You don’t need permission - Guerrilla Art.

Whilst I know the obvious thing to write about here is graffiti, this goes beyond that, beyond mediums even. From the performance art of protest and its painted placards, through intermingled poetry with political outcry, to replacing a companies hold music with “ciao Bella”, art is needed everywhere now, more than ever, especially where it is told it cannot be.

This idea is not new, not in reality or even my own writing, I have talked in the past on the organised and focused art collectives such as ACT UP, and about the decentralised grass roots movements of “Reclaim the night”, both of which made effective use of art in delivering a clear and pertinent message, even though their approaches varied.

But as we live in interesting times, there can never be too many reminders of what art can do, and what art should do. To paraphrase an old bard “Now is the winter of dissidents, made necessary by the policing of our thoughts” So we will look back so as to find the inspiration to carry on moving forward.

It is the summer of 1984, the MoMA launches a sweeping new exhibition to inaugurate its freshly renovated & expanded building; “An International Survey of Recent Paintings and Sculpture”. It is an exhibition with a bold premise, to survey and catalogue the eras most important painters and sculptors from over 17 countries. The exhibition includes a stunningly large roster of 165 different artists… only 13 are women, only 8 are people of colour.

The shows curator offered this comment on the selection; “any artist not in the show should rethink his career”

Now whilst in the immediacy this exhibitions selection would lead to The Women’s Caucus on Arts organising demonstrators to gather and protest the MoMAs, unfortunately this protest would have no real effect. What it would do was bring together seven women who would go on to form a group intent on more “media savvy” methods of delivering a message.

In the ensuing weeks across several strategy meetings, the Guerrilla Girls were formed. They would immediately begin to spread their message, not confined to a set day, they would wheatpaste posters in the most pertinent of places, those frequented by creatives and curators. In doing so they ensured their message was on display to those it mattered most to.

In these early days they would also adopt their signature masks, aside from an enjoyable pun and unique signifier, these masks and the anonymity they gave would - to my mind - add vital clarity to their message. In a time when the media would happily pick apart any women over the smallest thing, by hiding their identity they removed an avenue of attack from the media’s arsenal, they left little room to focus on anything but the message as even the masks pointed back to that message through the pun they represented.

By the following year the group had grown and so to had its scope of action. Beyond New York and beyond solely the plight of women, now trying to also tackle the issue of racial discrimination in the art world. They would tour museums taking account of the ratio of male to female artists and male to female representation within nude artworks. They would make handbills incorporating these facts and figures with art and design and hand them out en masse. It is amazing the impact you can have with data, and how easy it is to obtain that data (especially in today’s world) so whilst we may be increasingly surveilled, remember it is very difficult to stop someone counting.

We’ll pause here, because i want to make it clear why I’m recounting these particular beats of their story (that you could probably find much better written in a veritable trove of art books). These lessons apply today, the idea of using anonymity to avoid deflection, of taking a message to its audience, of confronting the illogical with the factual. These lessons you can implement in your practice today, and really should, for the sake of tomorrow.