I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

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One Flew Over the Coup:The Sculpture of Kate MilLettThe scholar Kate Millett, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1970, through a stunningexamination of patriarchal bias, gave the second round of 20th-centuryfeminism its theoretical moorings. The dissertation-turned-bestseller, SexualPolitics, secured Millett a Time magazine cover, household-name status,book contracts (a total of eight over the next 25 years)—and arguably herfame led to near oblivion as a sculptor. Ironically, her own torrent of wordsthat has eclipsed her prolific and profound body of art were sculpted in thestudio. There would have been no Sexual Politics without the 1963 "FurnitureSuite," a fanciful assemblage of hand-carved body parts encased in abed, love seat, and piano, in which Millet explored gender issues.Art historian Kathy O'Dell, has organized, with the Fine Arts Gallery atthe University of Maryland/Baltimore County, the first major retrospectiveof Millett's sculpture, opening February 27 (through April 5). The impetusto show her sobering large-scale installations since 1967 and earlier examplesof her witty surrealist sculptures came from "a desire to balance therecord," says O'Dell. As the curator observes, to second-wave feminists,Millett is a founding mother; to political activists worldwide, she is a comradeagainst human-rights violations; and to lesbians, she is a sensuous andculturally astute chronicler of her relationships with women. All can nowreckon with her extraordinary art production. In "Kate Millett, Sculptor:The First 38 Years," in the exhibit's catalogue, "Shaping Identity, ReshapingConstraints," and in a series of related lectures and interactive Web sites,the connections between Millett's visual and written work are finally addressed.The many Milletts are together at last.—HARRIET LYONSThe Trial of Sylvia Likens, 1978 •MiLLett's reaction to the 1965 torture-murderof teenager Sylvia Likens, held captivein an Indianapolis basement, would dramaticallychange the pop and fantasy imageryof her earlier work. The metaphor ofthe cage was born. It was "fear itself,"wrote Millett. "My fears. The fears of others.Of our times in fact. Confinement. Theterror of isolation." Although Likens's ordealwas the "hidden engine" powering herartistic vision, Millett did not deal with herexperience head-on until 13 years later in"The Trial of Sylvia Likens." This mockcourtroom filled with life-size models ofthe perpetrators invites visitors to readLikens's harrowing story written out on thewall (news accounts and pages from themanuscript of "The Basement") and listento it on audiotape.12 O N T H E I S S U E S • S p r i n g 1997
Psychiatry, 1995This work is informed by Milletfs personal history withthe mental health system. She was briefly committed in1972 to what she calls a California madhouse throughmisguided family intervention, and again in 1980 inIreland by police after she supported IRA hunger strikers."Psychiatry" displays a medicine chest housing bottlesof antipsychotics alongside bottles labeled withtheir positive and negative results. A hoped for effect,"quiet," can as easily produce "fright." "The glass doorof the cabinet has been smashed," observes curatorKathy O'Dell. "Medical tape has been wrapped aroundit, holding the cabinet together, as flimsily, Millettseems to be saying, as its drugs hold people together."rmfmmmmmHomage to the Old Menat the Houston Hotel, 1975 •The flop house that once stood a stone's throw from Milletfsstudio on the Bowery in Manhattan is re-created asa regulation cell with a victim she describes as "archetypicallymale. As are most prisoners, 'criminal' or political.As are most inhabitants of flop houses... With women, Ihave always known. That was our life—confinement... Allthat was merely theoretical until Sylvia Likens. Thisspunky kid, this humorist and fighter was punished untodeath for her energy, her potential sexual vitality. Shewas my lost child self. It could have been me, and in asense it was. I joined the underground people. Thereafterthey would be my subject, what I sculpted."H 1ri\< Waiting for Godot, 1995The two gigantic, wheel-like forms atop abench evoke two seated figures, a referenceto Estragon and Vladimir of Samuel Becketfsplay. These characters, according tocurator Kathy O'Dell, "wait for Godot, bidingtheir time by exchanging banalities andreflections on the vicissitudes of life. Nobodynamed Godot ever appears, the pointbeing the waiting: the deferral of satisfaction;the containment of desire. These arelikewise the terms of imprisonment." Whileno actual cages appear in Milletfs most recentwork, O'Dell sees the "caged dynamic"thriving. For Millett, however, "this entailsnot only resisting but reshaping constraints—thevery socio-political conditionsthat form the meaning of life."Spring 1997 • ON THE ISSUES 13
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