Upon completing the opera The Wreckers, British composer Ethel Smyth proselytized theaters across Europe to perform the work. It was staged in a German translation at the New Theater in Leipzig in 1906. Three years later, her friend and conductor Thomas Beecham produced it for His Majesty’s Theater in London. In 1958, Beecham published a short text to mark the centenary of Smyth’s birth. Despite his admiration for her work, he described the composer as “a stubborn, indomitable, unconquerable creature” (“Dame Ethel Smyth (1885–1944”), The Musical Times, 1958, 365).  Smyth is one of the hundreds of “creatures” included in Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Elkin, a cultural critic, translator, and novelist, eloquently weaves together the work of artists, writers, poets, composers, and performers who—like Smyth—challenged gender norms associated with female lives, bodies, and sexualities.

The book’s title Art Monsters is inspired by Jenny Offill’s fragmented, fierce novel Dept. of Speculation (Knopf 2014). Elkin was struck by a phrase from the novel’s nameless heroine: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead” (5). The theoretical ideas of Art Monsters are indebted to Susan Stryker’s essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1994). In this groundbreaking piece, Stryker, a transgendered woman, conveys her affinity with the monster, performs her rage, and claims the monstrous as an emancipatory term. Elkin builds on these predecessors, framing the “art monster” in relation to women who blast rocks, defy likability and prettiness, speak up, claim space, are mothers and/or professionals, and upend binary, heterosexual, cisgender norms.

Art Monsters is rooted in Elkin’s own positionality and experiences. Early in the book, she writes that “the art monster problem” that nagged at her for years was due to “having grown up a white American female at the end of the twentieth century, groomed to be appropriate, exacting, friendly and accommodating, as pretty and as small as I could make myself, yet filled with rage at not being allowed to take up more space in the world” (6). Elkin, who moved from the US to Paris in 1999 and now lives in London, discusses numerous practices and artworks that make a point of claiming space. The US-American artist Ann Hamilton, for example, known for her large sculptural installations, tasked her students to carry around a 4 × 8-foot sheet of plywood for a week (23). Emma Sulkowicz, when she was an undergraduate student at Columbia University in 2014, lugged her dorm mattress around for one year. She got in people’s way as an act of protest. She had been raped by a peer who was still enrolled. Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) inspired students around the world to do the same, taking up public space with their mattresses to draw attention to their universities’ lack of action against sexual assaults on campuses (23–25). These two examples are followed by the work of German artist Rebecca Horn, who used bodily extensions such as feathers, claws, and horns to extend her body into space. Discussing these three examples together under the subtitle “carry that weight” shows how artists take up space in various contexts to convey vastly different meanings.

Elkin’s book includes many artists who employ a monstrous aesthetic, creating works that are grotesque, vulgar, ugly, play with deformation, transformation, and mutability. These practices feature throughout the narrative, which is divided into three main sections respectively titled “monster theory,” “professions for women,” and “bodies of work.” Painter Genieve Figgis, for example, renders faces and bodies with thick, smeared, luscious strokes. Elkin describes Blue Eyeliner of 2020 (featured on the cover of the British edition) as an image “in which a woman massages her face, smearing her make-up, but as if all her skin were coming off with it, as if the make-up were causing her right eye to explode, leaving a gaping hole. The self as regarded in the mirror melts. (Somehow it seems clear to me that she is looking in a mirror, that we are her mirror.)” (39). This passage is typical for Elkin’s free flowing and intuitive writing style. Israeli artist Yishay Garba took photographic self-portraits of her naked body between 2008 and 2010 when she was transitioning from male to female. Garba assembled the photographs in a zoetrope and then as a flipbook, which can be read in either direction. These works claim the monstrous by resisting “the ‘before’ and ‘after’ binary of the transition narrative” (54). Other artists who employ deformation as a mode of defiance and feature in the book include Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), Hannah Wilke’s video Gestures (1974), Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School (1978/84), Jessica Ledwich’s photographs Monstrous Feminine (2013–14), works by Maria Lassnig, Carolee Schneemann, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and many more.

Elkin is interested in developing a form of writing that defies hierarchies and binaries. In the preface of the book—titled “the slash”—Elkin muses that she’s “long had a weakness for the form of punctuations that we call in American English the forward slash . . .  I like the way it’s used to break things up. Express division yet relation. Or the way it brings disparate things together. Exclusion and inclusion in one stroke. Slash/stroke. Slash slash stroke” (xi). The form of the slash in its various meanings and applications is promising. In Art Monsters this formal strategy produces a meandering narrative free of an overall structure. Examples that feature in one of the book’s three sections could easily be discussed in the others. Elkin effortlessly moves between artists, contents, forms, and modes of aesthetic expression, which encourages the reader’s mind to wander, trace certain leads, and search online details, contexts, and images. In the postscript, Elkin acknowledges that she’s “traced something like a narrative through kinks and contortions, possibly loosing track of it altogether” (281). 

The strength of Art Monsters lies in the author’s ability to entangle form and content, to think the slash, a form of punctation, as a strategy for artists, writers, and performers to produce content. The grammatical slash is a diagonal line on the page that functions as a symbol, while the literal slash severs the page and creates a material, spatial incision. The slash reappears, for example, in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic process of scratching her negative plates to achieve texture and splicing together negatives. Elkin also recounts that the suffragette Mary Richardson used a meat cleaver in 1914 to slash Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (ca. 1647–51), or that Lee Miller, while out on assignment in Paris sometime around 1930, found severed breast in a medical waste bin that she then arranged in a place setting for a photograph. The slash reads differently within these various practices and contexts. It is a multivalent and rich form, examples abound, yet a deep history that more intensely grapples with these various monstrous meanings is missing.

Further, the intuitive, free-flowing narrative of Art Monsters keeps returning to artists and writers who Elkin is most familiar with. Virginia Woolf, for example, is a constant throughout the book. Over a dozen novels and speeches by the important feminist author are discussed and referenced and continue to reappear. Elkin opens her book with a 1931 speech by Woolf, in which the author praised composer Ethel Smyth as “a blaster of rocks and the maker of bridges” (xi). The work of Smyth, however, remains in the dark. We do not learn about the works she composed, the challenges she faced, or that she served a two-month prison sentence because she and other women smashed windows throwing stones at the houses of politicians who refused to grant women the right to vote. The Wreckers was not performed in its intended French version until 2022. One wishes that such lesser-known artists would take center stage. Art Monsters also remains firmly situated within a Western context. It does include paintings like Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) by British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas that depicts “the Hindu goddess Kali as a pissed-off British housewife” (122) and functions as a critique of empire: however, artists, performers, poets, and writers living and working in the Global South are conspicuously absent. Still, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art provides a stimulating panoply of the monstrous in feminist art. It is admirable in the way it moves swiftly and easily across disciplines, practices, and forms, thus rethinking art histories within a Western framework, and as such provides multiple avenues of inspiration for future scholars to keep blasting those rocks and building new bridges.