Kate Millett Disappears
The physicality of the art work is also its proximity to violence. Language, being a product of rationality, lacks the capacity to interpose itself. Encountering Kate Millett’s 1972 installation, “Terminal Piece” (which is on display at mumok, in Vienna, as part of an eponymous exhibition curated by Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare, from June 20th through February of 2027), one immediately registers the failure of language in the face of the need for force. A text, with its explanatory burden, cannot even occupy the same moment as force. An art work that responds to the violence of living is not required to explain or describe the violence: it can equate itself with it.
These thoughts predated my introduction to “Terminal Piece” but were given an almost shocking substance by it. The limitations of language can often seem overwhelmingly problematic: the futility of writing as a response to certain realities opens the possibility of it being made ridiculous by those realities. There are periods in the cycle of history when people seize control of language in their quest for domination. The opposite of literature is propaganda: what could please the propagandists more than the notion of writers vainly laboring over the precision of their politically ineffectual sentences? Even from a nonpolitical perspective, there is also the problem that language cannot—can never—adhere exactly to the dimensions of certain experiences and states of being, either because of the non-lingual nature of those experiences or because the capacity of literature to be ignored mirrors that of the experiences themselves. The tension between language and image in the representation of female experience is especially complex: a couple of years ago, when I visited Louise Bourgeois’s exhibition “The Woven Child,” it was hard not to see her representations of the female body as more violently relevant and true than any literary account of it could be. What couldn’t be said suddenly seemed so much more important than what could, and although, at other times, the opposite is true, it is part of the character of any medium to gain or lose relevance according to its moment in history.
At first sight, “Terminal Piece” seems almost to constitute a reproach to literary form. It is so big and mute, so purely negative and yet so abundantly informative, that it immediately diminishes the notion of writing as a medium for encompassing experience. Looking at the caged woman amid rows of empty chairs, I felt instant fear, not just of this disturbing and sinister work but of the very notion of describing it in an essay. For a moment, I couldn’t understand what I was being asked to do. It was as though I had been targeted to explain the pointlessness of literary representation. It was the cool abandonment of language by someone I thought of as a writer that caused this confusion. It was as if Kate Millett, the author of numerous books and essays, had suddenly revealed a magical power, the ability to disappear. These notions of disappearance and abandonment—as though Millett were some universal mother or authority figure walking out on her responsibilities—sit oddly beside the work’s bald presentation of entrapment and humiliation. Is “Terminal Piece” a display of strength masquerading as an admission of defeat, or is it the other way around? And how can the power of disappearance also and at the same time be a power of manifestation? The writer disappears and manifests herself anew in silence, the inarguable silence of the object. In fact, it was this demonstration of the philosophical superiority of silence, manifested in an object, that made my first sight of “Terminal Piece” so devastating.
Yet some deep conservatism is disturbed when artists move into mediums other than those with which they were traditionally associated. It is as though art were a belief state, like religion: the illusion is destroyed when you admit more than one god. How had Millett been permitted this heresy? Like all forms of fidelity, adherence to one’s medium involves the surrender of other possibilities. There is the suspicion that polyvalence is also weakness: that to believe in more than one thing is to be faithful to nothing. The presence of this conservatism in myself, exercised against myself, was another revelation of “Terminal Piece.” In adopting writing as a métier or a discipline, I had relinquished a certain freedom, as people do when social structures require them to make a choice. A choice has to be defended and maintained, and the most effective way to do this is to believe that you were unfit for anything else, that there wasn’t really any choice, and that what looked like free will was, in fact, determined by the limitations of character.
For a writer, the privacy of the image-maker can sometimes be tormenting: standing behind the dumb and violent surface of the visual plane, the artist eludes—indeed, refuses—explanation. The self-sufficiency of the image itself discourages interpretation. A visual artist can begin by making replicas of life, but, once the image is no longer a reproduction of an object, we lose sight of the artist and can no longer easily follow. The artist comes back into view only in the manifestation of a finished creation, of which language struggles to supply a description. At a Rothko exhibition in Paris, I watched crowds of people standing in front of the big, mysterious canvases, and this distance—between manifestation and description—seemed greater than ever before. I imagine that there were few people there who could have said what the paintings were about, or explained how the works made them feel, any more than I could have. It seemed important not to have to explain: Rothko’s abstraction permitted us, for once, to not have to give an account of ourselves, to reside untroubled in our own mystery.
The writer and the artist supply qualitatively different responses to the world and represent different versions of power, to which the fluctuations of history add a determinative element. That a written text requires the active coöperation of a reader in order to be brought into existence is part of its democratic economy. It is impossible to buy a Rothko—it is hard even to see one—but a book can be read by more or less anyone. Like any social interaction, writing involves fabrication, exposure, judgment. Naturally, there is a requirement to interest or entertain. Again, as in any social interaction, the business of telling the truth, about the world or about oneself, can be perilous. By comparison, the indifference of the image to the person looking at it seems an unimaginable liberty. People can laugh at a painting, or walk away from it, but it has its existence outside of them. This was the freedom that I found myself desiring and that Kate Millett’s installation seemed to both allude to and embody. Perhaps what I saw in “Terminal Piece” ’s imprisoned mannequin was myself.
