KAlf MlllflL SCULPTOR: THt rlRST 38 YrRRS KRTf Mlllfll, SCULPTOR: THf f IRST 38 Yf RRS

Kathy O'Dell

With contributions to the catalogue by

Maurice Berger

Kate Millett

Linda Nochlin

David Yager

Fine Arts Gallery University of Maryland Baltimore County 1997 C O H T f H T S

Acknowledgments vi

Foreword viii Linda Nochlin

Preface ix David Yager

Shaping Identity, Reshaping Constraints: 1 The Sculpture of Kate Millett Kathy O'Dell

From the Basement to the Madhouse 41 Kate Millett

Plates 51

Time Line 61 Maurice Berger

Checklist of the Exhibition 81

Biography and Bibliography 83 Fine Arts Gallery University of Maryland Baltimore County Catonsville, Maryland February 27 -April 5, 1997

Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years was supported by a grant from the Maryland StateArts Council.

Designer: Ferris W Crane Editor: Antonia LaMotte Gardner Printed by Virginia Lithograph, Arlington, Virginia Copyright © 1997 Fine Arts Gallery University of Maryland Baltimore County Catonsville, Maryland 21250 410 455-3188 All rights reserved Time Line ©1997 Maurice Berger library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-86518 l ISBN: 0-9624565-9-4

Photographs courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.

Cover: Dinner for One, 1967. Photo: Diane Yamaguchi. Frontispiece: Opening Reception, Things exhibition, Minami Gallery,Tokyo, 1963. Millett, standing second from left.Photo: Nobori.

This catalogue is distributed by D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, New York. RCKHOWlfOGMfHTS I I

Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Aja Razumny,Ann Reynolds, Phyllis Years is the culmination of many individ­ Robinson, Mary Anne Staniszewski, and I uals' efforts,but none as enduring as Kate Kristine Stiles.The input of students has Millett's. Millett's commitment to making been equally important. Laura Nova, an I sculpture over the last several decades extern from the Cornell-in-Washington � as she received far more acclaim for her Program,produced a substantive research accomplishments as a writer is a testimo­ paper on Millett, which is available in ny to her commitment to her art and to the reading area of the exhibition.Joannl the sustaining power of art itself. I am Raczynska, a UMBC Fine Arts Gallery grateful to Millett for the prodigious intern,produced the illuminating video­ amount of energy she lent to the organiza­ tape accompanying the exhibition. tion of this retrospective and for the many Both of these young scholar-artists hours of interviews that amplifiedmy contributed tremendously to my own research forthe catalogue essay and pro­ research. I also wish to thank interns vided the basis for the videotape accom­ David Brown, Brian Garrett, Laura panying the exhibition. Pasquini, and Eileen Ragsdale for their I would also like to thank Linda patient, caring attention to detail.And Nochlin forher insightful Foreword to the the efforts of research assistant Kate catalogue, Maurice Berger for his nuanced Schaffer were typically indefatigable. Time Line, and Jon Hendricks (curator Financial support from various ofThe Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus sources has allowed us to produce the Collection) for his generous loan of pho­ exhibition, catalogue, videotape, lecture tographs.These and other colleagues and series, and numerous educational out­ friends contributed to this project by reach programs. Outside the university, providing writings on feminism, art, and many thanks to the Maryland State Arts politics, or by discussing ideas, or by lend­ Council and the Maryland Humanities ing moralsupport. Besides those already Council.At UMBC, many thanks to the mentioned, I am grateful to the following: Office of the Provost, Humanities Elizabeth Armstrong, Martha Buskirk, Center, and Humanities Forum. Eleanor Susan Edwards, Robby Garfinkel,Saundra Cunningham in the Office of Institutional Goldman, Robert E. Haywood,Amelia Advancement and Daphne Harrison, Jones,Anne B. Keating, Llz Kotz,Therese Director of the Humanities Center, Llchtenstein, Karen Moss, Mary Musick, deserve special thanks for their expert Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo,Leslie Prosterman, promotion of the exhibition and lecture series. I also gratefully acknowledge Arts Department, Professor Yager's the help of a 1995 Summer Faculty consistent support is deeply appreciated. Fellowship from UMBC's Designated Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Research Initiative Fund for conducting John Mernit, for his feedback and research for this project. his finely tuned toleration of ambient Symmes Gardner, Director of tension, and my mother, Ruth Homer Programs at the Fine Arts Gallery, went O'Dell, who first introduced me to art above and beyond the call of duty,as and whose death during the course of usual. His vision in all things related to this project made me ever more mindful the art of mounting an exhibition helped of the importance of women's leader­ steady my sights on numerous occasions ship in both art and education. This and kept me focused on the big picture. catalogue is dedicated to her memory. Monika Graves, Projects Coordinator, offered great insight and humor, which bolstered me as well. Professor Vin KathyO'Dell, Curator Grabill lent much-appreciated guidance in producing the videotape accompany­ ing the exhibition. Boundless thanks go to Ferris Crane,the designer of the catalogue, and to Antonia Gardner, the editor. Their sensitivity and collaborative spirit played a major role in producing a visually and intellectually stimulating document that will serve as a foundation forfuture research on Kate Millett's artwork. Without Mitch Rockwell of Virginia Llthograph this publication would not have lived up to our original plan. We are enormously grateful for his advice and professionalism. But none of these thanks would be in order at all if it were not for Professor David Yager's unequivocal acceptance of my proposal almost three years ago to launch a retro­ spective of Kate Millett's sculpture. As ExecutiveDirector of the Fine Arts Gallery and Chairperson of the Visual f OHf WORD

avid for justice, and, it was soon aesthetic interest; an art that teaches must apparent, justice not only for women, be preachy and didactic, according to but for political prisoners, for antiwar many of those who tell the public what is I Linda protesters and civil libertarians, for good art and what bad. Yet how untrue children, for the mentally ill, and for such an interpretation of art history is.A Nochlin gays and lesbians.What was less clear whole artistic heritage, including the work at the time was the fact that Millett of William Blake-also a poet and a visual was an artist as much as she was a artist; of Jacques-Louis David, ofWilliam literary scholar and social and political Morris, of Goya and of Daumier, of Gustave activist, and that much of her work lay Courbet and Kathe Kollwitz, all of them Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace in the area of sculpture and its updated socially and politically committed and Professor of ModernArt at the equivalent, the installation piece. unafraid to project their vision of humani­ New York UniversityInstitute of Fine Arts. Her most recent What is particularly striking about ty into their visual production, stands publication is The Body inPieces: Kate Millett's persona and achievement behind Kate Millett's project in sculpture. The Fragment as Metaphor of Modernity is how little it lends itself to conven­ Equally interesting is the fact that (Thames and Hudson, 1994). tional pigeonholing. Either you work Millett's sculptural production, although at with words or with images, or, more times dark and condemnatory, involved in recently, with some combination of setting forththe oppressive imagery of the both. But to be both an artist and a cage and the victim, is at other times more writer with equal dedication, and both indirectly evocative, and at still others, a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer, overtly playful, abstract,and lighthearted. a political activist and the organizer of Throughout,Kate Millett exhibits an inven­ a utopian art colony-and to be a tiveness and a poignant sense of individual woman and a lesbian at the same time: involvement-through craft,through it's somehow too much for the con­ feeling, through visual ideas-that mark temporary critical imagination, with her three-dimensional creation as a whole. For those of us who were around and its tendency to allot one talent per For many people, this retrospective of active during the crucial years of the customer, and that rathergrudgingly. Kate Millett's sculptural career will come inception of theWomen's Movement in Even within a single field,it is not easy as a salutary surprise. For some younger the late sixties and early seventies, Kate to hold together what are considered viewers, the very name of Kate Millett­ Millett occupied a special position. "contradictions." If an artist is serious iconic for women of my generation-may be a new discovery. For all of us, old SexualPolitics had hit us like a bomb­ and committed to issues of social shell, catapulting the new ideas about justice or to civil liberties, critics are admirers and new discoverers, this exhibi­ feminism and women's oppression to anxious to see her work as humorless tion will be a moving revelation of one the media and the public sphere. Millett and devoid of formal value or nuance. of the most interesting achievements of a herself was positioned as La Passionaria An art committed to social justice multifaceted career. ofWomen's Liberation-fiery,articulate, must be grim, flatfooted, and lacking

viii PRf f A Cf

It is an honor to exhibit the work of It is a special event to be part of Kate Millett at UMBC's Fine Arts this monumental exhibition and to Gallery. Milieu's powerful political and work with Professor O'Dell and Kate social work maintains its potency Millett. I thank Kate for allowing as we look at the world around us me new visions and Kathy for her today. Her unique balance of sculpture vision and hard work. and words has allowed us access to powerfulpolitical and social dialogue. I had seen a few pieces of Kate Millett's sculpture over the past twenty-five years and have read her writings, including ThePolitics of David Cruelty, so I was very enthusiastic I when UMBC Professor Kathy O'Dell suggested I visit Kate in New York Yager and look at an exhibition of her new work at Noho Gallery. As I viewed the sculpture, the rela­ tionship between Milieu's writings and her visual sense of the world around her emerged. This sculpture, often not beautiful but always powerful, left me with a sense of emotional void. The jail, the cage, the lone person occupying a timeless environment, the silence of not being heard. The elements of timelessness as emotional void. In many of the sculptures we become aware of the construction, not of any formidable materials, but of David Yager is Executive work that is rough, common, awkward, Director, Fine Arn Gallery, fragile.It is this juxtaposing of materi­ Chairperson, VisualArts Department, als with a powerful sense of doom, and Director of the Imaging Research Center, UMBC depression,and loneliness that causes one to look not only at a past history but at the present and future.

