Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

"In exactly the same way as clothes, this is a book about using something unexpected as the artistic medium. In this case, it deals with artists using the body. The female body, specifically. I’m writing a lecture about the nude at the moment, so questions of the body are very much on my mind. The nude was re-appropriated from the late 19th and into the 20th century from the confines of historic representation. Laura Elkin looks to a number of truly incredible women artists, highlighting a further evolution of ideas of the body. Many of them are performance artists, but what unifies all of them is a heritage of anti-patriarchy, using the female form to assert these ideas. It’s a really powerful, angry text. These artists put themselves inside the canvas, which in this case is the female form. It’s somewhat whimsical but also remarkable to remember that we’re walking around inside an artistic canvas! Absolutely. This book highlights the disconnection between the naked and the nude. A lot of these artists aren’t depicting themselves as nude, that is, as this rather idealised image of what the objective body should be. What they are showcasing is the physical experience of what it is to be inside a body, what it is to have a woman’s body, or whatever body in fact. Berger wrote about the nude and about how women in the history of art have been granted only an idealised form, which mostly doesn’t change. Why? Because the protagonist of art history has been the man looking at them, and depicting them, and that never changes. So the re-appropriated nude turns away from this objectification. These are artists who are questioning how to depict themselves and how to depict the female body without entering into historical cliche, conscious of the male gaze, but not catering to it, nor necessarily rejecting it, but coming up with a different way of looking at the female body. This way of being she calls ‘monstrous’, borrowing a line from a novel by Jenny Offill , Dept of Speculation : “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.”"