Art Monsters
Reading this book marked a pivotal moment in the crystallization of Zuzu - after reading it I scrawled in giant, unruly letters across my journal: “I WANT TO BE AN ART MONSTER! I want to be un-self-censored. I want to allow myself to make the art I want to make and be faster, more prolific, more intense and weird and brilliant.”
I owe so much of my current incarnation to this book.
It’s a deliciously sprawling exploration of women, their bodies, and the art they make to express the experiences of living in a female body. I’ve seen criticism of it that says it’s a bit too sprawling, but in my opinion it’s a fantastic case of the medium being part of the message - bodies ARE messy, unexpected, uncontainable, grotesque, even monstrous at times, and the higgledy-piggledy nature of book captures that perfectly.
From the author’s website
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.
Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous and Maggie Nelson, Lauren Elkin demonstrates her power as a cultural critic, weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers - from Julia Margaret Cameron's photography to Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits to Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE - and shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political.
On the cover
Also, I am obsessed with the painting on the cover of this edition - it’s by Irish artist Genieve Figgis who paints in the most amazingly unhinged way. Needless to say, I adore her work!
Here’s a brilliant interview with her on Juxtapoz, and The Great Women Artists Podcast did a whole episode on her too.