ix

SHRPIHG IDfHTITV.HfSHAPIHG COHSTHAIHTS TH f S [ LI LP T LI H fOf K R T f M I LLf TT

Who is Kate Millett? received less notice, although one To the person familiar with the last exception that gets to the heart of few decades of feminist activity, she is the Millett's work in art occurred recently. 2 scholar who in 1970 published Sexual A blast of publicity arrived in the Politics, helping shift the second round spring of 1996 with the travelling of twentieth-century feminism into high exhibition Old Glory:The American gear and prompting Time magazine to Flag in ContemporaryArt.3 Included feature her on its August 31, 1970, cover in the exhibition, a 1970 Millett piece (fig.1). To the reader of queer literature, protesting the Vietnam War and the Kathy she is a prolific lesbian writer, recounting violation of First Amendment rights I her relationships with women in candid drew the wrath of Newt Gingrich, Bob and sensuous terms, replete with astute Dole, and scores of citizens of Phoenix, O'Dell cultural observations. To the political Arizona, where it was then on view. activist, she has been associated with The work, TheAmerican Dream Goes numerous civil rights, feminist, and gay to Pot (plate 1), consists of a wooden liberation organizations, including cell-like structure, which contains a the Congress of Racial Equality, National commode. Draped across the rim of Organization forWomen, Columbia the seatless toilet bowl is an American Women's Liberation, Redstockings, and flag, appearing as if it is about to be Radicalesbians; today, she is a continuous­ flushed down "the pot," along with ly vigilant protestor of human rights and dreams of what many protestors civil liberties violations around the of the era,like Millett, thought of as world. To the residents of Poughkeepsie, true patriotism. New York, where she runs an art colony The exhibition in which Millett's subsidized by tree farming,she is the piece first appeared was the People's lady who sells the best, most artistically FlagShow, held in 1970 at the Judson shaped Christmas trees for miles around. Memorial Church in New York.The The full answer, then, to "Who is Kate show had been organized partly in Millett?" depends on exposure to the response to the arrest a few years multiplicity of Millett's careers. But ever earlier of art dealer Stephen Radich. In Kathy O'Dell is Assistant Professor since Sexual Politics,her first book, sold 1966-67 Radich held an exhibition of of Art History and Theory at the 1 University of MarylandBaltimore County. 80,000 copies in its first year, critics work by an artist named Marc Morrel, Herbook Contractwith the Skin: . and scholars have tended to give priority a former Marine who made antiwar Masochism, PerformanceArt, and the 1970s to her written production, which will be published by University of Minnesota Press in I 998. includes eight additional books to date. Millett's career as an artist has generally

1 sculpture out of U.S. flags.As a result of [expressing tbe sentiment} :America the exhibition, Radich was arrested for right or wrong,' and subject it to all flag desecration.The 1970 People's sorts of criticism, defacement, etc., in Flag Sbow likewise resulted in the an attempt to bring. . .[those wbo arrest of some of its organizers, who wanted the war} back to seeing that were among the exhibiting artists. In in f act tbe flag had been dishonored that show, Millett's piece was one of not by us but by policy.5 the targets. but as in the Radich case. it was not the artists in the Flag Sbow who were arrested-or, said more precisely, it was not as artists that the organizers were arrested. This was due to a legal technicality at the time sanc­ tioning only the arrest of those who display a desecrated flag (i.e., a gallery owner and exhibition organizers)-a ruling artists felt was a violation not only of dealers' and organizers' rights but, by extension, their own. It was the preservation of First Amendment rights that artists like Millett saw as central to their freedom as Americans-a freedom warranting deeply patriotic sentiments.4 Views of patriotism differed widely Figure 1 throughout the period of the Vietnam Time magazine cover, War. Looking back, Millett has sketched August 31, 1970. Portrait of Kate Millett the difference in this way: by Alice Neel. © 1970 Time Inc. Reprinted by permission. The people who wanted the war­ the hawks-imagined they were the patriotic Americans. We felt we were the patriotic Americans.And we really did bave concerns for tbe honor of the count1J1. So we could take its flag which bad been made into a magic object ...

2 Although many years have passed could be thirty-eight more years of work since the Vietnam War and the Flag to exhibit one day. Show, artists' struggles to preserve First Amendment rights continue, and views on patriotism and freedom still differ NEW YORK, TIIE EARLY YEARS widely-witness the dozens of articles and letters written to editors of nation­ al and local Phoenix newspapers last The first thirty-eight years of Millett's year by citizens expressing their views career as an artist began in the summer on these topics amid the controversy of 1959. At twenty-four,Millett had over the 1996 Old Gloryexhibition.6 finisheda one-year teaching stint at These letters and Gingrich's nationally the University of North Carolina at televised rants may have helped rectify Greensboro, where she had begun to incomplete answers to the question paint in her spare time as she taught "Who is Kate Millett?" by showing that English Literature.Her qualifications for she has been not only a feminist writer a career in academia included two but also an artist-a politically minded degrees in English Literature-a B.A. one, to boot. Even so, Millett's identity fromthe University of Minnesota, award­ as an artist, more often than not, still ed magna cum Laude in 1956, and a comes as a surprise, despite the fact B.A., grantedwith First Class Honors, that this was her first career, starting from St. Hilda's College at Oxford long before and persisting throughout University, England, in 1958 Oater, in all the others. 1970, she would receive a Ph.D., with The goal of Kate Millett, Sculptor: Distinction, in Comparative Literature The First 38 Years is to turn the sur­ from Columbia University). While in prise of Millett being an artist into the North Carolina, her memories of an surprise of her art. The exhibition is awe-inspiring excursion to view art in itself incomplete, since, by Millett's Italy during a vacation break from choice, only her sculpture is on view, Oxford, together with the satisfaction not her silkscreen prints, drawings,or she receivedfrom her fledgling attempts photographs,which have been exhibit­ at oil painting, were enough to make ed more widely elsewhere.And as with Millett decide to be an artist, not an most retrospective exhibitions,space academic. 7 She resigned her teaching limitations have meant that what is on view is only a selection. The last part of the artist-chosen title connotes an incompleteness, too. Indeed, there

3 post and at the end of the school year inYolved in painting a large Abstract moved to New York.Acquiring a loft Expressionist canYas. at 307 Bowery Street in which to both Millett turned to working in plaster, live and work. she made her first pieces studied briefly at the New School for of sculpture in the summer of 1959. Social Research with the sculptor Millett worked in clay at first, possi­ Seymour Lipton. and later sat in on a few bly because it was the only sculptural night classes with sculptor Reuben material with which she had ever Kadish at the Brooklyn Museum School. worked.As a thirteen-year-old frustrated Her early plaster sculptures. freestanding over a school assignment to build a or suspended from the ceiling. were small pyramid with plywood and chi,·. composed of abstract shapes arranged in Millett had resorted to playing around delicately spiralling arabesque configura­ with the ex"tra clay, ending up with what tions (fig. 2). not unlike Lipton's own she describes as a "head of Apollo."The work of the period. to The suspension of bust's features were inspired by repro­ Millett's pieces from the ceiling, howev­ ductions of Greek sculpture perused in er, was reminiscent of the mobiles of art books at the St. Paul, i\ilinnesota, Alexander Calder, their biomorphism of home of her elegant and influential Aunt Barbara Hepworth's and Henry Moore's Dorothy, Millett's first mentor in the work. NliJJett has credited these artists as arts. 8 The experience of manipulating influences, but it was Lipton. as a materials. watching something take teacher, who exerted a greater influence 1 1 Figure 2 shape out of complete formlessness, on Mil.lett's future direction. :Vlillett with earl,· to this day strikes Millett as an "utterly Millett remembers Lipton as a "won­ plaster sculpture::. miraculous occasion:· derful, sardonic guy" who. on learning ca. I 959-1960. \'v'hen Millett emerged as an artist that Millett had a big studio aU her own, in New York in the late 1950s, it was asked why she was bothering to take predictable that she would produce classes; why not just go into her studio abstractions, not figural work.Abstract and make work? Given the climate for Expressionism had reigned as a break­ women in the ma.le-dominated art scene through painting style since about 1947 at the time, this suggestion could �ave and was a force to be reckoned with, been read as a way to rid the classroom especially in New York where its artists of a female student. But any suspicions were sometimes referred to as the "New of sexism were quickly allayed by York School.''9 Many sculptors were Lipton ·s strong encouragement as well influenced by the movement and began as his deep respect for sculptor Louise producing works that could be seen as Nevelson. Lipton considered Nevelson, three-din1ensional manifestations of the who was already making her signature bold, seemingly spontaneous gestures all-black or all-white ,valls of boxes, 4 furniture legs, hunks of cornice, and This centuries-oldthinking would Waseda University). Her rigor paid off. other wooden elements, "one of the continue for at least another decade, In March 1963, the Minami Gallery in best sculptors in town," Millett recalls. when it was directly challenged for Tokyo gave her a one-person exhibition This impressed Millett, who "had never the first time in print by art historian -a remarkable feat for any twenty­ heard a man praise a woman's work." Linda Nochlin in her influential 1971 eight-year-old artist, female or male, Burrowing into her studio, Millett essay, "Why Have There Been No Great American or Japanese. subsidized her art-making by teaching Women Artists?" According to Nochlin, The title of the exhibition was kindergarten for a year in East Harlem. "The fault lies not in our stars, our Things (see frontispiece of this cata­ Additionally, for the first eighteen hormones, our menstrual cycles, or logue), and the sculptures were just months in New York, Millett's mother, our empty internal spaces, but in our that-things, objects, stuff, junk that though "not approving of the Fine Arts," institutions and our education­ Millett had found on the streets and sent her an allowance of forty dollars a education understood to include then "transmuted in parody and play," month, significant to Millett because everything that happens to us from as she wrote in her catalogue statement her mother had earned this money her­ the moment we enter this world for the show.13 The found objects were self by selling insurance over the of meaningful symbols, signs, and compiled in a wily manner that makes telephone. Many evenings, Millett would signals" [my emphases].12 them into whole new objects, often visit the popular Greenwich Village For Millett, the male artists'" killer anthropomorphic, and evocative of an hangout of the Abstract Expressionists, comments" between 1959 and 1961 infinite number of stories. The original the Cedar Bar, where she was one of functioned as a dare, one that soon meaning or function of an individual very few women among male artists. "I became impossible to act on in a city object ceases being unidimensional wore blue jeans with plaster all over that itself had become one big art when connected to other found objects, them just so they couldn't miss the fact institution made up of smaller ones like which in turn connect it to a variety [that I was making art]," she recalls with the Cedar Bar. In September 1961, Millett of interpretations. a chuckle. Less amused, she also remem­ boarded a freighter to Japan.where she For example, Oksamma (March bers that "one of the big problems was stayed until September 1963, expanding 1963) (fig.3), consists of a small wood­ 'there had never been any women her self-directed art education. en icebox (then common to Japanese sculptors'-which is what the... boys homes) suspended between two bicycle from the Cedar Bar would say at the wheels attached to iron rods to form end of the evening when you had a slender chassis, which serves as a cooked their dinner. Their killer com­ --�J_APAN support for a smaller wheel that faces ment was that 'there had never been the icebox and a wooden shoe last any important women artists.'" that faces away from it.After the first Millett's study and practice of art in glance, the old-fashioned household Japan were rigorous. Between October appliance, wheels, and device for 1961 and June 1963, she completed shoemaking give way to the image, roughly one sculpture per month (subsidized by teaching English at

