Art Monsters is a kaleidoscopic, dense, curious text that has a lot of potential avenues for student interest. I do not see a potential place in my curriculum, given its dense nature, but I will consider purchasing a copy or two for my classroom. I really appreciated the intertextuality of the book - it could be really interesting addition to AP Lang's curriculum, especially with its connection to Woolf and Solnit.

For Lauren Elkin’s purposes, feminist art can be said to be traced in 1620 from Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, the Hebrew hero/shero, her slash, the hideous gash, depicting the monstrous act that can only be perpetrated by someone equally monstrous. More monstrous than the act of painting the same scene painted by the male artist, Caravaggio roughly twenty years earlier. Painting, this is masculine stuff, painting depictions of grisly valor—that a woman would consider such a tableau through the execution of a masculine profession is too monstrous to imagine. The story of Judith did not make the inclusive cut within the traditional King James canon. One almost wonders why the censures of the seventeenth century did not paint over Judith with a Jude. Almost. Elkin reminds us of the mythological company monstrous Judith keeps: Medusa, the sphinx, Kali. Historically, women have been discouraged from becoming artists. The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez painted in the seventeenth century and slashed with a big knife by Mary Richardson in 1914, the irony being, Elkin observes, work by women artists wasn’t allowed in galleries whereas depictions of nude women, painted by men, were on the walls.

Feminism just got serious. Around that time, segue to another naked lady, Virginia Woolf in her bath. While soaping and rinsing her body parts, our fierce intellectual is pondering the societal situation of woman. Enter Lauren Elkin. The close attention paid by her to the body of Woolf’s work becomes frame and textual grid for her study of the art monster, a term attributed to the novelist, Jenny Offill and applied to feminist art by Elkin.

Elkin weighs in on controversial topics like racial appropriation, overcoming the lack of permission to paint nudes, in the 1980s the discourse on the irresponsibility of feminist artists to depict the female nude without theory when all female nudes fall within the male interpretative gaze, and the female body mutilated by knife slash as an act toward health in breast cancer patients.

The collected biographies of women artists and their art works, working from the 1970s to the present women thematically and conceptually arranged by Elkin make for a fascinating read, her criticism, opinionated and progressive.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC.

An obviously well written book, but structurally did not appeal to me. Felt slightly disjointed and not cohesive enough for me personally. I think it would have been a better read if the writer did not repeatedly reference the same writer/artist all over. That's just a personal preference, of course. While I thought the topics and arguments introduced seemed compelling and interesting enough, I was ultimately not convinced enough? Still glad to have read it though, and I look forward to reading the author's future work.

“The book like the body is teaching us how to read it.” Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is a strange beast of a book, in which Lauren Elkin so seamlessly threads together a whole host of complex and disparate ideas about art and bodies and feminism, blending art criticism with literary criticism, and interpolating some art history and personal memoir elements for good measure. It is a work, like many of the ones Elkin explores within, that should not work but absolutely does. Having only read Elkin’s (truly excellent) bus diaries, and the occasional short piece, I had no idea what to expect — maybe a more straightforward, neat little narrative, a chronological arrow about representations and uses of the body, mostly female, in art made by women. Instead, Elkin is elliptical, unafraid to see how contemporary filmmakers and twentieth century writers and seventeenth century artists are all working in conversation with one another, consciously or otherwise. This is the first, but I hope not the last, book where I have seen Lady Gaga’s name printed next to Susan Sontag’s, not far from Simone Weil, a thrill that may be unique to me, but still reveals Elkin’s eclectic, irreverent approach to the subject at hand. She also plays on the multiplicity of the titular ‘monsters’ as both noun and verb: to monster. Herein lies a great achievement of Elkin’s work, putting the work before the artist, itself a monstrous thing, overthrowing old narratives: “monstrosity, […] in its broadest, most marvellous form, dwells more in the surprise of the work, than the personal life of the artist making it”. Rather than answers, questions are offered like windows, letting light in by which to read, to view; to paint, to write.

A measured and thoughtful book on the reclamation of the body in art. Eschewing the cold formalism of (some) art criticism, this book endeavours to explore the artistic pioneers who re-centred the body as a space for creation.

A smart and provocative history of women and art and women artists. From Virginia Woolf to Ana Mendieta, Elkin draws really interesting lines through history to get to the root of what keeps women from being art monsters. Really enjoyed it!

This was a really interesting read. I think the idea of the monstrous woman in art is a fascination theme to explore. iWhilst I didn’t fully understand all of the connections that Elkin made (partly because of my limited knowledge of art) I really enjoyed how Woolf was a crucial part throughout the text.

Feminist art, beauty and excess? SIGN. ME. UP. Elkin's essay collection is packed with dense info and ponders female physicality in the art world. The title is inspired by Dept. of Speculation, where Jenny Offill uses the term "art monster" - and Elkin now investigates when and why women and their bodies are perceived as monstrous, as abject, as transgressive, and how female artists have claimed and owned their agency in being art monsters. From authors like Kathy Acker and Virginia Woolf over visual artists like Emma Sulkowicz and Eva Hesse to thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Elkin ponders the lives and times of various art monsters who have changed their respective fields.

All texts relate to the body, be it young, old, queer, disabled, sick or healthy, and how the body exists in the world and is reflected in art. This is no easy book though: While Elkin is an excellent writer who makes it easy to follow her thoughts, the sheer amount of knowledge and the (smart!) complexity of the arguments presented require a reader who really wants to dive into these topics - and this reader will be richly rewarded with intelligent, transformative ideas about the role of female art monsters in a male-dominated art world.