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 . . . Art Monsters is not prescriptive or instructive—better, it’s exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.” —Maggie Lange, The Washington Post
“Lauren Elkin changes the way you see the world around you . . . [In Art Monsters she] embarks on an achronological, art historical thrill-ride for the senses.” —Joshua Zajdman, Vogue
"Art Monsters joins a larger conversation about monstrousness and art. [. . .] provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently." —The Guardian
“Intellectually rigorous and emotionally astute. [Elkin’s] supple narrative gives deep attention to a diverse gathering of second-wave feminist visual artists and writers . . . There is an elliptical, cellular quality to [Art Monsters] . . . Elkin is masterful . . . compassionate, thorough, and discerning in her coverage of the lives and intentions of the women she features . . . Elkin’s vision is surprising in the best way. Innovation, interrogation, and intersectionality combine to bring a new understanding of how fertile the unruly body has been and continues to be.” —Sara Rauch, New City
“Essential . . . Art Monsters succeeds in bringing up important issues without beating readers over the head with what they already know, in part by insisting that the ‘art monster’ is not a ‘rhetorical flourish, or figurehead’ but, rather, ‘a (once) living, breathing person.’ Elkin embraces artists whose stories are too specific and complex to be affixed to feminist formulas—a lesson, I think, in the art that lives and lasts.” —Emily Watlington, Art in America
"A truly feminist work . . . building a ‘monstrous network’ of artists, while allowing the work to shape itself, veering between beauty and excess, and so to find its own monstrous form." —New Statesman
"A lively and vibrant account of feminist art that articulates the everyday experience of having a body . . . [a] superb book’" —The Spectator
"Insightful, provocative and at times heartbreaking." —Literary Review
“Art Monsters is [Elkin's] most theoretical work yet, while eschewing the conventions of that genre . . . thoughtful and nuanced . . . The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalizes, instead of essentializing . . . provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently—the monsters in our midst.” —Eliza Goodpasture, The Guardian
“[Art Monsters] proceeds as if it were a series of conversations with those whose work [Elkin] admires or feels challenged to examine more closely. I read it in a similar spirit, the pages of my proof copy covered in scribbles and exclamations, as though Elkin and I were engaged in lively debate. We often disagreed, but that’s no bad thing . . . One of the challenges she sets herself is to honour and analyse her honest responses . . . Art Monsters is also [Elkin’s] personal quest to become immoderate and unruly . . . In those sections where she does cut loose and take flight, it is intoxicating to be carried along in her slipstream.’” —Hettie Judah, Times Literary Supplement
"Elkin proves a more informative guide to feminist trends in the visual arts, bringing many an ephemeral happening energetically back to life." —Daily Telegraph
“Expertly blending astute critical analysis with intellectual curiosity, Elkin resists easy answers about questions of femininity, physicality, and art, leading the text into rich and unexpected directions. Even those well acquainted with feminist art will be enlightened.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rigorous analysis of what it means to be a woman artist.” —Maggie Taft, Booklist
“Lauren Elkin’s exhaustive, incisive re-readings of feminist writing and art across several centuries prove that the questions raised in these works are far from resolved. In fact, they're more timely than ever. The book seems destined to become a new classic. Making a passionate case for the monstrosity entailed in all acts of creation, Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
“Lauren Elkin has the nerve to defend the guilty, fight tooth and claw for long abandoned causes while making heroines out of trouble makers. Her book makes you take sides, change sides, change back and sometimes shout out loud with furious indignation, but you won’t find anything like this history, told in this way, anywhere else.” —Lubaina Himid, Turner Prize-winning artist
“Elkin’s authority as a cultural critic springs from her signature style of curious questioning. Rather than imposing her conclusions on the reader, she juxtaposes ideas, images, language, in a vivid collage that invites us to look more deeply. Never linear—because life isn’t—but perpetually moving, in both senses of the word.” —Jeanette Winterson, author of Frankissstein
“Soaring and vivid, the experience of reading Art Monsters is like watching a lightning storm at night, each chapter a bolt of light. A remarkable twinning of intellect and brightest scholarship, it left me giddy with possibility.” —Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat
“A fascinating re-visioning and re-imagining of women artists who have used their bodies in all sorts of creative, subversive ways. Lauren Elkin provides fresh insight into more familiar names and works, and brings plenty of less well-known ones to light, taking us through more than a century of women who boldly took on the world.” —Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: a memoir
09/01/2023
In a 1931 speech, Virginia Woolf told an audience that art must both build and destroy. Using this thesis, Elkin (Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London) deeply examines women artists whose work critics and audiences have found challenging, threatening, obscene, or even grotesque—in other words, monstrous. Elkin analyzes the art and artists through a feminist lens, asserting that feminism and art are both filled with ambiguity and contradictions. Sections of the book are separated by a slash, which Elkin says represents both exclusion and inclusion simultaneously; a zone of ambiguity. The art considered is from as recently as Emma Sulkowicz's high-profile 2014 "Mattress Performance," and as far back as painter Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portraits in the 1600s. An extensive bibliography and list of notes are included, as well as black-and-white images of many of the pieces of art referenced, which are interspersed throughout the text. This book leans heavily on the academic side, calling on the ideas of many notable feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Susan Sontag, and might not be accessible to readers looking for a light analysis of pop culture and art. VERDICT This book is better suited for academic libraries than for public libraries.—Heather Sheahan
