Lauren Elkin, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Vintage, 2024, 368 p.

Abstract

Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum? asks, in 1989, one of the most representative posters of the feminist group Guerilla Girls (1985–present). The message, accompanied by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814), but with a gorilla mask covering the face, is meant to emphasize the hypocrisy of art institutions, such as museums, that have no problem with exhibiting thousands of nude paintings of women, but still shy away from promoting female artists. The Guerilla Girls weren’t the only ones, not even the first ones concerned with issues centered around female representation, but also POC (people of colour) representation, in the art world. Starting from as early as the 1960s, the second wave of feminism quickly began to spread its ideology regarding gender equality and the need to fight against discrimination—not only towards women, but also towards POC, the LGBTQ+ community, certain religions, disabled people, and so on. Feminism became the main topic of many theorists, such as Linda Nochlin (1931–2017), Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), Catherine Clément (b. 1939), Griselda Pollock (b. 1949) or Laura Mulvey (b. 1941), and it also inspired a significant number of female artists to create works based on their own experience as women—which leads us to the main topic of the book I am about to present.