A Must-Read:
Vogue
,
Nylon
Chicago Review of Books
Literary Hub
Frieze
The Millions
Publishers Weekly
InsideHook
The Next Big Idea Club
“[Lauren] Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur . . . Sharp and cool . . . [
Art Monsters
is] exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.”
—Maggie Lange,
The Washington Post
“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 women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of
Flâneuse
—explores 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 reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece
DICTEE
—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène 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,
is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.