Who gets to be a monster? Is the term reserved for enemies or can it be applied to heroes too? Lauren Elkin’s work of radical feminist criticism asks us to meet her art monsters, who are all women, and to see their monstrosity as central to their being and their art.
She defines an art monster as someone “reaching after the truth of her own body”, someone who “takes for granted that the experiences of female embodiment are relevant to all humankind”, someone who “alerts us to what is outside of language”. Her book is written in a series of short and long snippets, separated by slashes. Some of them are critical engagements with works of art, others are fragments of memoir about existing in a female body or the process of writing the book itself; still others are more general art historical criticism or reflection. The immediacy of it all carries the reader along with Elkin as she thinks through her questions and disrupts traditional expectations of how “serious” theory should be written.
