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Summary
A Must-Read: Vogue , Nylon , Chicago Review of Books , Literary Hub , Frieze , The Millions , Publishers Weekly , InsideHook , The Next Big Idea Club ,
"[Lauren] Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur . . . Sharp and cool . . . [ Art Monsters is] exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration." --Maggie Lange, The Washington Post
"Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought." --Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty.
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin--the celebrated author of Flâneuse --explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference--among them Julia Margaret Cameron's photography, Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits, Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE --and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.
An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine--and enact--our lives.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Writer and translator Elkin (No. 91/92) presents dense and probing meditations on the "art monster," a term borrowed from Jenny Offill's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation ("Art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things... rarely women, and if women, then women who have renounced... housework, children"). Gathering female artists from roughly the 1950s on, Elkin delves deep into "what it was that they were so bent on doing that they ran the risk of being called a monster," including their nearly unsolvable task of "telling the truth of own experiences as a body," as Virginia Woolf put it. Spotlit here are Carolee Schneemann, whose provocative 1975 nude performance Interior Scroll marked "a moment when feminist artists committed themselves to making the body a site of liberation"; Kara Walker, whose 35-foot-tall "sugar-coated mammy figure in a Sphinx pose," which was displayed in Brooklyn in 2014, sublimated racist tropes and challenged the kinds of art Black women are allowed to make; and Eva Hesse, whose sculptures used rough "industrial materials as if they were paint" and thereby help viewers "take back our bodies from narratives that would deny their autonomy," because "to reclaim touch for the aesthetic... is to ask basic question about the relationships between our bodies." Expertly blending astute critical analysis with intellectual curiosity, Elkin resists easy answers about questions of femininity, physicality, and art, leading the text into rich and unexpected directions. Even those well acquainted with feminist art will be enlightened. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
Who gets to be a monster? Is the term reserved for enemies or can it be applied to heroes too? Lauren Elkin's work of radical feminist criticism asks us to meet her art monsters, who are all women, and to see their monstrosity as central to their being and their art. She defines an art monster as someone "reaching after the truth of her own body", someone who "takes for granted that the experiences of female embodiment are relevant to all humankind", someone who "alerts us to what is outside of language". Her book is written in a series of short and long snippets, separated by slashes. Some of them are critical engagements with works of art, others are fragments of memoir about existing in a female body or the process of writing the book itself; still others are more general art historical criticism or reflection. The immediacy of it all carries the reader along with Elkin as she thinks through her questions and disrupts traditional expectations of how "serious" theory should be written. The monstrosity of the artists Elkin covers is sometimes selfish or violent, but often it is just about being different from the norm - in life and art. Vanessa Bell's monstrousness comes from her radical paintings, and it is her work that finally convinces Elkin that "monstrosity, understood in its broadest, most marvellous form, dwells more in the surprise of the work, than the personal life of the artist making it". For other artists, monstrosity in life and art run together. Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, a film of her and her partner, James Tenney, having sex, made over the course of several years, is one of many examples of transgressiveness in her work. What Elkin's artists have in common is that in form, feeling, intention or lifestyle, they have violated expectations. I am reminded of feminist retellings of Greek myths - these artists are the Medusas and Circes of the 20th century, recast as not only powerful and dangerous but also brilliant and autonomous. This book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women Elkin threads stories of her own body and how it feels in the world through those of her artists. She recounts how Kathy Acker's work initially made her feel nauseous, how her pregnancy changed her understanding of creativity, how her opinion of Schneemann's oeuvre evolved over time as she came to see it as more than just erotic. Elkin is standing on the shoulders of the women she writes about, whose art blazed a trail of nonlinearity and ambiguity. The fragmented narrative structure builds on her previous two books: Flâneuse, a history of women walking the streets of cities, entwined with Elkin's own wanderings, and No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, an autofiction-esque memoir written entirely on a bus route in the French capital. Art Monsters is her most theoretical work yet, while eschewing the conventions of that genre. As much as the book is led by Elkin's own feelings, she looks beyond the boundaries of her experience as a white woman. Her chapter on white artist Dana Schutz, whose painting of lynched black boy Emmett Till in his coffin caused controversy when it was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is a particularly thoughtful and nuanced look at a moment in the art world that white people can fumble responses to. The artists she engages with often look different from her - Kara Walker, Betye Saar, Sutapa Biswas, Lubaina Himid, Howardena Pindell, Ana Mendieta among others - and she is clear-sighted about the obstacles they have faced because of this while still seriously engaging with their work on a personal level. The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism, reaching backward and forward in time from that crucial moment. Like second-wave feminism, this book is constructed in opposition to patriarchy, and one of the central questions for the art monster is "how to depict the female body without either catering to or rejecting the male gaze". Elkin seeks in each of her artists a form of practice that is not just a "refutation of patriarchy, but a gesture at building her own aesthetics". I call them "her artists" because that is how they feel as we meet them with her - not quite like her friends, but like her comrades in arms, her own coterie of inspirations, the artists who have made her the creative person she is. As the book progresses, Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual's reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory - or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment. Art Monsters joins a larger conversation about monstrousness and art. In Claire Dederer's recent Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, the monsters in question are mostly men who committed various forms of violence, abuse and discrimination. She asks how (and if) we can appreciate their work in spite of their monstrosity. Elkin's use of the word is very different, but she grapples with similar questions about what we consider acceptable behaviour for artists and how that is connected to gender and power. Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently - the monsters in our midst.
