Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

Sutapa Biswas, in Lauren Elkin, get our your knives, Kali, in Elkin's Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (pages 122-133).

'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, and what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which these 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 defines its own aesthetic aims.'

An brief excerpt from the opening chapter by Elkin:

'the slash

In a 1931 speech addressinga group of young women at the beginning of their professional careers, Virginia Woolf praised the composer Ethel Smyth for the groundbreaking works she did as a woman in an industry dominated by men, calling her 'a blaster of rocks and the maker of bridges'. [footnote 1] For women to make their way in the world it is necessary to destroy, Woolf believed, but also to build; to fragment, but also to link. With this in mind I have written this book under the sign of the slash, to remind myself that fracturing and connecting are the essence of art; that it is the work of the writer and of the artist to lay bare the experiences which divide us but also those which link us together.'