5 Figure 3 Oksamma, 1963. Photo: Nobori.

6 perhaps, of a little figure trying to make Yoshiko; the shoe last facing away from For Hiroshima,Millett set a wood­ a journey in a curious version of a the icebox becomes an indicator of the en apple crate on top of four baby rickshaw; a fantastical delivery cart to be direction the dying Yoshiko took, away carriage wheels. From an opening in the driven by someone using the shoe last from the domestic site where she had top of the box protrudes an iron rod as a seat and the toy wheel to once been united with friends;the with a metal helmet dangling from its steer; or from the vantage point of the small steering wheel facing the oppo­ end.A certain innocence is suggested late 1990s, some sort of wacky new site direction evokes those friends'nos­ by the baby carriage wheels and a portable hotel minibar; and a host of talgic desires to reunite with her. In this certain humor by the fact that the "bed" other quirky things. more serious light, the humor of the of the carriage, the box, is dropped to But for all the comical interpreta­ piece takes on a tone of tenderness, but knee height: the entire sculpture stands tions of Oksamma, or any of Millett's never disappears entirely. The humor only two and a half feet high. In leaning sculpture of her Japan period, there are could be seen as Millett's gift to herself over to inspect the piece, it is tempting serious ones as well. Millett's specific and to her Japanese friends to help to pat the helmet, as one would the titles lend her sculptures meanings them deal with their otherwiseover­ head of a baby, and then laugh at being that are rooted in her own personal whelming grief. seduced into the simulation of an act history as well as the history and culture Humor served another purpose as that itself generally prompts a smile. of Japan after World War I. well. It made it possible for viewers When one gives a second thought to Oksamma is an example. In Japanese, outside Oksamma's circle of friends to the title of the piece, however, and takes "oksamma" means, loosely, "honorable enjoy the sculpture, engage in their note of the scratches in the helmet, wife." Millett used this title as an ironic own brandof storytelling, and thereby innocence turns to victimhood and reference to a female painter friend personalize the meaning of the piece humor to seriousness. This could have named YoshikOYoshimura who was for themselves. Humor is always there been a helmet worn by a Japanese the perhaps honorable but far from to rescue viewers fromthat uneasy soldier, a member of a relief team after traditional wife of sculptor Fumio feeling that there's something in the the United States' dropping of the Yoshimura.14 Millett was Yoshiko's and work they should "get." Here, foolish­ atomic bomb. Suddenly, the apple box Fumio's neighbor and spent a great deal ness, in the form of humor, resides right no longer looks like the bed of a baby's of time with them. When Yoshiko died in the look of the pieces, never in the carriage, but a tiny coffin.And the rod of cancer at age thirty-seven,Millett viewer. But it is also true that under­ that holds the helmet and disappears made this sculpture in her honor. The standing various aspects of the into the cavity of the box now seems to icebox was chosen as a reference to the sculptures in their original contexts direct one's attention to the emptiness Japanese domestic site that Fumio and enhances one's experience of the work of that cavity, reminding the viewer of his Oksamma shared as well as forits and stimulates discussion of complex, accounts of the total disappearance­ dominant colors of black and white­ provocative, even controversial topics. vaporization-of so many men, women, the colors of the long silk banners hung Hiroshima Qune 1962) and Number 1 and children within seconds of at Buddhist funerals, including Yoshiko's. FireDepartment (December 1962- the bomb's impact on Hiroshima on The sculpture further suggests other January 1963) are good examples. August 6, 1945. mournful interpretations: the icebox From the front,Number 1 Fire becomes an anthropomorphized Department (fig.4) has the comical

7 Figure 4 Number 1 Fire Department, 1963. Photo: Nobori.

look of a large man with three legs.A having to do with Japan's relationship exhibition Japanese Art after 1945: curved form made of wooden slats is with the United States in the postwar Scream against the Sky, the first com­ anthropomorphized by an overturned period. prehensive exhibition of postwar red bucket perched on top, looking like The year Millett arrived in Japan- Japanese art. She provides a useful a head, and three black rubber boots 1961-emotions remained high over account of the history motivating these sticking out underneath.A faucet, the political ramifications of the war, protests:·' ... [T]he first renewal of the affixed to one of the slats at the right. is specifically the postwar Occupation of treaty in 1960 brought into sharp focus undeniably phallic. The piece is humor­ Japan by U.S. forces.In mid-June 1960 Japan's complex relationship to ous in its sprouting of a third leg and massive protests had been carried out America-its dominant foreign·other' the off-center placement of the phallic against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan that represented conflicting e}..1:remes reference. But finding a bucket on the Security Treaty, signed in 1951 as part of democracy and imperialism,interna­ streets ofTokyo with an inscription in of a peace settlement between the tional culture and gross materialism .... English instead of Japanese ('FOR FIRE two countries. Art historian Alexandra Ratified without deliberation in the last ONLY") raises more serious questions Munroe in 1994 curated the landmark months of the Occupation, the treaty 8 [had) sparked controversy and opposi­ original group of Dada artists had that it was a somewhat more opti­ tion from its beginning."1 5 The treaty come together in 1916 in Zurich (a mistic movement.21 Where Dada was was renewed on June 19, 1960, despite neutral zone during World War I) with destined to destroy itself, Surrealism protests that included one particularly similar artistic interests stimulated by was, as its name suggests, intent on cre­ bloody confrontation between riot their antiwar sentiments. Dada was ating a higher (from the French sur, police and demonstrators in which known for its destruction of almost "on top of") reality in the aftermath of hundreds suffered injury and one anything considered rational through World War I. Surrealists were interested young woman was crushed to death. 16 witty, sometimes nonsensical use in destroying or dislodging previously Given the strong U.S. presence of language and materials. Destroying held, rational, logical meanings for in Japan during the reconstruction rationalist convention was the the purpose of creating brand new efforts that took place as part of the Dada artists' way of mimicking the ones. Further, the Surrealists were Occupation, it is not surprising that destructive effects of the war for the interested in examining how such Millett would find an object like the purpose of criticizing what they saw meanings become dislodged-by the fire bucket labelled in English. It is as the deep-seated rationalism that workings of the unconscious mind, more surprising that Millett was treated had caused it. They protested the for example. Found objects were with such hospitality by all she met. l 7 rationalism at the heart of the modern utilized as materials, including objects Millett could not have helped but rep­ era's sophistication of the machine, as ephemeral as images remembered resent, on one hand, the "dominant for­ forexample, and its transmogrification from dreams, when the unconscious eign 'other,'" but her sculpture proved into the war machine. But as art mind is most visually active. Even her alliance with the critical side of her historian DawnAdes has pointed out, more crucial, though, was the way in Japanese friends'conflicted feelings.1 s Dada's commitment to destructive which materials were brought togeth­ Her sculpture, though explicitly humor­ processes, including the destruction er. Juxtaposing two disparate objects ous, remained implicitly critical of her of art, necessarily meant a commitment could destroy the previously held own country's actions both during and to the ultimate destruction of Dada meaning of each, but also create a new, after the war. In Number 1 Fire itself.20 By the early 1920s, after more provocative meaning, even if Department, for example, any recon­ various incarnationsaround the world, seemingly nonsensical-a Surrealist as structive efforts on the part of the U.S. Dada as an official movement was well as Dada principle. are made to look pathetically ineffectu­ dead. Its legacy lived on, however, in In Millett's essay for her Things al in proportion to the devastation artists like Millett who looked to the exhibition at Minami Gallery, she wrought by the atomic bomb. How detritus of the everyday world for specifically addressed the importance much of that firecould have been put materials with which to critique that of nonsense in her work while para­ out with a simple bucket? world with irony. doxically making sense of it in terms of Millett's use of found objects and Owing much to the Dada move­ her position in Japan as a foreigner: humor, sometimes for critical purposes, ment and including many of the same attests to her admiration of the Dada artists, Surrealism developed in a Nonsense is to make a meaning • different direction,Ades points out, in more cogent out of that which and Surrealist artists of the early twenti­ eth century, whose work she had stud­ is meaningless; to scale the wall ied prior to her trip to Japan.19 The which encloses a blind alley.... 9 With little money and less In a messy and anarchistic riot they quarter from a group of boys who later Japanese it was natural ...that I experimented with forms of art and destroyed it.And The Bowery (November­ should pilfer, roadside things, yet performance that parodied and critiqued December 1962), a garbage cart holding fresh with the dew of strange­ the social establishment, while liberating an old oil drum crowned with a rubber ness .... [But} I seldom really steal. themselves from the oppressive wartime top hat, pays tribute-seems to be tipping Only a type of garbage collector, legacy."25 The failure of the 1960 protests its hat, in fact-to the United States and a quiet night walker making off led many of the artists to become more Millett's New York home on the Bowery, with the refuse. Thus saving extreme in their activities, and by 1964, to which she would soon return. Her the discards for resurrection. ... 22 just months after Millett's return to the "education" in Japan would influence her United States, theYomiuri newspaper next period of work in a variety of sur­ Millett was further encouraged in brought a halt to the Independant exhibi­ prising ways. her use of humor and found objects by tions. 26 her Japanese artist friends who But for all of Millett's interest in Dada themselves had been influenced by and Surrealism, and their manifestations RETIJRN TO NEWYORK the Dada and Surrealist movements, among her Japanese Independant friends, in particular those who exhibited in she was also curious about another the annualYomiuri Independant postwar phenomenon in Japan. Millett's Started to sculpt free and alone, a exhibitions in Tokyo (one group called landlord was involved in helping the no one. No, not even a woman. themselves the"Neo-Dada Organizers"23). great potters of Japan to preserve ancient Kate Millett, 1970 These exhibitions had been inaugurated Japanese ceramic traditions.She joined in1949 by theYomiuri newspaper as him on tours of pottery studios in the A sobering statement.And a paradoxical an opportunity for artists without official countryside where, she remembers, "pot­ one. Exhilarating in its mention of libera­ exhibition opportunities to show their ters were falling on their noses because tion, brought down by its evocation of work. 24 The Independant exhibitions everyone wanted plastic dishes from the emptiness of peing, it has the ring of became increasingly lively over the Woolworth's." Her landlord helped these an existential pla1nt.Wr itten as part of a years, especially while Millett was in potters find a market among people short essay for a brochure accompanying Tokyo, due to artists' increased politiciza­ who had begun to see traditional arts, a gr�mp exhibition she participated in, tion around the 1960 treaty-renewal crafts,and customs as symbolic of a Mod Donn Art: I 1 Women Artists, at the controversy. Many took advantage of Japan divorced fromAmerican influence Public Theater in NewYork in May 1970, found objects, uniting various groups -in other words, Millett says, "better Millett is commenting here on her arrival in an "obsess[ion] with ruins and than the Occupation." in Japan, but from a vantage point nine destruction;' according to Munroe. Not all of Millett's production in years later. 27 Thus, the statement is also This had an art historical as well as Japan suggested she was critical of U.S. about the intervening years, the spirited political rationale, as she points out: involvement there. Some of her pieces but complex 1960s which for Millett, like "[These artists] advocated making junk are more straightforward reflections many others, meant twists and turns in art and violent demonstrations to on childhood-like Long Car (April political commitments, education, jobs, protest the conventional practice of art. 1962), the reincarnation of a "chug" careers, and artistic styles. It entailed find- (toy car) she had bought as a kid fora 10 ing out who she was.As she shaped her while there were lesbian bars in New Millett did not acknowledge her pieces, she was shaping her identity. York, Millett remembers outsiders then-bisexual orientation in Sexual In Japan, Millett had been able to conceiving of them as "dens of iniquity," Politics, but she was open about it with start at degree zero. She destroyed all her and raids by police brought the threat of the media during the enormous fanfare previous sculpture, save one plaster one's family being notified of the arrest, following the book's publication. piece, a few nights before she left on her to say nothing of one's employers.Wh en Nonetheless, when her sexual orienta­ voyage.As an American who did not Mod Donn Art opened in May of tion became an issue in a hostile public speak Japanese (except for the numbers 1970, almost a year after the widely exchange at a Columbia conference in she had learned by playing poker publicized police raid in New York on the fall of 1970, the media misused with the Japanese crew on board the the Stonewall Inn and the subsequent the event.3 1 Many lesbians and bisexual freighter),she was without the most burgeoning of the Gay Liberation women felt her fame could provide familiar tools of communication. She Movement, for Millett to have mentioned the bridge needed between the Gay wrote in the Things catalogue that lesbianism in her written statement Rights Movement and the Women's the experience was akin to "becom[ing] no doubt would have been volatile, as Movement-in other words, she a species of idiot, illiterate and without a proven when Sexual Politics was could serve as a notable, high-profile tongue."28 And as a New Yorker, she released, just a few months after the spokesperson. Some straight women was coming from a place where it had opening of the Mod Donn Art show. felt that her sexual identity would been hard to get noticed as an artist, Millett had written SexualPolitics as damage the Women's Movement-or let alone a female artist, where she had her doctoral dissertation at Columbia at least that's what the media project­ in fact felt like "a no one." University, where she had enrolled in the ed.3 2 Toe media had already-made Millett might have added to the Comparative Literature doctoral program much of the fact that this outspoken above statement, "No, not even a lesbian." in 1964. In the book, she addressed the writer, who had exposed the deep­ Looking back from the vantage point of sensation of being "not even a woman" seated politicization of sexuality in our today, she has wondered if her departure through an analysis of the ways in which culture, was also a wife.Appearing in forJapan "might have been [about] run­ certain well-known literary works the September 4, 1970, issue of Life ning away from being gay a little too." In featured male characters who tended to magazine, along with coverage of the Tokyo, she recalls,"there were no lesbian reduce female characters to "thoroughly late-August women's liberation marches bars." Millett had been compelled to objectified amalgam[s] of body parts and on the fiftieth anniversary of the keep her firstlong-term lesbian relation­ animalistic reactions."30 Millett analyzed grantingof women's suffrage,was a ship in the 1950s secret, at least from her periods in political history for similar photograph of Millett simultaneously family, since her aunt's funding of her tendencies toward real-life women, thus kissing and shaking hands with her Oxford education hinged on Millett not showing how attitudes toward sexuality, husband, Fumio Yoshimura.33 taking her "friend " with her (which she to include concepts of difference Just beforeYoshiko fell ill, Fumio had did anyway).29 Secrecy surrounded one's between men and women, are shaped moved to New York, expecting Yoshiko gay or lesbian identity at that time, for less by biology than by history and the would join him. When he learned of her cultural products growing out of that history. The sexual, then, is political.

