Art Monsters
Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
A Must-Read: Vogue, Nylon, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, Frieze, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, InsideHook, The Next Big Idea Club,
“[Lauren] Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur . . . Sharp and cool . . . [Art Monsters is] exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.” —Maggie Lange, The Washington Post
“Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty.
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.
An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writer and translator Elkin (No. 91/92) presents dense and probing meditations on the "art monster," a term borrowed from Jenny Offill's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation ("Art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things... rarely women, and if women, then women who have renounced... housework, children"). Gathering female artists from roughly the 1950s on, Elkin delves deep into "what it was that they were so bent on doing that they ran the risk of being called a monster," including their nearly unsolvable task of "telling the truth of own experiences as a body," as Virginia Woolf put it. Spotlit here are Carolee Schneemann, whose provocative 1975 nude performance Interior Scroll marked "a moment when feminist artists committed themselves to making the body a site of liberation"; Kara Walker, whose 35-foot-tall "sugar-coated mammy figure in a Sphinx pose," which was displayed in Brooklyn in 2014, sublimated racist tropes and challenged the kinds of art Black women are allowed to make; and Eva Hesse, whose sculptures used rough "industrial materials as if they were paint" and thereby help viewers "take back our bodies from narratives that would deny their autonomy," because "to reclaim touch for the aesthetic... is to ask basic question about the relationships between our bodies." Expertly blending astute critical analysis with intellectual curiosity, Elkin resists easy answers about questions of femininity, physicality, and art, leading the text into rich and unexpected directions. Even those well acquainted with feminist art will be enlightened.
