You Turn Me On I'm a Radio

After our lecture on public art I began to think about what exactly constitutes public art?
One of my favourite artist groups is the Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous and faceless women, with pseudonyms of dead female artists such as Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe. Their tag line is “reinventing the ‘f’ word”, the group aims to be the “feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger.”
This truly brilliant group of female activist have erected numerous billboards, all of which attempt to change the current position of women in the arts, through the use of humour they successfully gauge an equilibrium between the significance of the situation and the joke that is statistics pertaining to women and the arts.


Whilst the group put up billboards featuring their own designs they have also frequently altered sexist ad campaigns via their ‘guerrilla graffiti’, recontextualising the initial aim, most often overtly sexualising a product which in NO way relates to sex.
I am very proud to exclaim that I am a feminist, my own works, although not quite as admirable, relate to the continual belittling of women in general, I believe that our society in this day in age is lacking the public activism made by groups such as the Guerrilla Girls and Bugga Up, assisting the public who are constantly bombarded by unavoidable agenda pushing advertising everywhere to realise that this is a wrongful representation of women and that they shouldn’t be publicly viewed, the fact that there are groups out there willing to put themselves on the line in order to attempt to change the opinions of the public or even to make people more consciously aware of the brazen nature of the advertising industry is inspiring and motivating. I believe that these activists are public artists, brilliant and witty and eager to redefine the current acceptance of the degradation of female artists.