The shock of the new in feminist art

Lauren Elkin begins her book about bodily art with a charming ode to the punctuation mark that she in American English calls a ‘slash’ and we in British English call a ‘stroke’. She likes the way it expresses ‘division yet relation’. Brings disparate things together. Makes space for ambiguity. Blends and blurs. And/or. She writes:

The slash is the first person tipped over: the first person joining me to the person beside me, or me to you. Across the slash we can find each other. Across the slash I think we can do some work.

That work begins in Art Monsters with a lively and vibrant account of feminist art that articulates the everyday experience of having a body. This might not sound especially radical but, as Elkin writes, the female nude is ‘art or obscene, depending on the context’. She continues: ‘Made by man, in the context of the history of art, it is beauty itself.’