Art Monsters

September 1, 2023

A good companion to Claire Dederer's trending Monsters, PEN essay finalist Elkin's Art Monsters considers feminist art not just as defiance of patriarchy but as an aesthetic with goals of its own (30,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from October 16, 2023
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.

October 15, 2023
In this rigorous analysis of what it means to be a woman artist, Elkin (Fl�neuse, 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.

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