The shock of the new in feminist art

Lauren Elkin begins her book about bodily art with a charming ode to the punctuation mark that she in American English calls a ‘slash’ and we in British English call a ‘stroke’. She likes the way it expresses ‘division yet relation’. Brings disparate things together. Makes space for ambiguity. Blends and blurs. And/or. She writes:

The slash is the first person tipped over: the first person joining me to the person beside me, or me to you. Across the slash we can find each other. Across the slash I think we can do some work.

That work begins in Art Monsters with a lively and vibrant account of feminist art that articulates the everyday experience of having a body. This might not sound especially radical but, as Elkin writes, the female nude is ‘art or obscene, depending on the context’. She continues: ‘Made by man, in the context of the history of art, it is beauty itself.’ Made by a woman, it can be inappropriate, vain and scandalous.

The book borrows its title from two much-quoted sentences from Dept. of Speculation (2014), Jenny Offill’s fragmentary novel about modern marriage: ‘My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.’ The expression ‘art monster’ has now become popular in the feminist lexicon, writes Elkin, sparking conversations about what it means to have a family and make art. But rather than focus on female artists’ lives, she encourages us to look at their work – ‘at what it was that they were so bent on doing that they ran the risk of being called a monster’.