11 illness, he returned to Japan immediate­ Like the Japan pieces, the works is a hat form,into which Millett has ly, and she died soon thereafter. Fumio from this period involve found objects carved two eyes, painted blue. Blue­ then moved to New York forgood, and and are anthropomorphic and humor­ Eyed Marble Boxseems to be keeping when Millett returned as well, the two ous, but now they incorporate more watch over Millett's other pieces of the friends became lovers. Fumio's visa was handcrafting ( cutting and carving of period, reminding viewers and Millett about to run out in 1965, so he and materials).Also unlike the Japan pieces, herself of the advantages of play. By Millett were married (they continued to they imply little or no critique. The formally frolicking around the phenom­ live together for about ten years and pieces from this period verge on being enon of coupling, its meanings could remained officially married until the celebratory, in fact,with no hint of the be kept as open and constructively early 1980s).34 The sculpture Millett intense controversies toward which ambiguous-in terms of sexual, psycho­ made after her return to New York in Millett was headed by the end of the logical, and emotional issues-as 1963, up through the spring of 1967, decade. It is almost as if she were con­ possible. This ambiguity is particularly in many ways grew out of this relation­ ducting the first round of"sculptural pronounced in a number of sculptures ship. But the work was less about her research" for Sexual Politics by playing Millett made between 1965 and 1967, relationship with Fumio than about with the phenomenon of coupling in which she grouped together under the coupling as a phenomenon, all told the most general sense of the term title "Furniture Suite."36 through the metaphor of the domestic -therefore,the anonymity of the title, Included among these sculptures space couples share, more specifically, He and She. is Love Seat (1965) (fig.6) in which its furniture. Millett corroborates the importance two old wooden chairs are stripped of For He and She (1964-65) (plate 2), of play in her work, at least to the their original legs and affixed to a Millett made two rectangular boxes out process of writing the preliminary ver­ box.As in the Victorian tradition,the of masonite, each set upright on four sion of SexualPolitics. In a new intro­ seats face in opposite directions. In legs. In some respects, the structures duction to the 1990 reprint of the book, the chairs are identical constructions could be household storage cabinets; she reflects on how she began to write resembling two human bodies, but they're about the right size and have the doctoraldissertation ( on which the with no anatomical specifics.Their drawers. But one is painted to look as book was based) in earnest in 1968. "I carved-wood heads are also identical if it is wearing a dress with a frilly started to play," she said, "to work at and featureless. Devoid of clues to bottom, and two drawersare located writing the way I'd made sculpture, gender, the sculpture is open to inter­ where breasts would be. The other box forfun."3 5 pretation: this could be a heterosexual is "dressed" in a formal suit. Its drawer, The importance of play is embodied couple, a lesbian couple, a gay male· which can be opened by pulling on a by Blue-Eyed Marble Box(1965) (fig. 5). couple. The piece seems to be more water faucet affixed to its front,is remi­ The piece consists of two boxes with about the way in which sharing space niscent of Millett's phallic reference in small drawers,built by Millett from and love brings two individuals so close Number I Fire Department. masonite ·and painted in blue and white that they begin to look alike.And yet, squares. Inside the drawers are blue and no matter how close two individuals white marbles, continuing earlier refer­ may grow, they can be headed in ences to childhood pfay found in pieces completely opposite directions.Another like Long Car. Centered above the boxes

12 Figure 5 Blue-Eyed Marble Box, 1965. Photo: FumioYoshimura.

13 Figure 6 Love Seat, 1965. Photo: Diane Yamaguchi.

14 possible interpretation has to do Central to the phenomenon of Art historian Robert E. Haywood with the humorous contradictionsof coupling is a knowledge of aloneness. has described Judson Church as "a radi­ Victorian-style courtship: despite the Another "Furniture Suite" sculpture­ cal Baptist church in Greenwich Village appearance of this couple not being Dinner for One (1967) (see cover) that devoted extraordinary energy able to make physical contact "below -is for single occupancy only.The towards revamping vanguard art.... By the waist," sexual tension persists. The piece utilizes a found bar stool to sup­ defying status-quo Christian tenets, topic of sex is loosely referenced in port a round table top sprouting two devoting itself to an enlightened and Love Seat by Millett's use of bed tick­ legs with knobby knees and feet (like thus dissident cultural mission as ing, the heavy, striped fabric commonly those in Bed),which are propped on much as to Godly reliance, the Judson used at the time to cover mattresses. the rungs of the stool. The table is cov­ Church implode[d] both conventional Bed ticking appears in all the sculpture ered with bed ticking; carried over Christianity and orthodox modem­ included in "Furniture Suite." In Love fromLove Seat and Bed, the material ism."37 Artist Jon Hendricks served as Seat, it covers part of the boxy torsos seems to connote a nostalgia for the the director of the Judson Gallery and laps of the figures. coupling those sculptures represent. through the latter half of the 1960s, a Bed (1965) makes the most logical Two forearms extend upward from the position to which he was assigned as use of bed ticking. Millett has wrapped table top, fists clenching a fork and a conscientious objector during the the fabric tightly around two rectangu­ knife above a white ceramic plate.The Vietnam War. Hendricks has said he lar boxes that make up the mattress plate is empty, as if to emphasize the was impressed by the "playful, irrever­ portion of a double bed. Below the loneliness of eating "dinner forone." ent, neo-Dada feeling" of Millett's ornately carved headboard, rising up The "Furniture Suite," which included furniture pieces and invited her to from the surface of the mattress, are other pieces as well (Chair [1965] and have a show.38 two wooden forms similar in shape to Bachelor's Apartment [1967] [plate 31 Rita Reif reviewed the show for the heads in Love Seat. Out from the among them), received positive critical the New York Times, Harriet Morrison bottom end of the bed extend two acclaim in Millett's second one-person for the Worldjournal Tribune.While pairs of wooden feet, carved in a car­ exhibition, held at the Judson Gallery both primarily described the work, toonish style-inordinately large-toed in March 1967. Part of the Judson Morrison concluded that "the whole feet, comically wide and flat, set at pert Memorial Church, the gallery was re­ idea of Kate's furniture evokes happy right angles to the ankles. Because the nowned from the late 1950s through smiles."39 AndReif made the art feet are exactly the same size, and the 1960s forits unusually strong and historical observationthat there had because the top of the mattress is com­ often controversial support of art that been, as of late, a trend toward work pletely flat and the faces as anatomical­ was out of the mainstream. The 1970 "to be sold in art galleries or stores ly nonspecific as those in Love Seat, it People's FlagShow was characteristic. either as one-of-a-kind designs or for is impossible to identify the gender of mass production.Artist-designed the figures embedded here. There is, furniture,which has appeared sporadi­ nonetheless, a hint of sexual tension: cally throughout history, has had a the two rectangular boxes making up renaissance in the last few years.•4o the two halves of the double bed are separated by about an inch.

