Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

A Must-Read: Vogue, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub 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 womens stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkinthe celebrated author of Flneuseexplores 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 referenceamong them Julia Margaret Camerons photography, Kara Walkers silhouettes, Vanessa Bells portraits, Eva Hesses rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemanns body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Chas trilingual masterpiece DICTEEand steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hlne 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 imagineand enactour lives.