Book review: Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin

August 03, 2024

Last year, an artist friend texted me about one of Julia Cameron’s commands from her creativity reclamation workbook “The Artist’s Way”: Identify five people you admire and then five people you secretly admire. We liked the imperative to consider clandestine forms of respect, which forced us to think beyond the wise, justice-minded heroes we openly admired. My friend’s secret idols were “vain/glamorous, bratty,” while mine were single-minded and funny. But none were men, and all were selfish, excessive, messy, feral and consciously — sometimes even willfully — disliked by many. And if we’d known the term, developed by Lauren Elkin in her new book, they’d all be Art Monsters.

“Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” is a series of interlocked essays that identify a creative sensibility. Art Monsters have an instinct toward provocation (in both their artwork and the conduct of their lives), a creative pull toward the unspeakable, a defiant aesthetic, a focus on the body. The book centers primarily on visual artists — Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas and Kara Walker are some of its main characters — but it is attentive to literary ogres, as well. Virginia Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Kathy Acker are equally consequential in the development of this theory.

Elkin takes her title and primary terminology from Jenny Offill’s slender novel “Dept. of Speculation ”:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Elkin, an essayist with a historian’s worldview, is keenly aware that this project of being an Art Monster entails a great deal of labor. She knows who’s doing the stamp-licking and life maintenance in the lives of these female artists. Almost all of them had to vehemently resist supporting someone else in exchange for making their own art. The umbrellas perhaps never got folded. Elkin is most interested in the art these women made — as she should be; their art is fascinating — but the book also argues that this art is often a response to the social structures that threatened to inhibit them.

Like her many subjects, Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur. But while she’s provocative and firm, she’s also careful and diligent about demonstrating her arguments. It’s a very satisfying combination. She has a clear and elegant style reminiscent of other sharp and cool feminist academia thinkers, such as Sara Ahmed and Maggie Nelson. She’s inspired by her subjects but not a cheerleader; this book is devoted to the qualities of the Art Monster but not uncritical of the persona. Elkin points, for example, to Dana Schutz, a White woman who painted a controversial portrait of Emmett Till. But Elkin dwells more consistently on artists, such as Carolee Schneemann, who were reviled or dismissed in their time, often because they confronted or disappointed their fellow feminists — but whose work seems to have transformed over the passing years into something radical and sacred.

In analyzing the lives of these artists, Elkin adopts a conceit proposed by Woolf in her speech “Professions for Women,” about “two of the adventures” of her professional life. The first adventure concerns resisting the call to serve men, a resistance, Woolf said, that “I think I solved.” “But the second,” she admitted, “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved.” Thank goodness no one has solved the challenge of creating fully expressive art about the experience of walking around, thinking, inside a woman’s body. In its very ambiguity that “problem” makes women’s art that much more thrilling, thorny, strange, grasping and layered.

One of Elkin’s premises concerns the fruitfulness of the inarticulate attempt. Anyone who tries to express something outside of the current “regime of truth,” as Michel Foucault called it, runs into this barrier. They must make meaning where there is none, and this, Elkin theorizes, engenders inventiveness. By aiming to express the inexpressible, and of course missing, these artists keep making breakthroughs. In the process, they change what is and is not sayable, leaving us at a new loss about saying something more true, and work is made about this impossibility, once again.

For the Art Monsters whom Elkin studies, a preoccupation with what cannot be articulated but must be spoken is often made manifest through deliberately fragmentary aesthetic choices. The works of her subjects often contain a visible rip or some other intentional fault, as is evidenced by Vanessa Bell’s smudged paintings or the canvas at the center of Céline Sciamma’s film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019). As Elkin writes, “The woman in pieces may see herself in fragments as a way of holding herself together — or reconfiguring the body language she was given.”

From the beginning, Elkin envisions the Art Monster as a mode of being, an entire artistic approach. “I realised the word monster was just as effective as a verb,” she observes. Think of Rachel Yoder’s novel “Nightbitch,” in which a stifled conceptual artist and new mother gradually transforms into a creature that is selfish, excessive, carnivorous. “She monstered out of the restaurant,” Yoder writes as her protagonist’s metamorphosis takes hold. Monster as verb. Monstering as a practice. Monstering as a way to live and create. This conceit is on every page, in every artwork Elkin analyzes. “Art Monsters” is not prescriptive or instructive — better, it’s exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.

Maggie Lange is a writer who covers style, culture and art. She lives in Philadelphia.

Art Monsters

Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

By Lauren Elkin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 354 pp. $35

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