Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
by Lauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus , £20

DISTANCED from the market’s central nervous system, the avant-gardes of art and literature play together.

New ways of seeing, desiring and being are imagined. Questions about selfhood, in particular women’s selfhood, emerge while mainstream discourses are directed elsewhere.

A lack of curiosity from the market — because unsellable — helps create conditions in which artists and writers kick back against their confinements: social repression, economic unviability, the taboo.

Eventually, the mainstream catches up, or on; market tentacles detect potential for profit.

I see Lauren Elkin’s new book, Art Monsters, as the product of such a dynamic, focusing as it does on a seam of avant-garde cultural development of the 1970s and early ’80s, so far underexploited, but opening up. 

Nostalgia for the New York of this period carries with it an unconscious recognition of the annihilation — by the market — of its creative energy, through gentrification.

New York is a dead zone now for artists: high-end art galleries have replaced the run-down lofts and warehouse studios where creative practice could grow. 

Another crucial connection to the period for feminism is Roe v Wade, achieved in 1973, overturned in the great backlash of Trumpian neoliberalism.

How to negotiate these conflicting imperatives: return to the source for inspiration and feed the market?

Published by Chatto & Windus (Penguin-owned), Art Monsters is a gorgeous-looking object containing high-quality representations of wonderful art works.

The book’s liveliest writing deals with a small group of women working in obscurity in New York in the ’70s. 

These artists have been disseminated across art school teaching for decades but their breakthrough to wider public recognition is more recent.

Grouping them under the “art monsters” strap-line signals feminist conceptions of women’s freedom to transgress: bodily and sexual demands to take up more space, women filling their appetites beyond what are the usual measures allotted them.

Transgression is something female artists are made for; art-making involves the body in intimate play; getting naked, messing with gloop, daubing, spilling, pouring and uckying up, and scrolling manifestos out of every conceivable orifice — this is the artist’s modus operandi.

Enviable to writers who only get to hold a biro, tappy-tap across a keyboard; artists seem bigger and braver than their introverted writer sisters. 

So there is a bit of fangirl going on in this book, evident in the emphasis on short-lived careers: young lives flaring brilliantly, dying quickly, usually tragically.

A bit of doomy Edwardian sensibility underpins the book, represented by Bloomsbury suicide Virginia Woolf, presented by Elken as some sort of alpha-Fabian-mother-wolf.

But the toll of violence against these young women does register the risks involved in daring to transgress.

There is Cuban-American visionary Ana Mendieta, “falling” under suspicious circumstances from a New York high-rise, aged 37.

Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, raped and murdered in a random encounter, aged 32.

Photographer Francesca Woodman, a suicide at 32.

Others such as sculptor Eva Hesse, were seemingly contaminated by the materials of their craft, dying of cancers that they documented, incorporating death into their body of work as a last clash with reality.

A structural weakness for the book is that such premature exits limit the breadth and depth of work necessary to extend the conversation beyond early achievements.

You start looking around for the survivors — where are the long-tooths?

I found myself asking, wanting Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, Annie Ernaux, Vivien Gornick, to name just a few. 

Art Monsters may be more rock’n’roll than in-depth cultural critique; still it offers challenging insights when the Continental theorists show up.

The greatest strength of Art Monsters for me lies in the connections Elkin makes between art-makers and those radical feminist thinkers whose work they’ve absorbed: Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Beauvoir, Kristeva — heavyweight ideas are shown jabbing at the boundaries of possibility in art.  

US art activist/writers, Chris Kraus and Lucy Lippard are there too. 

Other theorists introduced include US literary critic and black feminist theorist, Hortense Spillers.

Her essay, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, is peerless writing I am grateful to have come across through Elkin. 

Art Monsters is messy in structure, a bit blog-ish with some red-herring digressions and patching from previously published material.

At its core it’s a valuable documentation of creative achievement in the trenches of pre-financialised Manhattan. A must-have resource for discovering influential art work of marginalised women reporting on life in the abject.