Many people don’t know that Kate Millett had a vigorous practice as a visual artist. Her academic achievements in English literature, at the University of Minnesota and then at Oxford, were outstanding, but, a few years after getting her master’s degree, she changed course and moved to Japan to study sculpture. Her childhood, in the United States, had been hazardous and occasionally violent—her father was an alcoholic and abandoned the family when Millett was fourteen—yet genteel enough for Millett to have found the thread of education and followed it. The move to Japan seems almost to have been an attempt to evade the destiny that this education would eventually confer on her.
In Japan, she met the sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, who was her partner for two decades. Millett returned with him to New York, and it was there that the social revolution of the nineteen-sixties drew her into activism and teaching. Yoshimura, uprooted and without the radicalizing possibilities of Millett’s social identity, pursued his artistic vocation independently. The two of them, in retrospect, form an interesting paradigm. In New York, Yoshimura taught himself carpentry, as though its practicality and the humbleness of its materials answered his own loss of status and social integration. He began to make models in unpainted basswood, extraordinarily complex replicas of ordinary objects—houseplants, sewing machines, bicycles—whose colorlessness lent them a ghostly appearance. These nonhuman works embody the human capacity for attention to an extreme degree, as though by paying attention to objects Yoshimura discovered that he could give them souls. By giving them souls, he retained a soul himself: the capacity for attention, his works suggest, is all that humans require to define their humanity. This radical reduction in the sphere of individual activity is a philosophical statement, sure enough, but it is also a response to danger—the danger of being an outsider. By contrast, one might say that Millett, in dramatically expanding her own sphere of activity, was deliberately courting danger.
In 1970, Millett published her book “Sexual Politics”—an almost unrivalled example of the power of a written text to effect explosive change. The book was quickly received as era-defining, and Millett was culturally consecrated as the leader of second-wave feminism. The violence of her public life began. Millett had entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia University in 1968, and the book was her thesis; perhaps she had not expected her academic persona to deliver such a challenge to the status quo. Yet one might almost say that it was Millett the visual artist—rather than Millett the academic or the feminist activist—who wrote that book. She recognized that she could not consider herself to possess artistic freedom so long as the structures of patriarchy were in place. She responded—whether out of obligation or out of need—to the moral imperative to challenge those structures in order to restore her integrity both as a human and as a creator.
The success of “Sexual Politics” brought all of fame’s bedfellows to Millett’s door: intrusion, insult, worship, expectation. In itself, success was a crude notion to apply to a set of ideas whose goal was so earnest and pure. That a profound critique of patriarchy could be a best-seller, and its author on the cover of Time magazine brought capitalism and revolution into uneasy proximity. Millett responded by trying to hold on to her activism, involving herself in movements against racial and sexual injustice in America and elsewhere in the world. Yet her sensitivity as an artist made her experience of fame—and of notoriety—exceptionally bruising: her intellectual integrity drew accusations of élitism; her discomfort with her own power attracted more scrutiny than its abuse might have. Between the enormity of her public persona and the complexity of her private self, her mental health began to fracture. There were countless opportunities for the breakdown to be publicly exposed, and on more than one occasion she was involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions by her family. In 1979, she wrote “The Basement,” an account of the horrifying torture and murder of an Indianapolis teen-ager by the family she was boarding with in the basement of their home. By 1979, Millett had herself experienced the terrifying cul-de-sac of (institutional) imprisonment. This perception of a location as fundamental to the establishment of powerlessness and the enactment of human cruelty carries echoes of “Terminal Piece.” It is the physical location that creates the framework for abuser and abused, that enshrines and withstands the volatility of mental states, that authorizes the passage from sanity to insanity in the social contract.
Over time, Millett’s loss of trust in her family, and the indissolubility of her ties to them even so, exposed the very foundations not just of her own self but of the deformed femininity that she had spent her life addressing. She was not—she refused to make herself—free, and the reason for this was the absence of a true location or shelter for female freedom. She lived doggedly in this lack: even to provide an answer to the question of her sexual orientation, about which she was tirelessly interrogated, was to risk a form of dishonesty that she struggled to countenance. Mental illness showed her how close to incoherence and meaninglessness all these definitions lay. Just behind the politics of human relationships stood the power of the institutional, which could permit or extinguish the theatre of life at will. “Terminal Piece” offers a compelling account of these dynamics.
