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Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, by Lauren Elkin, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2023, 368 pages.
I recently read Art Monsters, by Lauren Elkin, which came out earlier this year. I’m recommending it because, as always but especially now, it’s time for us to consider some of the questions that feminist writers, artists, and psychoanalysts have raised for decades: what it means to think, write, work, create art in a female body, grappling with the boundaries of interior/exterior, restraint/excess, visible/invisible, beautiful/grotesque. Elkin specifically examines what is considered monstrous about the liminality and multiplicity of feminist work in art made by women between the 70s to the 90s. In psychoanalysis, we regularly encounter that monstrous feminine, reaching for unconscious material that resonates viscerally and overspills boundaries. Elkin writes and sees art from the body here, in the tradition of French feminist psychoanalysts such as Helene Cixous. She considers what is impossible and monstrous about being a mother and a writer/artist, what it is like to create work in a pregnant body (she discusses becoming pregnant with her first child during the writing of this book, and the limitations thereof), what lives can be imagined outside the binaries of gender, of beauty and ugliness. Psychoanalysis struggles with the same historical problem as the fields of art and literature for women or any individual in an outsider position, in that the language we rely upon is one that we did not invent. Elkin ultimately advocates that we appreciate the fact that “we do not all come to language or image in the same way along the same path” (p. 274). Her lens is inspiring, her call for us to make room for ambiguity (what she calls “at the same times”) is useful to psychoanalysis, and her book as a whole is a stunning example of a form of writing and thinking that we need to see more of.
Andrea Fortunato Loftus, Associate Issue Editor
London, UK