15 No doubt this "renaissance" had red boots, had been included in the Millett's work had attracted the atten­ something to do with Pop Art's dramat­ Judson show, where it also served as a tion of Fluxus leader George Maciunas ic impact on the art world beginning in piano stool, but for Millett's sculpture before the Judson show, and around the the early 1960s. Pop artists utilized called Piano [ 1965-66).) Also pictured time the show opened, he initiated plans found images, appropriated or expro­ in the article is a man pushing Millett's to "introduce into mass market" some of priated from newspapers, advertise­ Roller Skate Table (1965) (plate 4)-a Millett's pieces, including Stool (1967) ments, and commercial products.This table on real roller skates-down a and a series Millett called Metaphysical imagery stimulated debate as to New York sidewalk. Food, Food forThought (1965) (fig. 7 & whether the artists were glorifying the One of the subtitles of the Life plate 5).44 For Metaphysical Food, ready­ commercialization of culture or more article reads, "Pieces with built-in made ceramic plates had glued onto critically showing how overwhelming riddles and gags," and it was precisely them carved wooden eyes or wooden commercialization was becoming. A this brand of wit that separated Millett "oddments" that resembled chess pieces. combination of the two was probably from Pop artists, aligning her more Maciunas never did produce Millett's most accurate. But Pop Art overall suc­ closely with a group of artists who work, but he collaborated with Millett ceeded in being entertaining. In large came together under the name Fluxus in photographing much of her sculpture part this had to do with the familiarity in 1962.The name connotes a state of of this period (fig. 8).45 of the imagery that allowed a wide flux and, indeed, it is difficultto define Confirming the absence of critique range of viewers to relate on a personal Fluxus in any set way. But the sensibili­ from the sculpture that Millett made level and to feel comfortable with ties shared by the artists include wit, a after her returnfrom Japan up through it, despite its exhibition in New York purposeful childlikeness, and the Dada her "Furniture Suite," Morrison asserted galleries that were frequented by a and Surrealist drama of juxtaposing in her review of the Judson show that very particular elite. unlike entities.42 Millett was "not being satirical, ironical, And what could be more familiar Millett's association with Fluxus or making fun of the establishment, as and comfortable than furniture?Three was key to her inclusion in the Life some artists are accused of doing. She's months after her Judson show, pho­ article.The text was largely about simply having a thoroughly good time tographs of two of Millett's furniture­ Fluxus, which the anonymous author making furniture."46While Morrison may related pieces were featured in a Life described as "a loosely knit group have been accurate in her observations magazine article entitled "Eye-fooling of young NewYork artists whose of Millett's sculpture exhibitedin the Furniture."41 In one image, a pony­ hope is to tap the market of the great spring of 1967 , Millett's thinking about tailed little girl is pictured from the American sense of humor-at prices her position in the world and her posi­ back, smiling over her shoulder as she that don't take away all the fun."43 tion on art-making was beginning to plays a grand piano while sitting on shift. Within a few months, her sculpture Millett's Stool (1967)-a foundcushion would drastically change and within the placed atop two legs painted in black next few years, she would participate in and white striped "socks" and set into a two other activities at the Judson pair of used leather boots. (A similar Church, both of which most certainly Stool [1965), but with a bed-ticking challenged "the establishment." cushion and solid-color legs stuck into 16 Figure 7 MetaphysicalFood, Food for Thought, 1965. Photo: George Maciunas. Courtesy of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit.

17 Figure 8 Millett seated on Stool, 1967. Photo: George Maciunas.

18 A NEW DIRECTION The story of Sylvia Likens altered "Banking System" emphasizes the eco­ the course of Millett's life-what she nomic basis of prostitution.The attitude wrote about, how she made art. She put of debasement typically meted out The turning point came in 1966 when the finishing touches on "Furniture toward prostitutes is suggested by the Millett had what she refers to as a "life­ Suite" for the show at the Judson way in which the fetishistic fragments changing experience." Millett has written Gallery in March of 1967, but by the of their bodies are not only imprisoned about this event with great eloquence summer she had found a metaphor by wooden bars, but merged with in her article "From the Basement to through which to express her reactions receptacles of human waste. the Madhouse," which is reproduced in to Sylvia's story.The metaphor was the As important as the socio-economic­ this catalogue.47 I refer the reader to it cage. political references in Trap is the for a full understanding of her transfor­ Trap, built during the summer of sensate experience one would have mative experience and its ramifications 1967 in the basement of Millett's loft had visiting the piece. Entering Trap in her sculpture. building at 307 Bowery, consisted of required lifting heavy grates in the Briefly, in 1966 Millett read an several cagelike segments.A reference sidewalk in front of Millett's building, article about a young girl named Sylvia to Sylvia Likens occurs in a segment in walking down some steps, pushing Likens, who had lived in an Indianapolis which a female mannequin, cut offjust back a metal accordion-gated door, boarding house run by a single mother below the hips, appears on a staircase and stepping into the dank, dreary named Gertrude Baniszewski. In this in a shadowy recess covered with a basement. The sense of vulnerability horrific story, Sylvia was starved, tortured, wooden framework of bars. Legless, the would have been acute, especially and banished to the basement by figure is beyond hope of escaping. In after Millett padlocked the gate behind Gertrude, with the participation of some another segment, entitled "Banking new visitors to prevent strangersfrom of her own children and teenagers from System," Millett placed torsos, bound descending. Being locked in might the neighborhood. Eventually the sixteen­ with rope, behind bars made to look mean safety, but it also produces a year-old Sylvia, having tried in vain to like bank teller windows; on the claustrophobic sense of captivity-a attract neighbors' attention by scraping a counter below the bars sit stacks of sense that accentuates rather than shovel on the basement floor, was dollar bills, encased in small cagelike eradicates vulnerability.As Millett had dragged back upstairs, where her tortur­ boxes, suggesting the way in which built the piece over the course of ers made pathetic attempts to normalize money, while liberating to some, is weeks, she too had locked herself in for the situation by bathing, partially dressing, imprisoning to others. Nearby was the safety's sake. The resulting isolation and placing her body on a mattress. segment "City of Saigon" (fig. 16). Inside brought her and her visitors closer to Gertrude hit the girl across both sides of a large wooden cage structure appears understanding the complex mix of the head with a book and demanded she a line of urinals out of which protrude exposure and enclosure that made up get up, but the girl, by then, had died. papier mache legs fitted into real the conditions of imprisonment that Sylvia's body held an "estimated 150 women's shoes. Millett meant for this Sylvia had experienced.49 burns, cuts, bruises and other lesions," as segment to be a critique of the U.S. well as the words "I am a prostitute and military's support of prostitution in proud of it" etched into her lower South Vietnam during the Vietnam War; abdomen with a hot sewing needle.48 the proximity of the segment to 19 Millett e:x---rendedher investigations cage of wooden slats and dowels that of the sensations of in1prisonment virtually filled the space, except for a shortly after Trap in a performance. No small a.isle along the sides.After a two­ was presented as part of a series at the hour period during which viewers Judson Gallery called "12 Evenings could walk around the setup. lit by two of Manipulations," organized by Jon bright spotlights, the gallery was cleared Hendricks and held during the month of visitors. When they were allowed to of October 1967.50 For her performance, reenter at the appointed time of the Millett built into the gallery, which was performance,it was into a darkened in the basement of the Judson Church. a space.A few bars of the cage had been removed at the entrance to the gallery. and visitors were ushered straight into the cage. Once the cage was full. the bars were replaced, with everyone trapped inside. Dim lights were turned on so people could glimpse their predican1ent.An audiotape of mixed sounds ranging from gunfireto soothing music was played; then an audiotape was set up to record the sounds of the '·prisoners." Some were amused. others thoughtful.After awhile, some devised plans for escape and eventually Figure 9 "Tower with Guards:· succeeded-without damaging the Situations installation, piece. Millett was surprised by th.is. Brooklyn Community As she wrote. "I found I had under­ College. New York. 1968. estimated the ingenuity of my victims, Photo: Fumio Yoshimura. their respect for sculptural structures, and their powers of cooperation among themselves, forthey did find a peaceful means of egress. Th.is I took to be significant."51

