Review by Booklist Review
In this rigorous analysis of what it means to be a woman artist, Elkin (Flâneuse, 2016) theorizes the concept of the art monster, a term she uses to conceptualize what happens when women invent new forms of storytelling by using their own languages rather than those established by men. In Elkin's assessment, doing this necessarily entails foregrounding the female body and putting it at the center of artmaking. Examples include feminist art icons like Carolee Schneeman, whose infamous Interior Scroll involved her pulling a roll of paper from her vagina in protest of a misogynistic art culture that looked down upon diaristic and messy art, as well as emerging contemporary artists like Emma Sulkowicz, who made headlines in 2014 when she staged a yearlong performance carrying a mattress around Columbia University, where she was then enrolled, to protest the university's failure to expel her accused rapist. With its frequent use of the first person plural, this art history for feminist creatives foregrounds the work rather than the lives of women artists, seeking to uncover what has driven their artmaking.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In a 1931 speech, Virginia Woolf told an audience that art must both build and destroy. Using this thesis, Elkin (Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London) deeply examines women artists whose work critics and audiences have found challenging, threatening, obscene, or even grotesque--in other words, monstrous. Elkin analyzes the art and artists through a feminist lens, asserting that feminism and art are both filled with ambiguity and contradictions. Sections of the book are separated by a slash, which Elkin says represents both exclusion and inclusion simultaneously; a zone of ambiguity. The art considered is from as recently as Emma Sulkowicz's high-profile 2014 "Mattress Performance," and as far back as painter Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portraits in the 1600s. An extensive bibliography and list of notes are included, as well as black-and-white images of many of the pieces of art referenced, which are interspersed throughout the text. This book leans heavily on the academic side, calling on the ideas of many notable feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Susan Sontag, and might not be accessible to readers looking for a light analysis of pop culture and art. VERDICT This book is better suited for academic libraries than for public libraries.--Heather Sheahan
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