Booklist Review
In this rigorous analysis of what it means to be a woman artist, Elkin (Flâneuse, 2016) theorizes the concept of the art monster, a term she uses to conceptualize what happens when women invent new forms of storytelling by using their own languages rather than those established by men. In Elkin's assessment, doing this necessarily entails foregrounding the female body and putting it at the center of artmaking. Examples include feminist art icons like Carolee Schneeman, whose infamous Interior Scroll involved her pulling a roll of paper from her vagina in protest of a misogynistic art culture that looked down upon diaristic and messy art, as well as emerging contemporary artists like Emma Sulkowicz, who made headlines in 2014 when she staged a yearlong performance carrying a mattress around Columbia University, where she was then enrolled, to protest the university's failure to expel her accused rapist. With its frequent use of the first person plural, this art history for feminist creatives foregrounds the work rather than the lives of women artists, seeking to uncover what has driven their artmaking.
Library Journal Review
In a 1931 speech, Virginia Woolf told an audience that art must both build and destroy. Using this thesis, Elkin (Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London) deeply examines women artists whose work critics and audiences have found challenging, threatening, obscene, or even grotesque--in other words, monstrous. Elkin analyzes the art and artists through a feminist lens, asserting that feminism and art are both filled with ambiguity and contradictions. Sections of the book are separated by a slash, which Elkin says represents both exclusion and inclusion simultaneously; a zone of ambiguity. The art considered is from as recently as Emma Sulkowicz's high-profile 2014 "Mattress Performance," and as far back as painter Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portraits in the 1600s. An extensive bibliography and list of notes are included, as well as black-and-white images of many of the pieces of art referenced, which are interspersed throughout the text. This book leans heavily on the academic side, calling on the ideas of many notable feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Susan Sontag, and might not be accessible to readers looking for a light analysis of pop culture and art. VERDICT This book is better suited for academic libraries than for public libraries.--Heather Sheahan
Table of Contents
| The slash | xi |
| I Monster theory | |
| Angels and monsters | 3 |
| Carry that weight | 23 |
| The hand-touch sensibility | 33 |
| Objects of vulgarity | 43 |
| Slash/aesthetics | 50 |
| On sensation | 57 |
| On articulation | 63 |
| II Professions for women | |
| The angel in the image | 77 |
| Sibyls and slashers | 88 |
| Extreme times call for extreme heroines | 99 |
| Difficult conversations | 112 |
| Get out your steak knives, Kali | 122 |
| Let it blaze! | 134 |
| III Bodies of work | |
| This monster the body | 147 |
| Body awareness | 161 |
| Fuses | 170 |
| Her body is a problem | 180 |
| Vanitas | 193 |
| Ucky | 210 |
| The nature of fire | 224 |
| Kathy Acker is my abject | 236 |
| Meat | 252 |
| Decreate to create | 264 |
| Right after | 279 |
| List of illustrations | 283 |
| Notes | 289 |
| Bibliography | 323 |
| Acknowledgements | 339 |
| Index | 343 |