Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin review – daring to be different

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.

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.

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