Lucy Thynne

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Mother Tongue 

Mother Tongue Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Lauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus, 2023, 368 pp, £25.00

 

Midway through Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation, the narrator contemplates her impending divorce. ‘My plan was never to get married,’ she announces. ‘I was going to be an art monster instead.’ What is an art monster? Offill explains further. ‘Women were never art monsters, because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.’ In short, art monsters are selfish. They are smokers; they are drinkers; they stay up late working; they have no caring duties or responsibilities, and if they do, they shun them. They are men. As Offill quips, ‘Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.’

Before reading Lauren Elkin’s latest book, I had never heard of the term. It doesn’t exist in English, only in French: monstre de l’art. But a quick Google search reveals that a few years back, Offill’s term took the Internet by a storm. In an article for The Paris Review, Claire Dederer wrote that female writers she knew ‘yearned to be monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.”’ Celebrated author Rebecca Solnit dedicated a whole essay to the idea, asking: ‘Is selfishness necessary to art, more than other things?’ And nested in that question, another: can women be that selfish?

Yes – yes, they can, argues Lauren Elkin in Art Monsters. From the beginning, Elkin makes it clear that she’s not looking for a direct female equivalent to the rockstar male artist. ‘Converting a masculine figure into a female one forever strands us on the side of the second sex, making work in reaction to the patriarchy,’ she says. There’s no value in such an exercise. No, Elkin wants women taking up space for their own sake. To locate the point at which, ‘instead of making ourselves small, we allow our monstrous selves to grow unignorably large,’ she writes, paraphrasing writer Chris Kraus. ‘Unwise and unstoppable!’

Her examples are various. To list all of them would take up this entire page, so I won’t – but included are Julia Margaret Cameron, Vanessa Bell, Lee Miller, Kara Walker, riot grrrl and Pussy Riot. There are writers, too: Virginia Woolf, Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison, to name just a few. Each feels familiar from the outset, if only because we sense that they have spent a lot of time walking around Elkin’s head. There’s an in- depth exploration of the art monster’s work, sometimes illustrated, so that we know what Elkin’s talking about. Then there are daring, brilliant flashes of memoir – scenes of Elkin’s pregnancy, the earth-tilting experience that is becoming a mother.

But as per the book’s subtitle – unruly bodies in feminist art – Elkin’s main obsession in Art Monsters is bodies: their beauty, their disgustingness, their power. If the initial issue at stake is whether a woman can be free enough to pursue her art, Elkin’s overriding concern is whether the female body helps or hinders this objective. She starts with antiquity, where it’s not looking good. For Aristotle, Elkin writes, a ‘female is a deformed male, therefore a female is a born monster.’ The mythological female body provoked ‘hygienic[ic], physical, and moral’ anxieties, Elkin writes, quoting Classical genius Anne Carson: ‘she swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses.’ How could a woman portray her body solidly if it was so uncontainable, so horrible?

For answers, Elkin turns to art monsters of the seventies. Namely: Carole Schneemann and Suzanne Lacy, who offer a way to ‘live in a female body’ by leaning proudly into their own monstrosity. These are women unafraid of showing the body ‘menstruating, masturbating, coming, shitting, ageing.’ Most striking of the mentioned projects is Lacy’s Ablutions (1972), where in front of an audience, naked women dipped themselves in vats of beef blood, animal innards, and liquid clay, all to the recorded soundtrack of women talking about their rapes. The performance piece is exemplary for Elkin’s point: you might as well claim your monstrous body if you’re going to be punished for it.

Elkin has been writing about women and art for a long time. Of all her books, she is most famous for Flâneuse, a history of women walking through Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo. It has a line of enquiry similar to that of Art Monsters: was there a female variant of the male flâneur, the wanderer, when the streets were (and are) less safe for women?

Perhaps not – but ‘we cannot rule out the fact that women were there,’ Elkin writes. It’s a book I love deeply because it is also a kind of coming- of-age tale, and rather like the hodgepodge nature of a city itself, research often sits wedged next to an anecdote about an old boyfriend. There’ll be a section on George Sand, and then a declaration high on youthful bravado: ‘I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting.’ Call it naïve, but is it not also a pledge to an authentic life? An awareness that you have only one?

That ambition continues in Art Monsters. What is interesting to Elkin becomes interesting to us: if only, I think, because Elkin has plucked out the shiniest pearls from the deep. The best example of her curation is a section devoted to art about breast cancer. Here, Elkin first takes us through Hannah Wilke’s photographs of her dying mother. A mastectomy scar sits, snagged, like a lightning bolt on her chest. We’re then spun over to writer Audre Lorde, who consciously rejected a prosthetic breast post- surgery in favour of becoming an Amazon. As Lorde writes in her Cancer Journals, ‘women with breast cancer are warriors; I have been to war, and still am.’ Finally, and most movingly, Elkin turns us towards photographer Jo Spence, spending some time describing her self-portrait, Exile:

She is all dissymmetry, with the Phantom of the Opera-style half- mask, the partial mastectomy, her stomach as it bulges on one side, the uneven pubic hair, the unevenness of the lighting on her skin […]

So attentively, so lovingly does Elkin write, that if the artwork is not pictured, I often have to put down the book just to Google it.

About now you might think – we’ve got a problem here! Focusing on the body as the pinnacle of female experience risks feminism becoming essentialist, i.e., taking a woman’s biological differences as definitive of her gender. No one wants their work to be ‘female’, either: to fall under that reductive umbrella, “women’s art.”

