THOUGHTS/ESSAY:
EVENTS: L7 in Australia 🦘
PHOTO GALLERY / ARCHIVES: Tiny Nightmare and JPF at “Laugh, Cry, Fight!… with the Guerrilla Girls”
GIRL CAUGHT A FIRE: Memoir style essays on my life / Childhood (coming soon)
Explaining the 90s to Jennifer Finch (essays on 90s culture - coming soon).
HELLO. my name is Jennifer Finch. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. I have dedicated my life music and visual art and am adding essayist to evolving list of interests. I love reflecting on cultural production, media, modern mythology, punk rock, fashion, society and self.
My musical credits include being the bass player, writer and co-singer in L7 (1986 to current), The guitarist and co-singer in Other Star People (1999 - 2003) and the Singer / song-writer in The Shocker (2003 - current).
photo of Jennifer Finch by Tiny Nightmare
Hey Friends, for quick content, I am going to refer to the Guerrilla Girls a lot, and you may need to know more about them. This article is inspired by their first and only West Coast show that is currently up (UNTIL JAN 2024) and you should go!:
Laugh, Cry, Fight!… with the Guerrilla Girls
At BEYOND THE STREETS Gallery in Los Angeles
NOV 22, 2023 - JAN 18, 2024
Gallery Info: Show Info.
Guerrilla_Girls WIKI
Guerrilla_Girls Website
Now that you are back - let’s talk about…
NAKED LADIES. We all love them. Photographers love them. Artists love them. Oh, and capitalism really love them. My own path as an artist started with the usual mix of drawing on my own and taking the occasional after-school art class where I was eventually asked to draw a naked lady.
Anyone on the art/education trajectory knows that advancing inevitably leads to what is called… “life drawing” as the advanced class - the class where they use live models, the “advanced, advanced” life drawing — introduces the naked model and becomes the centerpiece of creation.
Truth be told, the idea of Life Drawing as “Advanced” creeped my teenage self out. At the time, I assumed it was me. Maybe some weird mix of self-consciousness around sexuality or some kind of self-hatred, or Body dysmorphic disorder, or the way the other kids talked about the differences in bodies the way kids do. Something felt off to me, but I had no way to articulate it at the time. I just had this feeling that people got weird around interacting, painting, portraying, etc. a naked women.
Spoiler Alert: I never really became the painter I thought I’d be. Perhaps it was in part due to those early experiences and maybe because I found “studio art” kind of underwhelming — especially painting. It turned out to be too expensive, too toxic (literally and figuratively), I did not have anywhere to store all “the stuff” and the way to make money at it is completely controlled by too many dull people. But one thing stuck: the realization that, for so many famous artists that made it to the museums and into the history books, the path to recognition seemed to hinge on their ability to interpret and reinterpret the female body—specifically, the naked female body.
This theme repeated itself as I began to educate myself on art history and theory. The nude figure was the door-opener, the ticket to galleries and exhibitions. Picasso, Matisse, Klien, Duchamp—on back through history—every generation seemed to define itself by how it painted, sculpted, photographed, satirized, or distorted its version of “her,” the naked lady. (For the record, Duchamp is my favorite in this regard. Nude Descending the Staircase— he was one of the first punks for sure. Credit where it’s due).
For those who are part of the mainstream canon, the female body is less a subject and more a tool—a way for male artists to declare, “Look how I’m different.” And while this is often framed as a celebration of form or beauty, it’s hard to ignore the undercurrent of exploitation and the power dynamics baked into the act of creating and consuming these images. Add to that the exclusionary practices of most museums over the last centuries of women and BIPOC artists (still far from perfect in 2024), and the naked lady starts to look less like art and more like a symptom of a deeper sickness.
And yes dear reader, before you start listing all the fantastic women artists and performers out there who’s work also explores the female naked body with all its complications, Let me remind you, we are still talking about women artist STILL being considered on the fringes, and only very recently has their presence begun to pressure the mainstream of art history courses and mainstream museum collections. (I’m looking at you Ono, Sherman, Abramović.) Even then, they’re often treated as outliers rather than central to the narrative.
And here is why I ❤️ the Guerrilla Girls.
They, as seeming required by the art world - did their very own reinterpretation of the naked lady. They actually did the last reiteration of the nude that we will really ever need. They released her from the walls of thirsty, power-hungry museum curators, put a mask on her —a mask of a beastie Gorilla 🦍 and let her out to play. With her face obscured she got to become anonymous (again) in a new and different way. Like the Guerrilla Girls who also wear gorilla masks - her mission, her principles, her message got to be forefront recursively reminding all — her identity was often that of a nameless women or girl, perhaps a model from a life drawing class, or a lover from a bar or a prostitute, or a young servant who’s name was unimportant to the artist, lost somewhere in time.
She got to “perform art as protest.” They gave her text to call out the power in the museum system that excludes women and BIPOC artists. She, the naked lady could now speak to the system of gate keepers, the private auctions, the investment bankers, the wealthy patrons, the power dynamics, the art market —and gave that creeping “dis-ease” a diagnosis. The Guerrilla Girls simplified the complexities into sharp, unavoidable questions: Why is this the default? Who decides what kind of art is worth elevating? And more importantly, who gets to decide who creates it? Who sells it? Who buys it? Who collects it.
The Naked Lady Is Having Fun!
Remember that ick feeling I had in high school when confronted with the “advanced, advanced” art classes that introduced live nudes? While I couldn’t quite place the off feelings I felt at the time and assumed there was something off with me - The Guerilla Girls work helped me make sense of the ick I felt toward the female nude. Their art helped me realize it wasn’t the nude itself, but the female nude in context to society that made me feel weird. It wasn’t the awkward teen version of me - it was society, how she was treated that gave me the ick.
She became a symbol of the things the Guerrilla Girls were exposing—how exclusion and exploitation go hand in hand, and how systems of power in the art world mirror those in society. For me, their message wasn’t just about fairness or inclusion. It was about asking why these systems exist in the first place—and whether I wanted any part of them.
I think back to being that teenager in art class, automatically assuming I’m the one with the problem. That’s the power of a well-crafted system. It can so seamlessly shift the blame, that we blame ourselves. It makes us believe there is something inherently wrong with us. But thanks to the work of the Guerrilla Girls and like artists, I’ve learned to see through those oh-so-well-established lies. They reminded me that the protest is the art. That art is the protest, and although the system of museums has improved the narrative, we all really should be keeping an eye on it over the next 4 years.
——————————
For our next Guerrilla Girls installments:
let talk about ANIMAL HORROR and King Kong and other “Ape” movies. Is there any film folks out there who can consult on ANIMAL HORROR context and history? Is it just a case of Vorarephilia that drives people to fantasize about a massive ape from a “still savage lost-in-time” place coming to destroy modernity and eat them? Is it postcolonial guilt looking to relieve itself? How will I ever tie that into Guerrilla Girls?? — More will be revealed!
Tiny Nightmare and Jennifer Finch at Beyond the Streets
December 2024
2024-12-6 Melbourne, AU Flemington Racecourse (Tickets)
2024-12-7 Sydney, AU Centennial Park (Tickets)
2024-12-8 Brisbane, AU – Brisbane Showgrounds (Tickets)
Thank you so much for reading this far down, you rule!
LOVE,
Aubree Miller IG: @tinynightmare @jenniferfinch @myrockstarsays
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