art
Interior Scroll (1975). The artist stands on a table in an East Hampton gallery. She removes her apron (the only item she’s wearing), reads a self-authored zine (Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter), then drags a roll of paper from her vagina and reads it aloud:
I met a happy man/a structuralist filmmaker … /he said we are fond of you …/ but don’t ask us/to look at your films …/ the persistence of feelings/the hand-touch sensibility/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess
The female art monster does not just speak the truth about her body; the body speaks itself.
Lynda Benglis joins Schneemann as an art monster, posing oiled and macho with a double-ended dildo in the pages of Artforum. Also on the list: Kara Walker sculpting a giant Sphinx mammy figure from sugar; Sutapa Biswas painting the goddess Kali wreaking bloody revenge on British colonialism; Hannah Wilke photographing herself covered with tiny chewing-gum vulvas; Betye Saar, Helen Chadwick, the list goes on. Musicians and dancers can be art monsters too, though Elkin primarily focuses on visual artists, along with certain writers: Woolf, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker.
It isn’t that these art monsters would self-identify as such, or that they claim a common inheritance, though Elkin sometimes discusses their encounters with one another or wonders whether they witnessed each other’s work, given striking similarities. For the most part, Art Monsters is – and Elkin is clear on this – a work of imagined genealogy, a constellation she draws herself.
In other words, it ’s not a history of art monsters. Which isn’t to say Art Monsters is ahistorical. It ’s packed with rich histories of specific artists and illuminating contextualisations. Yet these aren’t strung into a grand narrative. Elkin skips indiscriminately between ages and artists, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Emma Sulkowicz, ‘that girl with the mattress’.
The historical-biographical method is one mode of writing Elkin adopts among many. We also find the confessional (‘I sat down on the steps of Edith Piaf ’s house and cried’), the quotational (‘Nisha Ramayya: “I propose a Tantric poetics”’), the ekphrastical (‘The colours shape and
Body shock: ‘SOS Starification Object Series’ (detail) by Hannah Wilke, 1974
shift and vary ’), the declarational (‘To be a good wife is to accommodate yourself to someone else’s story ’) and the programmatical (‘we will need to invent our own forms for the telling’). The prose is sliced into fragments, each one separated by a slash symbol denoting cut/splice.
This form, Elkin notes, is especially apt given the long history of women collaging and weaving (and, I would add, patchworking – see the quilts of Gee’s Bend or Louise Bourgeois). Women have always been gatherer-makers, including Woolf with her scrapbooks. Elkin describes her own work as ‘an experiment in critical form’.
But the non-linear is pretty modish these days, a favoured form for the nonfiction nonconformist. And fragmented criticism certainly has its weaknesses, leaving gaps in the argument, encouraging obfuscation. At times, the theorising of Art Monsters rests upon etymological discoveries (the OED makes too many appearances for my taste) and word associations that aren’t as revelatory as Elkin seems to want them to be:
The aesthetic and the political have always gone hand in hand. No, not hand in hand. The aesthetic and the political occupy the same body.
These difficulties of fragmentation are most evident in the first part of the book, ‘monster theor y ’ , which provides a framework and draws together disparate monsters. But the beast comes alive in parts two and three, which tackle artists in depth: Lee Miller photographing a severed breast on a plate; Francesca Woodman crawling through a gravestone; Ana Mendieta leaving her silhouette on the earth to smoulder and flame. Elkin’s criticism here is insightful, provocative and at times heartbreaking. She examines the bodies of female art monsters in all their forms: meaty, ghostly, excreting, diseased, smooth, sensing, speaking. The thinking behind Art Monsters emerges most lucidly not in the introduction but in the accumulation of all these terrible, brilliant bodies of work.
july 2023 | Literary Review 11
