By Melissa Rodman
The Art Monster is chaotic, ambitious and narcissistic, but it doesn’t care about your opinion in the slightest. Are you afraid?
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut. Columbia University Press, 272 pages
Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 368 pages
What do you think of when you hear the word “monster”? Perhaps Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein springs to mind, the “creature” cobbled together and brought to life in some supernatural way. Perhaps the word evokes a childhood fear, a dark space where something lurks under your bed. Perhaps, to use our post-#MeToo lexicon, you’re discussing a terrible date with a friend right now. “Watch out for him,” she might say. “He’s a monster.”
Three books published in the last two years focus on a specific but elusive type of monster, the “art monster,” a term coined by Jenny Offill in her 2014 novel Department of Speculation. “My plan was never to get married. Instead, I wanted to become an art monster,” writes Offill. “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never with mundane things.” Offill suggests that the “art monster” is someone extraordinary, selfish, art-obsessed, and most likely a man. The art monster is chaotic, ambitious, and narcissistic, but it doesn’t care in the slightest about your opinion. Are you afraid?
The three books — Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023) by Claire Dederer, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023) by Lauren Elkin, and now Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York (2024) by Marin Kosut – all of them quote the same lines from Offill’s novel. The idea of creating art, or in some cases delving into it at the expense of relationships, stability, niceness, politeness, restraint or presentability, captivates these authors. Monster, Art MonsterAnd Art Monster All of them are about the obsession with that inexplicable, personal thrill that sometimes occurs when one is drawn to a work of art and it becomes one’s whole world. These books are hybrid works that stitch together fragments of personal essays, cultural criticism and sociology, reflecting on different aspects of the “art monster”.
There are no clear conclusions to be found in any of these books. Instead, the entanglement of monsters, art, and women preoccupies these authors, who approach their different but related projects in discursive, contradictory, indiscriminate ways. For Dederer, the crucial question is whether we can love art created by monstrous people like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Pablo Picasso, and others. Elkin thinks about how women artists like Carolee Schneemann, Eva Hesse, Kara Walker, and Vanessa Bell have used their work, bodies, and politics to reject traditional scripts and instead transform themselves into art monsters. And Kosut grapples with what life is like for unsung, unknown art monsters (that is, people who have dedicated their lives to art, often at great personal, financial, and professional sacrifice) in New York City. The addendum to Kosut’s book further acknowledges that she was “not the only author attracted to Offill’s art monster,” and particularly refers to the books of Dederer and Elkin.
Experiencing a work of art can evoke overwhelming feelings, and these books ride the chaotic wave. The motto of Dederer’s book, a quote from the writer Shirley Hazzard, suggests that art itself has an overriding, monstrous power to which we surrender even when we think we are in control: “Of course, it is always tempting to impose one’s opinion rather than submit to the submission that art demands—a submission akin to that of generosity or love.” Dederer’s chapters explore how that submission or love toward a work of art can flourish even when the film, painting, or novel in question was created by an artist who has committed rape, is misogynistic, anti-Semitic, transphobic, or behaves in other horrific ways. “The question ‘What do we do with art?’ is a kind of laboratory or a kind of exercise for the real thing, the real question: What does it mean to love someone terribly?” she writes. “That is the problem and the solution: the enduring nature of love.”
Early in Art MonsterKosut also focuses on the fact that we often have no choice but to submit to art. She quotes the American art critic Irving Sandler, who came across the painting in 1952 Boss (1950) by Franz Klein at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Unfortunately, Kosut doesn’t really describe the painting, which consists of thick black lines and black patches of varying opacity, with patches of white breaking through. This work absolutely fascinated Sandler. “It was as if the floodgates of vision were opened,” he wrote. “I looked to art for meaning, for the illumination of my life – and, by extension, my society. Art became the content of my life, to paraphrase (Russian artist Kazimir) Malevich, and even a kind of surrogate religion.”
This idea – art as substance and livelihood – resonates with the struggling artists who Kosut art monster, including himself. Predictably, some, including Kosut, wonder if the determination to make art in New York without critical or financial success is worth the struggle. “You can’t believe you’re forty… You’re not represented in a gallery and you’re subletting a windowless studio in Bushwick with two other artists in their late twenties,” Kosut writes. “Multiple paychecks are almost enough, credit cards maxed out.”
This whiny tone, which runs throughout the book, might turn off some readers. Kosut’s attitude is – who cares? She bares her teeth as an art monster and snaps on the page at her readers and even a peer reviewer. “One scholar who reviewed this manuscript anonymously wrote that I have portrayed ‘a romanticized starving artist with working-class roots who rejects capitalism, and on the other hand, mindless rich philistines who destroy the city. It’s tempting to skewer the rich, but it’s not novel,'” she concludes mockingly. Then she returns the favor: “I’m not trying to be novel. I’m trying to be honest, and I’m damn angry.”
Much like Kosut’s unknown artists, Elkins creates works “against prevailing notions to understand something outside the usual path.” She goes into dizzying detail of the works examined in the volume, evaluating context, content, composition and iconography as well as her own experiences with the artworks. In her description of Cindy Sherman’s photography Untitled #175 (1987), for example, Elkin writes: “Half-eaten brownies and Pop-Tarts lie scattered on the sand next to an unidentifiable green substance that resembles Silly String but is probably some kind of frosting; the towel itself is covered in vomit… ‘Yuck!’ I said aloud when I first saw it in vivid, chromogenic colors.” This photograph, and the other art Elkin covers, is graphic, unexpected, challenging, and kind of gross.
“Culture punished women for not being small and quiet,” Elkin argues. “Our boundaries were policed; if we crossed them, we were labeled repulsive… The idea of the art monster is a challenge to transcend the boundaries assigned to us and invent our own definitions of beauty.”
It’s about being subversive and monstrous. However, moaning and moaning about the status quo, the reality of patriarchy, about very real challenges, frustrations and disappointments, not only becomes exhausting, but is also counterproductive to the ultimate goal of an art monster: to create extraordinary art. Instead of looking at yourself, why not channel all that pain and anger into action?
Melissa Rodman is a New York-based journalist and critic.
