When Lauren Elkin began work on this book, she believed its subject was monstrosity and female creativity, her spur a now much-quoted line from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” Naturally, Elkin hardly needed to be told that such a monster is almost inevitably male: a beast who relies on women for all the mundane things in life (the cooking, the washing, the regular praise due to an undoubted genius). Female art monsters are thin on the ground because to become one means choosing work over motherhood.
But it wasn’t only such unfairness that interested her. The more she thought about it, the more she saw that while it is still agonisingly difficult for a woman to allow herself to be monstrous – how we fear baring our teeth – it’s also terrifyingly easy inadvertently to become so, at least in the eyes of others. Behaviour that is perfectly acceptable in a man – determination, rage, ambition – is all too often seen as ugly and unwarranted in a woman.
Somewhere along the way, however, Elkin’s plan changed. She stuck with her title, but her book is not, after all, about these tensions. Converting a masculine figure (the art monster) into a female one, she tells us, strands women on the side of the second sex, making work only in reaction to the patriarchy. Monstrosity is “a trap” even if we revel in it; the female monster is Other in a way the male monster is not. Instead, she has written about a variety of female artists who placed the body at the centre of their practice; who made a language of the body, and by doing so defined their own aesthetic aims. Elkin’s book asks – and here I begin to struggle to summarise it – whether women should prioritise feeling over thought; it looks at how they might literally take up more space in the world; and it celebrates the “joy” to be found in the “meat” of our flesh, our unruly female bodies.
How did she put it together? Obviously, she did a lot of reading and gallery-going. But its composition, ultimately, had to do with “vibrations”. Written in a “hyper alert state of linking and connecting”, any consequent disorganisation is, she insists, deliberate: “For me this book is an experiment in critical form as much as it is a feminist intervention… I needed to follow the line of thought as it developed; I couldn’t impose a primary argument followed with supporting chapters.”
I think there are times when it’s profitable for a writer to freestyle a bit: to show their workings, all those sudden unnerving blots and semi-revelations. But in the case of Art Monsters, I’m afraid there is no getting away from the fact that the result is desperately contingent. However hyper-alert Elkin was as she wrote – and she is a very good writer, one whose last two books, Flâneuse and No 91/92, I loved to bits – the connections she makes are sometimes so loose as to be invisible. Imagine a crocodile of children led by a teacher (Elkin) who loves each one of them just a little too much. Try as she might to encourage them to hold hands, some are resistant; they go their own way, and quite rightly, too, for they belong elsewhere. What I’m trying to say is that this book might have worked better reframed as a collection of essays.
Still, it’s nothing if not capacious. Here is Virginia Woolf, lying in a bath where she is dreaming up a book about the sexual life of women, and here is Laura Knight, painting a female nude whose buttocks look for all the world as if they’ve just been spanked.Elkin writes about the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, and of the slashing of Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus by the suffragette Mary Richardson; she tells us, too, about Fanny Burney’s mastectomy, an operation, the novelist describes in a letter of 1812, performed without anaesthetic. But while all these women are, individually, perfectly interesting, I cannot string them together for you, like beads; the only real connection I could see between them as I was reading was the fact that they were female, and in possession of such things as breasts and vaginas (though, as Elkin makes plain when she writes about the American artist Hannah Wilke, who made little vulvas out of chewing gum and stuck them all over her face, she thinks the “association of genitalia with gender” is terribly démodé – a statement I found confusing in the context of her book).
The presiding spirits of Art Monsters, though, are less well-known than the above. Elkin admires the writer Kathy Acker, and what she calls her “philosophy in the first person”, and she has a passion for the sculpture objects of the German-born American artist Eva Hesse. Above all, she’s a fan of the performance artist Carolee Schneemann, who in 1975 famously drew a roll of paper from her vagina, on which she’d written a (female) critic’s criticism of her work.
I did wonder at Elkin’s reverence for Schneemann, which seemed disproportionate to me (when she is good…, etc). But it wasn’t until I considered another section of the book, in which she writes about the (white) American painter Dana Schutz, and the controversy that blew up when her painting of the corpse of Emmett Till was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2017, that I began to wonder about Art Monster’s parameters all over again. If it’s hard to understand why Schutz appears in the book at all – she is not, so far as I’m aware, an explicitly feminist artist, and her subject is not the body – I was even more puzzled by Elkin’s vociferous condemnation of what she regards as Schutz’s cultural appropriation.
It’s not necessarily that I disagree with Elkin on this. It’s more a question of double standards. Aren’t artists allowed, sometimes, to make mistakes? And isn’t it the case that female artists are more likely to be punished when they do? I thought of the Barbican’s Schneemann retrospective last year, where I saw the cheap and utterly gratuitous Terminal Velocity (2001-05), in which outsize images of bodies falling from the twin towers on 9/11 are used to no good purpose. Elkin doesn’t mention this piece, but to me it’s a good example of the kind of connections she fails to make in her book; a vibration whose tremors here go unfelt.
• Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
