Elkin is most interested in the art these women made — as she should be; their art is fascinating — but the book also argues that this art is often a response to the social structures that threatened to inhibit them ... Like her many subjects, Elkin is a stylish, determined provocateur. But while she’s provocative and firm, she’s also careful and diligent about demonstrating her arguments. It’s a very satisfying combination. She has a clear and elegant style reminiscent of other sharp and cool feminist academia thinkers ... Art Monsters is not prescriptive or instructive — better, it’s exemplary. It describes a whole way to live, worthy of secret admiration.
Hybrid cultural criticism and memoir ... Pleasurable linkages ... Elkin’s book, as stirring as it is, never enters the beauty zone. It remains randomized, slashed-up, not too combed over in reworking, in a word monstrous.
...she offers the original, bracing definition of her subject only to abandon it ... She starts with monstrousness in the artist’s life but guides us toward monstrousness in the artist’s work. That monstrousness has often found form in art involving the body, especially those parts of it that are typically hidden — corporeal versions of what anthropologists call 'matter out of place' ... Elkin is such a nimble writer that it took me a while to realize I was losing the thread. Her readings of art are attentive and vivid. But by dispensing with the original definition of the art monster — dedicated to art to the exclusion of all else — Elkin also saps it of its power. She moves so far afield that even her early focus on the body recedes from view ... in a book about 'art monsters,' however defined, deciding that monstrosity lies in something as unobjectionable as 'the surprise of the work' is playing it safe ... For all Elkin’s formidable range as a critic, Art Monsters still contains traces of that careful, tentative person; the text is filled with caveats and asides betraying an anxiety that someone might read her or her book the wrong way.
Erudite, provocative, and relentlessly eclectic ... Don’t mistake Art Monsters for an in-depth history of a particular artistic movement ... Elkin seeks to reappropriate some of the space-grabbing, boundary-transgressing, in-your-face assertiveness, and destructive power, of men ... I wished at times that Elkin would stop and linger in more depth on the works of artists who are her main subject.
She did a lot of reading and gallery-going. But its composition, ultimately, had to do with 'vibrations' ... 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 ... 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?
The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism ... Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual’s reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory – or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment ... Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently – the monsters in our midst.
Elkin weaves across the decades, writing into a current culture of rowbacks (Roe-backs?) in women’s lives ... To investigate gendered expectations of women as artists, she draws not just on visual makers, but writers and thinkers from Virginia Woolf (frequently circling back to Professions for Women) and Julia Kristeva’s linking of shame and abjection.
Lively and vibrant ... What this book does brilliantly: engage with the physicality of art, the sensory, texture, lumps and all. It juxtaposes artists and writers who insist on both beauty and excess ... Packed with theory, but is jargon-free. As well as critical, Elkin’s prose is chatty and at times enjoyably blunt ... Complex. Changeable. Out of bounds. Ambiguous, like the stroke. Monstrous art, Elkin writes, is weird and bold. ‘What makes it good – what sets it apart – is its commitment to a sometimes scathing honesty.’ You could say the same for this superb book.
Elkin’s latest book is part feminist theory, part memoir. It is structured around encounters in thought, sculpture, painting, performance and text, with writers and artists who move her ... Elkin is an excitable citer. The book proceeds as if it were a series of conversations with those whose work she admires or feels challenged to examine more closely.
...intellectually rigorous and emotionally astute. Her supple narrative gives deep attention to a diverse gathering of second-wave feminist visual artists and writers, though her broad scope connects these women through time and lineage to past- and present-day artists, writers and themes ... Art Monsters” includes images of some of the artwork under discussion, and they are a welcome addition to the text, though Elkin is masterful in her descriptions. She is also compassionate, thorough, and discerning in her coverage of the lives and intentions of the women she features. Some of these women’s lives were catastrophically, even fatally, impacted by misogyny, facts that Elkin refuses to elide ... Elkin’s vision is surprising in the best way. Innovation, interrogation, and intersectionality combine to bring a new understanding of how fertile the unruly body has been and continues to be.
Lauren Elkin’s study of rule-breaking female artists is admirable in intention – but the execution is contradictory and confused ... The choices at times seem arbitrary and the approach narrow, especially on literature. Elkin proves a more informative guide to feminist trends in the visual arts, bringing many an ephemeral happening energetically back to life ... More damagingly, Elkin is much taken with the world of hurt, liking nothing better than a raped or murdered or diseased artist who had a suicidal mother and a daughter by Duncan Grant. It makes for spicy copy but amateurish art history.
Dense and probing ... 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.
