

Of course, it is impossible to discuss this concept in a Columbia campus publication without mentioning Columbia's Art Humanities class, notorious for its blanket exclusion of women artists. “We think they should be embarrassed, and they should be ashamed, and they should be ridiculed for it,” Kahlo sighs. The website for this course proudly proclaims that its purpose is to provide “an analytical study of a limited number of monuments and artists.” Despite the theme of “white men throughout history,” should a Monet or Michaelangelo be removed from such a curriculum, even if it is to add (the real) Kahlo?

“To see art only through masterpieces is to turn it into the Olympics,” in which there is only one winner and everyone who is not a Rembrandt or Goya is omitted from the annals of history, Kahlo contends. And maybe that is the essential truth of this argument. Although the underrepresentation of women artists tends to be one of the more obvious faults of the art world, perhaps the problem is not that the few women artists who gain fame discuss their status as women, or that their discussion of this status draws a crowd. After all, they are just as entitled to discuss the female experience as Picasso was to paint a group of prostitutes, and the taste of the art world in its choice of “masterpieces” is fickle. The deeper issue is the silenced voices everywhere — artists of color and artists without wealthy benefactors, as well as women artists — voices that can be present in small outer-borough galleries, but that are rarely recognized on the walls of the Met or MoMA.