20 Although Millett admitted to having directly with issues of the domestic Unverifiable:the inmate must never "misgivings about the 'propriety' of site. The piece was composed of several know whether he is being looked at caging others,"5 2 the results were segments, each involving a freestanding at any one moment; but he must be revealing, especially given the date on wooden cage inside which sat an sure that he may always be so."55 In which No was (purposely) held. The object typically found in a home:"Bed" Situations, Millett only suggests the date was October 21, 1967, the week­ holds a cot;"T oilet" (plate 7), a com­ presence of people in the cells by end of a major anti-Vietnam War mode;"Family Dining Room," a table the types of objects located within. demonstration in Washington, D.C. , in and chairs; and "Baby Carriage," a baby Moreover, the tops of the cages are which 50,000 protestors marched carriage with papier mache balloons open.Are these efforts meant to on the Pentagon while Dr. Benjamin attached (the only light note in the imply the possibility of escaping the Spock and other luminaries attempted piece).5 4"Tower with Guards" (fig. 9) panopticonism of our everyday lives? (unsuccessfully) to deliver a briefcase seems to depart from Milieu's main The three cage works (Trap, No, filled with draftcards to the Attorney theme, but in the context of the other and Situations) that Millett made General'soffice.53 What Millett saw segments, fits right in. The wooden cage in the aftermath of"Furniture Suite" as"significant" was the remarkable abili­ sits atop a high plywood closet structure coincide exactly with her academic ty, demonstrated so often in this era, of with a door that cannot be opened research for her doctoral dissertation. individuals combatting"imprisonment" because two wooden slats are nailed Situations was installed during the (as many felt induction into the armed across it in the shape of a huge X. From historically momentous month of May services to be) through peaceful means. the top, through the bars of the cage, 1968, during the strike at Columbia Sylvia's imprisonment had taken two heads peek out. For Millett, surveil­ University. Millett's participation in the place not only in the basement, but lance is as palpable an entity in domestic strike led to her dismissal from the in the Baniszewski household in general. life as any of the objects one uses on part-time teaching job she had held For Millett, reading Sylvia's story turned a daily basis, and as palpable as it is in since 1964 at Barnard College, then around the entire significance of any real prison. the women's college of Columbia. It the domestic site, a setting she had Jeremy Bentham's late eighteenth­ was being fired, ironically, that freed celebratedin her previous work using century introduction of the panopticon up her time and motivated her to the metaphor of furniture. It became -a design in which cells are located focus exclusively on her dissertation.56 to her not only a site held together by around a centralized guard tower-into The sculptural ramifications of the love, humor, and the phenomenon prison architecture is discussed by Michel Sylvia Likens story constituted a sec­ of (or nostalgia for)coupling, but one Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The ond round of"sculptural research" for that could be altogether bound by Birth of the Prison:"Bentham laid down Sexual Politics,far more somber than violence and by any individual or institu­ the principle that power should be Millett's earlier furniture-related sculp­ tion powerful enough to draw others visible and unverifiable.Visible: the tural research and coincident with her into a vortex of entrapment, domination, inmate will constantly have before his actual academic research. In the book, and oppression. eyes the tall outline of the central tower Millett deals with the dynamics of Millett's piece Situations (1968), from which he is spied upon. patriarchy, especially the hierarchical originally installed on the grounds of ideology at the core of the domestic Brooklyn Community College, dealt site. This is an ideology that is sexual 21 in nature and is inculcated in all other duction of a portrait of Millett painted press. Then slammed with an identity social institutions that touch our lives by Alice Neel (fig.1). that can no longer say a word; mute (inasmuch as all other institutions are The burden of leadership, riddled with responsibility."60 In her sculpture modeled after the domestic site). It is, with controversy over the question Terminal Piece (1972) (fig.10), a female therefore,an ideology that is highly "whose leader," also took its toll on mannequin with long dark hair like politicized.57 Even though Gertrude Millett. In a recent essay, Laura Millett's, dressed in a dark dress, sits Baniszewski was a woman, she held Cottingham puts Millett's situation alone in a chair in the second of three the hierarchical position of power in in the context of women's history of rows that could have accommodated an that familyand from that position had the era: audience of forty-seven. Here, though, confabulated a sexual identity for the "audience" of exhibition visitors Sylvia for which the young girl was Throughout the 1970s organized must take up a position in frontof the imprisoned and killed. Millett felt the feminists in the United States were figure,separated from her by a wall of need to trade in the parallel stripes often uncertain as to which was wooden bars that almost reaches the found on bed ticking-the very surface worse:having leaders or having ceiling.61 On display for all to see, but on which Sylvia breathed her last no leaders, designating authorship simultaneously caged, the figure'sposi­ breath-for the parallel lines formed by or maintaining anonymity.Millett tion is a visual analogue for the situation the invisible, yet no less powerful, was one of many who endured in which Millett found herself after prison bars that had put Sylvia there. the precariousness of leadership Sexual Politics-the utterly public, yet status in a movement of people profoundly alienated situation that is (women) who generally had no synonymous with stardom.62 Toe look SEXUAL POLITICS AND BEYOND experience or model for public on the figure'sface is somewhat painrd, life or professional leadership but moreover blank, as if drained of and a surplus of understandable identity, "a no one." If this piece is to be Foucault also writes that prison "merely suspicions of authority;conse­ read autobiographically,however, the reproduces, with a little more emphasis, quently they tended to vacillate opposite was true. By this time Millen all the mechanisms that are to be found between hero(ine) worship had achieved a strong identity as a in the social body."58 After Sexual and character assassination.59 sculptor, and despite Sexual Politics's Politics was released, Millett was sub­ impact on her, Millett would continue to jected to more of those mechanisms It was between these two public train her focus on wide socio-political than she could have anticipated. She responses that Millett felt stifled, trap­ concernsof oppression and domination found the mechanism of stardom and ped. She reflected on this condition in as they pertained to women, men, and its reliance on practices of exclusion both words and sculpture. children. especially oppressive. When Time In her book Flying (1974), she Meanwhile, many female artists magazine editors asked her what wrote the following,a monologue to would pursue new paths in the 1970s­ should be on their August 31, 1970, herself:"Musn't hurt the movement­ an erain which the term feministart cover, she suggested a picture of a they will use you against it. Irony that I was popularized-examining questions mass of women marching down Fifth had just started writing, really writing, of sexuality or sexual oppression of Avenue. Instead, they printed a repro- in my own voice, as my thesis went to women specifically. SexualPolitics

22 Figure 10 Terminal Piece,Women's lnterart Center, New York, 1972. Photo: Chie Nishio.

23 Figure 11 "Approaching Fmility," SmallMysteries installation, Noho Gallery, New York, I 976. Photo:Jack Beshears.

24 was followed within months by the publi­ borrowing of Millett's title as a rubric On the printed announcement cation of Robin Morgan's anthology under which all of the above might be for a 1987 installation entitled Sisterhood is Powerful:AnAnthology of seen,Jones writes:"My reference to Madhouse, Madhouse, Millett Writings from the Women's Liberation this book-with its polemical call for described the experiences that Movement (September 1970) and a politics oriented around 'our system personalized her understanding of Shulamith Firestone's Marxist analysis of sexual relationship... [as one] of human rights violations: of women's place in society, The Dialectic dominance and subordinance'-marks of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution both my commitment to rethinking In 1972 through misguided fami­ (October 1970). These books, and so the terms of 1970s feminist art theory ly intervention I was caught and many earlier volumes published by and practice and my interest in exam­ held in a California madhouse. feminist writers, gave shape to a whole ining the politics of sexuality (espe­ And again in 1980, this time in generation of feminist activity, including cially the politics of sexuality within Ireland where my sympathy activity in the art world.63 feminism itself)."66 with the hunger strikers and my Even today, Sexual Politics resonates Given Millett's primary artistic "record" made it possible for the with meaning for the feminist art world, focus in the 1970s (and before and police to commit me indefinitely as shown by art historian Amelia Jones, after),perhaps it is not surprising to a back ward asylum in who borrowed the title of Millett's book that none of her pieces was included County Clare .... I was fortunate for an exhibition she curated in Los in the exhibition that bore the title that both imprisonments were Angeles in the summer of 1996. Sexual of her book. (Two pieces were brief Few are so fortunate. But Politics,the exhibition,featured a selec­ pictured, however, in the catalogue.67) I have a record now; it could tion of female artists whose works Millett's concerns after the publica­ happen again. Any time. 69 "reflect[ed] concerns central to feminist tion of Sexual Politics were not only art practicefor the last thirty-five years.•64 about feminist issues specifically, The cage would continue to be essen­ The impetus for the exhibition was the but about human rights and civil tial to Millett in her sculpture.7° remounting of Judy Chicago's controver­ liberties issues more generally. The Millett's initial institutionalization sial Dinner Party(1979)-a gigantic fact that Terminal Piece was part of a was founded on a diagnosis of manic triangular "table" set with thirty-nine continuum of wm:ks, rather than the depression that she viewed, as she ceramic plates of (mostly) vulvar designs, last in a line, a terminus, from which wrote in her 1990 book TheLoony­ representing historically notable women, to shift to another style,68 may be Bin Trip, as "the diagnosis of a shrink atop intricate needlepoint runners.Jones related to Millett's own experiences my elder sister delivered me over to wanted to include other artists besides of the powerful forces behind the one day when, acting in righteous Chicago and produce a catalogue with violation of human rights and civil lib­ spite, she made one of the sadder mis­ essays taking a variety of critical erties-experiences that reinforced judgments of her life."71 Deployed by approaches in an effort to situate the her commitment to vigilance over her family into this institution and the Dinner Party"within the broader context these issues and their expression in locked ward within it, Millett was of feminist art practice and theory out sculptural terms. brought closer than ever before to the of which it developed and within which condition of imprisonment Sylvia had it has been evaluated."65 As for the experienced.

25 The first sculpture installation all the figures are wrapped tightly in position sometimes inflicted Millett presented after the "California strips of cloth, as if they are in the pro­ on prisoners, especially prisoners madhouse" episode deals with the cess of being embalmed, readied of war. In another sense, however, the 1 sensation of imprisonment, no matter for burial, turned into mummies.The piece bespeaks a hopefulness, inas­ where it might be, no matter what woman's head has been left unwrap­ much as the sod yields grass that could, the gender or age of those imprisoned. ped, yet she stares with a despairing, in fact, grow beyond the confines of Three of the five segments of Small mournful look into an indeterminate the trap, just as the rug can be made to i Mysteries (1975; exhibited in 1976) fea­ space. Llke the living dead. grow in size by adding rings to its ture a figure in a wooden cage. "The Another segment of Small circumference.The smell of the sod Maja Rediscovered" (plate 8) utilizes the Mysteries,"Tristan and Isolde," also con­ plays a part here too: as it permeates 1 same female mannequin that appeared veys a sense of mourning.73 A box filled the entire installation, it seems to carry in TerminalPiece. She is seated on a with soil holds two life masks made hopefulness with it, mitigating the chair in the same pose, body erect and from Millett's and Fumio's faces.The despair and futility suggested by all leaning forward.She's on edge, yet piece marks the end, a few years earlier, the other segments. 1 not fidgety, as she stares at a bare spot of their living together. Although Millett This hopefulness turned into of floor just to the left of a pot of and Fumio would continue to be humor (rare in Millett's post-Sylvia flowers.72 In "Homage to the Old Men friends, this shift in their relationship Llkens sculpture) in a project Millett at the Houston Hotel" (plate 9), a male was a loss. Other losses are perhaps undertook at the Woman's Building in mannequin lies on a bare-mattress cot, mourned here too. Around this same Los Angeles in May 1977.TheWoman's hands held awkwardly together over time, Millett destroyed a number of her Building, which opened in 1973, his belly, a television suspended over lesser works and was forced out of housed the Feminist StudioWorkshop, the foot of the bed, too high to allow her building at 307 Bowery when it "the nation's first independent feminist manipulation of the settings. The was condemned by the city; (she art school,'' founded by Judy Chicago, television blaringly transmits whatever moved into a building nearby, where art historian Arlene Raven, and designer happens to be on (SmallMysteries she resides today). Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. 74 There preceded the omnipresence of remote The fifth segment may refer to this Millett produced a series of sculptures controls). In "Approaching Futility" last loss, although less autobiographical called Naked Ladies-six colossal (fig.11), a child-sized mannequin is interpretations are likely, too. "Domestic female figures, some eight feet tall and positioned inside a cage on a ladder Scene" consists of a small wooden cage five feet wide, made of chicken wire, that just reaches the top edge of the with real grass growing inside, sitting on papier mache, plastic acrylic, and other open-topped cage. a homey, braided rag rug.The piece elic­ materials covered with dried pigment. A woman, a man, a child-all its an intolerable sense of claustrophobia Each was in a different setting, some­ imprisoned for unknown reasons. if the cage is read as a symbol of the times comical, sometimes festive:one, Though the child appears to have the home, shrunken to a size inhabitable lounging on a couch, telephone to ear most hope of escaping, the title sug­ only if one were to curl up in a tight ball and watching television, paid tribute to gests that even if escape were possible, on the floor. This also evokes a torturous the comedic side of actress Shelley what awaits would only render the act Winters (fig. 12); another, sitting at a futile. Furthering the feeling of futility, picnic table, stretched out a bulky arm