A mannequin sits alone in the second of two rows of empty folding chairs. She is not—or not only—an autobiographical figure: she is a placeholder, a stuntman. She is waiting, but for what? Bars fence off this waiting area, so that it is unclear whether it is the mannequin who is behind bars or the viewers. Perhaps she is a visitor, our only visitor, waiting among the empty chairs to see us. Even our visitor, then, is a simulacrum, a doll. If, on the other hand, it is she who is imprisoned, then she has already, in a sense, escaped, leaving her likeness behind her. But what has happened to her real or original self? We do not know whether the other chairs were ever occupied, whether the mannequin was forgotten while others were processed, or whether a different kind of hopelessness is implied by her solitude in this place. Sometimes the cage seems like a brain and the mannequin an emblem of individual consciousness: the idea that the brain could be an institutional setting and the self a fabrication is disturbing. Yet, at the same time, it is perhaps how we really feel, trapped alone in our brains, not knowing what to do there or when we’ll be released.
Millett said that she created “Terminal Piece” because “it could not be written.” The failure of language again: Is it because language is itself a social system and therefore ultimately untrustworthy? Is the art work, with its autonomy and silence, the only place where individual reality can be safely revealed? Yet it is language that defines our humanity: what outraged Millett the most about her institutionalization was that she had been deprived of the opportunity to speak. No one had consulted or properly examined her. Her will, the same will that had argued and battled so fiercely for change, was suddenly of no account. She had been given no voice—as though mental illness had cast her out of the language economy and placed her on the level of objects and animals. This terrifying reduction in status revealed the conformity that is the basis of language. Later, she wrote feelingly about depression, the refusal to engage that is a kind of revenge against that conformity. By turning away from engagement and explanation, “Terminal Piece” attains a melancholy autonomy. The mannequin is alone, but, in a fragile and temporary way, she is free. Whether the bars are keeping her in or keeping us out, there are no other people around her.
In an essay about her work as a sculptor, Millett wrote that the whole orientation and purpose of her life changed in the course of a few moments in the late nineteen-sixties, when she read a newspaper paragraph reporting the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens, the teen-ager whose story she would tell, years later, in “The Basement.” There could be no better illustration of Millett’s visionary and political integrity than this fascinating claim. It shows us two things: first, what a world without moral compromise might look like, and, second, how vulnerable the uncompromising mind is to breakdown and persecution. That Millett could not accept the continuation of normal life in the face of the aberrant murder of a stranger is evidence of her formidable sense of justice. Yet, more than that, in imagining Likens’s experience, Millett came face to face with the inextinguishable nature of evil. This robust existence of evil, as evidenced by the teen-ager’s suffering, removed in one stroke Millett’s willingness to make a bargain with life. One might almost say that it drove her mad, if madness is the revolt of the mind against the body that contains it. It was, in other words, Millett’s imaginative sensibility, more than her political one, that made Likens’s murder intolerable to her: the idea of the body as an object, susceptible to being caught, caged, and tortured, overwhelmed, in her mind, the body as a valued and socially defended subject. What Millett grasped was that female identity—and, indeed, the identities of all victims of social or institutionalized power—lay somewhere between the two. Whereas her writings articulated the concerns of femininity as a political condition, her work as a sculptor unequivocally confronted the terror of the body as an object.
In the same essay, Millett reflects on some occasions of showing her works, occasions on which she could not help acknowledging that the sculptures themselves experienced some of the body’s vulnerability. During one exhibition of “Terminal Piece,” a friendly but drunken crowd attempted to “rescue” the mannequin, freeing her from her cage and seating her stiff form among them while they caroused. Millett plays the good sport in describing this amusing and profoundly troubling event, noting that the non-precious nature of her materials opened her works to a degree of communal “play”; yet it is not much of a leap to see an element of mob violence in the crowd’s actions, the frenetic nature of destruction that triggered Millett’s deepest fear of the social contract. Like Sylvia Likens, the mannequin is at the mercy of the group, whose members can inflict the inchoate and ungrasped violence of their own being on her at will. In this case, at least, the mannequin has a defense: she is not “there”; she has already vanished, leaving a simulacrum of herself behind. Is this disappearing trick the summit of objectification or a mystical release from it? This is a fundamental question asked by “Terminal Piece,” one that extends into death itself.
Millett believed that the visual art work, with its power of nonspecific allusion, could touch something deeper than human thought and rationality. She is possibly unique in identifying the absence of allusion in femininity as a philosophical crisis: if “Terminal Piece” has a message, it is perhaps that there is no philosophical structure for female death. In her sculpture, Millett refuses the standard imagery of womanhood, refuses to posit a meaningful female history: a woman, for her, is an individual trapped in the political meaning of her body. Yet Millett’s sculpture also took her by a different route to the threshold of dissolution, the dissolution of the physical substance but also of the meanings themselves. The survival of “Terminal Piece” takes us, too, to that threshold, a place of temporariness and waiting, beyond which nothing is known. ♦