Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
Starred review from October 16, 2023
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.