26 in a gesture of toasting the viewers with, tasks range from building additions as Millett said at the time, "a large martini onto existing buildings to tending the glass. Her left hand... beckon[s] you as if tree farm that helps sustain the to a feast."75 All were assertive in girth colony. While Millett's administration and pose.All venerated the female body of the Farm may seem distant from forits ability to take up space, be power­ her activities as an artist, scholar Anne ful, and have fun-all principles carried B. Keating has argued persuasively that out by the real-life women who helped it is not. Keating, whose own experi­ Millett fabricate and assemble the figures. ences at the Farm date from 1983, has The series was exhibited at the written brilliantly about "Millett's ·dis­ Woman's Building along with Millett's covery' of the Farm as a new sculptur­ erotic drawings. Employing curves and al and environmental form (the Farm :·-::_. .:. .:..;;,�. -_..... ,-�·- splashes of ink on paper, the drawings as both art colony and art piece-a ...:_._F ,,r-7 It,-� • .;...,___ are representative of her calligraphic style place to make art and a place made by 7 (her long-held interest in calligraphy had artists)." -:- been one attraction to Japan). Starting in Also in 1978, for the first time the mid- l 970s, it was primarily through since the legless-mannequin segment her drawings, but also her silkscreens and of Trap, Millett confronted the Sylvia photographs, that she celebrated lesbian Likens story directly. This time, the sexuality, producing a body of work that confrontation was direct enough that stands in counterpoint to the more Millett had no need for the cage to somber (save the Naked Ladies series) serve as a mediating metaphor for sculptures done after mid-1967.The draw­ the atrocity Sylvia had suffered.In Tbe ings often feature text along with inked Trial of Sylvia Likens, Millett recon­ designs (fig. 13), bringing the drawings structed scenes from the Baniszewski closer to her literary production in which home and the courtroom in which she addresses her lesbian relationships. 76 those scenes were brought to justice. It was soon after her project at the Three of the perpetrators-Gertrude, Woman's Building that Millett turned her her son Johnny, and neighbor Rickie second home into an art colony. She had Hobbs-are featured in one segment ("The Kitchen Table Scene") in man­ Figure 12 bought a farm in 1971 in Poughkeepsie, "Telephone Lady."Naked Ladies exhibition. New York, with proceeds from Sexual nequin form,sitting around a kitchen The Woman ·s Building. Los Angeles. 19-;-7. Politics. In 1978 she began a summer table, as if plotting their next torture. Photo: Cynthia MacAdams. program at "Millett Farm:An Art Colony In the central segment, "The Trial Figure 13 forWomen." Besides practicing and Scene" (plate 10), five mannequins sit MiUett drawing for poster and sharing their artwork and writing, visitors in chairs behind a simulated court- announcement, T/Je Lesbian Boe{)' exhibition. Chuck Levitan Gallery, are asked to work several hours a day on New York, October I 977. the farm as "apprentices."Apprentices'

27 I I I room table, their heads fashioned from screaming" echoing in her mind, as a fairly surreal context, but all xeroxes of the perpetrators'faces taken voice "easier to know, to hear again based upon this original myth. from newspaper photographs (besides in every fight one ever had. One's own For over ten years I continued I the three mentioned, Gertrude's daugh­ bullying yell not that hard to summon."78 obsessively to put forth this ter Paula and neighbor Coy Hubbard The reader is led to identify as much experience in visual terms but I were also on trial; all were found guilty with the chief perpetrator in this story dared not approach it in words. I on charges ranging from manslaughter as the victim. We are reminded that Not until I had fallen through to first-degree murder). Behind them is we all have vicious tendencies over the rabbit hole and tumbled a wall of news clippings of the case, which we must be vigilant, taking care down into the pit: not till [sic] blown up to an immense size, making that they "not ...be reproduced."With the first loony-bin trip. BO the"NOT TO BE REPRODUCED"notice, the exclusion of the cage element, I which was stamped on the photographs viewers can walk around the kitchen In 1980, the year after The Basement by the news service from which Millett and trial tables, stand between the per­ was published, Millett had her second I had gotten them, even more noticeable. petrators and examine their own major encounter with the mental health One of the stamped photographs is inclinations toward even a modicum system (in County Clare, Ireland), an of the mattress on which Sylvia was of the same violence. 79 experience she deals with very specifi­ found-a scenario replicated in a third In her 1991 introduction to the cally in her 1987 installationMadhouse, I segment, in which a mannequin with a reprint of TheBasement, Millett situates Madhouse.81 Here, the cage takes differ­ life mask lies on top of a bare mattress. this book in the context of her earlier ent forms to convey deeper fears of In the context in which Millett has used work, both literary and artistic, as well as entrapment,to include death itself. In the I it, the news service stamp reads less as her own personal experiences of being segment entitled "Buried Alive; for exam­ a warning not to reproduce the photo­ trapped: ple, a wooden coffin-the penultimate graph than a plea not to reproduce the cage structure-houses a life mask of crime itself. In my own private code I thought Millett. In "Window in Clare" (plate 11), Also blown up and interspersed of this book as Sexual Politics 11 a plaster hand reaches through a slightly I among the news clippings are xeroxes I had meant The Basement to opened window. The hand is disembod­ of handwritten and typewritten pages do things, to save lives. Ifnot ied; only that part of the body could fromMillett's manuscript for her physically, then psychologically.... reach the outside world, for it is the com­ 1979 book about Sylvia's ordeal, The My first reaction to Sylvia mon practice of mental institutions to rig Basement: Meditations on a Human Likens's story was to sculptit patients' windows so they can only be Sacrifice. One of the remarkable things over and over again in exhibi­ opened a few inches. about this book is the way in which tion after exhibition: sculptures In perhaps the most arresting seg­ Millett is able to portray Gertrude as that were large wooden cages, ment of Madhouse, Madhouse, entitled monstrous, but not so demonized that cages with things and people in "Fear Death by Water" (fig.14), a plaster the reader has the luxuryof thinking them, oblique retellings, indirect head with long black hair lies on its I of this torturer's acts of violence as versions of this central event beyond his or her own capacityfor cru­ dispersed into general references elty. Millett writes about "Gertrude's to politics and society within a I 28 I I I I side, on top of a transparent acrylic box filled with water. Placed over the head is a cage made of curved iron bars.Any hope of escape one might have read into i'vlillett's previous cages. made of the more vulnerable material of wood. is now denied by the impenetrability of iron. The head's dismemberment from the body and its placement above the water. as if floating. suggest the dissociative sensa­ tions one can experience in "liYing in one·s heact:·attempting against all odds to gather together one·s energy to break free from this, or any. incarcerat­ ing situation. The isolation of the head on top of the clinically pristine box also has the look of a specimen on display. conveying one's perpetual feeling of being watched not only in institutions like the one referred to here, bur any institutionalized situation based on the voyeurism of the panopti­ con-situations that can drive, or at the very least make, a person "mad:·which is to say, angry.

Figure 14 "Fear Death by Water," Madbou.se. Madbouse installation. Noho Gallery. New York, 1987. Photo: Kate Millett.

29 Over the next several years, Millett Such futility and despair are felt only worked on a book that examined such temporarily in Millett's text, however.As anger, through a methodical analysis of in so many of her books and so much of other writers' texts on the topic of her sculpture, Millett's overriding goal is torture. In The Politics of Cruelty:An to stimulate awareness and activism. On Essay on the Literature of Political the first page of The Politics of Cruelty, Imprisonment (1994), Millett looks Millett could be addressing the viewer at the experience of torture through of her sculpture as well as the reader of eye-witness accounts, historical her book: "In asking the reader to accom­ documentation, and literary texts on pany me over this ground, I have the subjects like the apartheid system in same motive that first drove me: if we South Africa, the Nazi extermination of know these things, there is some hope Jews, political dissidents, gypsies, and that they can be changed; if we care, gays, and atrocities in the Middle East there is the possibility of action against and Central America. Throughout, she this evil."84 Lest this sound like empty attends to the role the United States rhetoric, Millett offers a concrete solution: has played in these events.82 Besides anger, Millet deals, as she The remedy is ...simple: state did in The Trial of Sylvia Likens, prohibition of torture.When one with the perplexing phenomenon of considers torture, one comes to identifying not onlywith victims but understand how crucial a precon­ with victimizers. Referring to the pub­ dition is capture;how great an lished text of Claude Lanzmann's docu­ invasion of the human condition mentary film Shoah and Primo Levi's is imprisonment itselfHow any Survival in Auschwitz, she observes: confinement erodes humanity, "While hearing the Nazi state narratives, and how broadly it is extended in even hearing the Nazi voice, one the case of political imprisonment participates unconsciously, perhaps even where there is no criminal offense necessarily, in its mentality, succumbing to extenuate the arbitrary cruelty however slightly or momentarily to its of human incarceration.8 5 point of view, and then one is aghast: experiencing revulsion ... with the self." Afteraddressing the converse situation, in which one identifies with the victim and feels angry, she then points out how "the very futility of the prisoner's situation brings on a certain despair in the reader."83 30 PSYCHIATRY

Figure 15 Psychiatry, Flux Sculpture exhibition, Noho Gallery,New York, 1995. Photo: Kate Millett.

