Sí, sí, ya lo sabemos, las cosas van cambiando, pero que lento se vuelve todo cuando una y otra vez vislumbro de forma más clara y apabullante una injusticia enquistada en las sociedades actuales... cuánto talento desperdiciado, cuántas energías desparramadas...
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| Yayoi Kusama, una de las artistas con más éxito en el Tate Modern |
Here's a teaser. How many female artists featured in the top 100
auction sales, ranked by price, last year? Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an
independent curator, decided to find out. One day, not long ago, she sat
down with the 2012 list, "and spent a couple of hours writing M next to
the artists. I got to the end and there wasn't a single F." Some of
those artists were alive, some were dead, all were highly valued –
considered "great" or "genius" – and all were men.
Her count was part of a major project that began more than a year ago, in a packed church hall in Bethnal Green. East London Fawcett,
a feminist group, had set up an event on women in the arts, and the
turnout was large and vocal. "People were saying: 'I find I can't even
have this conversation about equality
in the art world'," says Rolls-Bentley, "because so many people think
it's already been achieved. Because figures like Tracey Emin have defied
the statistics, their rare success misleads people into thinking women
get an equal shot."
As the arts director of ELF, she had come armed with statistics gathered by the campaigning group UK Feminista
in 2010. These showed 83% of the artists in Tate Modern were men, along
with 70% of those in the Saatchi Gallery. The conversation became even
more heated.
A group of volunteers decided to do their own wide-ranging audit. The results are published today, and they make interesting reading.
The auction statistic surprised Rolls-Bentley the most, but she was
also struck by the low proportion of public art created by women. In
east London, of 43 public works of art, 14% were created by women. In
Westminster and the City of London, of 386 public works of art, the
proportion created by women is just 8%.
Given that many of those commissions date back years, these numbers reflect women's marginalisation in art history – it's often estimated that only around 5%
of the work featured in major permanent collections worldwide is by
women. The National Gallery in London, for instance, contains more than
2,300 works; an information request made by the women's activist Tim
Symonds at the start of 2011 revealed that only 11 of the artists in
that enormous collection are women.
Rolls-Bentley and the other
ELF volunteers were inspired in their audit by the self-styled
"conscience of the art world", the feminist activist group Guerrilla Girls,
who started highlighting sexual and racial inequality in the arts in
1985 – while dressed in gorilla masks. Perhaps their most famous poster
came in 1989, and featured the female nude from Ingres's Grande
Odalisque, wearing a gorilla mask, alongside the question: "Do women
have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? Less than 5% of the artists
in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."
Has anything improved in the nearly three decades since the Guerrilla Girls
started? Some areas of the ELF audit suggest they have. When they
looked at the proportion of women artists selected to exhibit on the
fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, for example, they made up 25% of the
total – far from brilliant, but much better than those other statistics
for public art.
They also looked at the artists represented by 134
commercial galleries in London and found that 31% were women – a figure
reflected exactly in the proportion of solo shows by women at the
city's non-commercial galleries. Given that women make up a majority
of art students, the fact that they account for just fewer than one in
three of the artists exhibited in, and represented by, London galleries
might not seem much cause for celebration. But in the context of art
history, it does suggest a step forward.
Rolls-Bentley recognises
that there are still problems but is hopeful that we're seeing
improvements, and flags up one specific point of comparison to
illustrate this. The ELF audit found 23.3% of solo exhibitions hosted by
commercial galleries during the Frieze Art Fair last year were by women
– when the Art Review journalist Laura McLean-Ferris investigated this
in 2008, that figure was 11.6%.
The question remains how many of
the female artists shown in London galleries will go on to be celebrated
as true greats – and how many will be scuppered by that familiar tangle
of boys' clubs, motherhood and cultural expectations. On this last
point, the auction statistics suggest it is still all-male at the top,
as does the assertion by the feminist artist Judy Chicago that only 2.7%
of art books concern female artists. When I spoke to Chicago last year,
she pointed out: "The monographs on artists, permanent collections and
major exhibitions are really the path into history, and that's what is
important to look at, and not be deceived by the many women showing at
entry level in smaller and regional museums and galleries."
The
glass ceiling in art still exists, then – but campaigners are determined
to break it. The audit was set up to put this issue on the map, says
Rolls-Bentley; to encourage the art world to consider gender
balance much more frequently and freely. If that becomes second nature,
the many brilliant women at the start of their careers today, putting
on shows in small galleries, might have a genuine shot at history.
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