No need for alarm, however – Elkin, ever the sensitive critic, swoops in quickly. Generations of feminists have dismissed Schneemann and Lacy’s work as ‘essentialist nonsense’, she writes, especially if it depicts the female body as the ‘essence of femininity’– an essence that, ultimately, does not exist. Knowing this, though, ‘does not invalidate the work of these 1970s artists’, Elkin mediates. We can still look to Schneemann and Lacy’s work as important representations of how it felt to live, and be, a woman at the time.

So – Elkin navigates the thornier issues with ease. She’s also unafraid to do that unfashionable thing in art criticism, which is to look at the artist’s biography alongside their work. Of one of her art monsters, the Cuban American Ana Mendieta, who fell out of her Manhattan apartment under suspicious circumstances, she ponders: ‘I do not want to read Mendieta’s work through her death, but it speaks to my anxieties; how you never know which day of the year you’re going to die.’ No ‘serious critic’, as Elkin puts it, wants to paint Mendieta as the tragic artiste. To do so would ignore the monstrous power of her work.

Where Elkin excels, then, is in her balancing the need for traditional, ‘serious’ criticism, with her own, ‘sappy’ feelings. Faced with a similar problem regarding the difficult life of Eva Hesse, Elkin candidly wonders whether to spend time discussing the artist’s biography or to move on. But is there any other way than to ‘buy into [Hesse’s] myth? Is there any other way when you fall madly in art love?’

For the most part, Elkin’s new take on criticism really works. But where it falters is when it starts to get slightly too trendy. After a while, punning aphorisms like ‘decreate to create’, interesting the first time, begin to jar. At one point, Elkin quotes from Woolf, who, describing her collage-style diary of news clippings, jokes that she has ‘collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls.’ Instantly, Elkin concludes: ‘Powder: a letter away from Power. Woolf is referring, of course, to explosive powder; but perhaps she was also thinking of; the kind some of us dust on our faces.’ No, Elkin – I think she really did just mean gunpowder. That kind of wordplay, à la mode in some academic papers, feels unconvincing here.

The same goes for descriptions of ‘the body’, also now an academic buzzword. From the beginning, Elkin states that she will not be making clear-cut arguments but ones that revel in ‘glorious ambiguity’, that allow for an uncertainty over ‘what the body means.’ There’s much to be gained from this approach, which Maggie Nelson calls ‘wanting it both ways’ – the sense that art can mean two things at once. But a clear definition of ‘what the body means’ feels indispensable to a book about bodies, and soon the reader is unmoored without it, especially when the word comes in the same roster as other words like ‘wholeness’ and ‘fragmented.’

That flimsiness is redeemed – thankfully – by Elkin’s skilful interweaving of memoir. She writes lyrically about her pregnancy, ‘the strangest of experiences.’ ‘My appetites changed, as did my ability to move in the world; There was something new and low in my body, rumbling and trembling and twitching with a new relationship to gravity.’ This is criticism I would have longed to read at university. Often, I would find myself wishing for more of these sections, not only because they are some of the most perceptive and beautiful, but because they feel part of the book’s larger project. If you’re going to be examining the lives of others, then it seems an ethical imperative to throw part of yourself in the ring.

Elkin does recognise this. Throughout Art Monsters, we’re always aware of where she is, of what she is doing: ‘As I write this, sitting in a café in Paris,’ one sentence begins. Piss off, you might think. But it’s done with self-awareness and tact, and it means that we see the book come together as it is born, monster-like, out of its egg. ‘When I started this book,’ Elkin writes at the beginning, ‘I thought it was going to be about; how difficult it was, for a woman artist, to take up space in the world.’

Gradually, though, she explains, the book became more about the body. Readers who came onboard for a book about selfish women might be disappointed, but Elkin’s revelation of this fact feels curiously brave, akin to a writer undressing. It’s as though we’ve been given a telescope to look back on the book’s previous drafts, which lie, shadowy, below the book’s surface. ‘Soon after I finished the final draft of this book,’ begins the epilogue. It’s very Annie Ernaux, the French memoirist whom Elkin reveres.

Is Art Monsters too clever for its own good? Yes and no (I’m wanting it both ways.) A good example of this is the book’s form, which is written ‘under the sign of the slash.’ The ‘/’ symbol keeps the beat to Art Monsters, dividing sections sometimes the length of pages, sometimes sentences. With the latter, the form irritates. ‘Eva Hesse couldn’t sleep at night without her feet touching the bottom bars of her bed frame,’ one fragment reads. It’s not the fault of the sentence, it’s just that, by floating on its own, it’s set up to have more mic-drop worthy significance than it has. This is the risk with writing in fragments, another style du jour: the form can feel motivated by gimmicky and aesthetic ends, rather than intellectual ones.

But the majority of Elkin’s book is in Proper Paragraphs and the slash becomes a slick way of dividing up interesting, rich analysis. An inhale, before Elkin returns, tender, back to the artwork. It’s also a neat reflection of the writer at work: Elkin’s ‘loss of a regular writing rhythm’ with snatched time between a pregnancy, childcare and irregular library availability over the pandemic. As Elkin explains, lockdown was ‘an invitation to a mode of writing I might not have allowed myself to access.’ And – ‘[I am glad] I have remained open to the particularity of this writing experience.’

For better and for worse, Art Monsters is particular. It will not be for everyone. But it will stay with me for its refreshing, critical voice that rejects what Jane Tomkins calls the ‘father tongue’ of academia in favour of a ‘mother tongue.’ This kind of writing, Tomkins imagines, ‘would always take off from personal experience. Would always be in some way a chronicle of [our] hours and days.’ Writing that would strive for connection over kilometres of critical distance. In this respect, Art Monsters has more than found its mother tongue. We can only hope for more work like it.
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Lucy Thynne is a freelance writer from London. She has had work published by Prospect, Review 31 and the BBC, and is the recipient of this year’s Harper Wood Creative Writing studentship.