31 Millett has said that the publication time by exchanging banalities, nonse­ ----CODA of ThePolitics of Cruelty marked the quiturs, sometimes purely nonsensical end of an era forher. She felt she could banter, and sometimes reflections perhaps move beyond the somberness on the emotional vicissitudes of life. The cage works-not only forMillett, of the sculptures influenced by the Nobody named Godot ever appears, the of course. Recent examples of artists Sylvia Likens story and "come out of point being the waiting: the deferral of using cages in an effectively provoca­ the cage." In 1995, she held an exhibi­ satisfaction;the containment of desire. tive manner are plentiful. Coco Fusco tion entitled FluxSculpture.86 But These are likewise the terms of and Guillermo G6mez-Peiia in 1992 sombernessis not entirely put aside imprisonment.According to literary critiqued the quincentenery celebration here despite the fact that the actual theorist Lawrence Graver, Beckett of Christopher Columbus's so-called cage structure does not appear. himself talked about how he wished discovery of America in a series of Psychiatry (1995) (fig. 15) to mobilize in his play "a caged dynam­ performances they conducted inside features an old medicine cabinet hous­ ic," in order to convey how, as Graver a cage, simulating the way in which ing bottles labelled with names of summarizes it: "Vladimir and Estragon, colonized peoples were often brought drugs used for various disorders and like all human beings, exist in other back to colonizers' home countries the states they are meant to induce­ sets of circles: living organisms subject and put on display, caged as human or, conversely, may induce.Bottles to the cycles of time, on a round specimens in ethnographic museums.88 for the antipsychotic medications planet, orbiting the sun. Within the cage Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum's 1992 Thorazine and Haldol, forexample, sit of that circle their possibilities are installation Light Sentence drawsthe near bottles labelled "Quiet" and limited. They have been born, they will viewer into her own "contemplat[ion "Fright." The glass door of the cabinet live for a term and then die; but at of] pain, entrapment, and loss," reflect­ has been smashed. Medical tape has the same time that they acknowledge ing her separation from her family been wrapped around it several times, these facts, they resist them by recreat­ during the civil war in Lebanon.A bare holding the cabinet together as flimsily, ing and asserting meaning in the face lightbulb descends from the ceiling, Millett seems to be saying, as its drugs of the fundamental negative constraints casting the viewer's shadow against hold people together. that define their condition."87 the wall, where it merges with other In Waiting for Godot (1995) Although there are no actual cages shadows cast by high stacks of small, (plate 12), two gigantic, wheellike in Millett's most recent work, the wire-mesh storage cages.89 In the machine formssit on top of a bench. "caged dynamic" thrives. Her goal, like 1995 exhibition sponsored by Moore Recalling her Japanese period, the Beckett's, is to recreate meaning, but College of Art and Design entitled forms evoke two seated figures, a refer­ for Millett this entails not only resisting "Prison Sentences," artists installed ence to the two characters in Samuel but reshapingconstraints-the very work in the decrepit cells of the Beckett's play of the same title.At the socio-political conditionsthat form defunct Eastern State Penitentiary on beginning of this play, Estragon is seat­ the meaning of life-for others as well the outskirts of Philadelphia.90 ed on a mound of earth, struggling to as oneself. There has been growing concern remove his boots, when he is joined by throughout culture and society over Vladimir. Together, they wait for Godot issues of incarceration since about the for the durationof the play, biding their time Millett started using the cage

32 in her work. The jail and prison system incarceration in New York took place in the United States has been one of around the same time in 1970 that those concerns.The Eastern State Milieu's Sexual Politics was receiving Penitentiary, for example, was finally both applause and sharp criticism closed in 1971 after long, heated debate (Millett later attended Davis's trial in over its solitary confinement design.91 California).Davis continues to be a The year before,Congress approved forcefully articulate critic of systems large-scale federal funding for the of imprisonment. From her inside construction of state and local jails and experience, Davis has confirmed what prisons. Beforefunds were spent, a Nagel reported from the outside, research project examined "the 'good' but with greater poignancy. In her auto­ and the 'bad' of contemporary correc­ biography, she wrote that "jails and tional architecture," according to prisons are designed to break human William G. Nagel, an author of one of beings, to convert the population into the books resulting from theresearch specimens in a zoo-obedient to our project. Nagel minced no words in keepers, but dangerous to each pointing out that "the housing areas of other."93 most of our jails, even the new ones, are Vastly differing views among still essentially animal cages. Call them Americans on the necessity of some any other name-cells, squad rooms, kind of system of containment for dormitories-they are still cages."92 judicial purposes makes the cage a Contributing to the critique of controversial symbol. The cage works­ incarceration practiceshave been the to get people to think about their powerful firsthand reports of jails stance on what it represents, whether and prisons by political prisoners like it be the literal jail and prison system Angela Davis. Davis was held at the or other oppressive systems. Women's House of Detention in New It is hard not to imagine that at York before being extradited to least part of the reason Millett's The California to be tried for (and ultimately American Dream Goes to Pot(1970) exonerated of) charges of murder became a target of criticism in the and conspiracy in a shootout at Marin 1996 OldGlory exhibition in Phoenix Civic Center in which fellow members had to do with the cage that held the of the Black Power movement were flag-swallowing commode.To be sure, allegedly involved. Davis's arrest and it was this latter juxtaposition that stood out as more controversial than

33 the cage in the minds of those who Movement? Would her sculpture from complained. Nonetheless, the cage has mid-1967 onward have had as much the power to function as a catalyst power without allowing herself to of painful memories of entrapment revel, through the metaphor of whimsi­ experienced in some measure by cal furniture,in the positive potentiali­ everyone, of the desire to repress such ties of the domestic site? Would her memories, and of intense anger over commitment to looking at the darker the impossibility of doing so. side of institutions, modeled after the The commode played a role in the domestic site, have been as strong controversy, too. From the first time without looking at the dark side of artist Marcel Duchamp used a urinal in the paternalisticpresence of the U.S. a work of art-or, rather, designated it military in Japan as she lived there in as a work of art in 1917 by simply the postwar period? signing it with a pseudonym and giving I believe the answer to all these it the ambiguous title of Fountain­ questions is "No."And so I end this ordinary pieces of plumbing used in essay where I started it. For a large art have tended to rile viewers. From part of the reason Millett's career as a the precept that "Art" should be so ele­ sculptor has been overlooked lies in vated a notion as to not include every­ the breadth of activity these questions day objects, to the scatological refer­ imply. Keeping her view as wide as ences inherent in objects involving she has, Millett's contributions to the personal hygiene, a urinal or a toilet is worlds of feminism, literature,art, and highly charged.94 politics have been vast. But the result The controversy growing out of of using a wide-angle lens is that the the Old Glory exhibition shows that picture produced tends not to show Millett's piece, twenty-seven years old, things to scale. Focusing on Millett's still resonates on topics having to do sculptural production in this exhibition with human rights and civil liberties. may allow it to be seen more clearly in And those who opposed her piece in relation to her other contributions. the show did so with the same First Amendment freedoms the piece was originally built to preserve. Would Millett's work on general topics of human rights and civil liberties have had as much strength had she not burrowed into issues concerning women, specifically, first? Or been involved in the Gay Liberation Movement? Or in the Civil Rights 34 H O T f S

1. Kate Millett, SexualPolitics (Garden City,NY: 6. Examples are too numerous to cite in totality. issues.January 1971, 22-39, 67-71. See also Linda Doubleday, 1970).All citations will refer to the However, for all the negative commentary (e.g., Nochlin, "Starting fromScratch:The Beginnings of 1970 edition. Sales data from "Kate Millett," in Jonathan Marshall's "Denying Freedom to Others Feminist Art History,"in The Power of Feminist Art: Current BiographyYearbook, ed.Judith Graham Dishonors Flag.Too," Tribune Newspapers, 2 The American Movement of the 1970s, History (NewYork:H.W.Wilson, 1995),410. April 1996,A7),there was plenty of positive and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard commentary (e.g.,Jennifer Dokes's "Protests, (New York: Harry N.Abrams,1994), 130-7, 301-2. 2. Another, more scholarly exception Artwork, Compromise: Enjoy the Show,America," is Anne B. Keating's "'A World We Have Invented The ArizonaRepublic, 28 March 1996, B4), and 13. Kate Millett,"Words about Things," in Things Here': Exploring Community,Identity and Art in a great deal in between (e.g., the provocatively (Tokyo: Minami Gallery,1963), n.p. the Construction of'The Farm,' Kate Millett's glib piece by Kathleen Vanesian, "Deja Wow: Red, Feminist Art Colony,1978-19 94 " (Ph.D. diss., White and Snooze," New Times, 4 April 1996, 14. Fumio Yoshimura was a nontraditional Japanese University of Maryland at College Park, 1995). 29).Altogether, the published responses husband as well. See Milieu's account of the Regarding Millett's career as artist, see chapter constitute a multifaceted discussion of First Yoshimuras' relationship in a preface she wrote for entitled "The Apprentice in the Sun," 329-406. My Amendment issues.The reporter who focused the Japanese edition of Sexual Politics.111is preface research, begun long after Keating's,owes most closely on Millett's work was Michael was adapted for publication (in English): Kate a great deal to her extensive, substantive, Kiefer, "Tempest in a Toilet Bowl," New Times, Millett, "A Personal Discovery," Ms., March 1973, 56- insightful scholarship. 6June 1996,63. 9, 113-5. The essay provides an overview of Milieu's time in Japan. 3.The exhibition was organized by David· S. 7. Tilis is to say, Millett did not pursue a tenure­ Rubin for the Cleveland Center for track teaching job. However,she has taught peri­ 15. Alexandra Munroe,"Morphology of Revenge: Contemporary Art,June-August 1994. See odically (see "Time Line" in this catalogue). The Yomiuri lndependant Artists and Social exhibition catalogue, Old Glory: The Protest Tendencies in the 1960s,"in Japanese Art American Flag in ContemporaryArt 8. Aunt Dorothy also funded Millett's Oxford after 1945:Scream against the Sky (New York: (Cleveland: Cleveland Center for education and was the subject of A.D., A Harry N.Abrams,1994), 150. ContemporaryArt, 1994). Memoir (NewYork:W.W.Norton, 1995). 16. Ibid., 151. 4. See David Rubin, "From U.S.A. to S.O.S.: 9.For an analysis of how the New York School Changing Perspectives on the American Flag," in gained international acclaim, see Serge Guilbaut, 17. Millett was in a bar in Japan one August Sixth OldGlory, especially 27-32.Also see articles pub­ How NewYork Stole the Idea ofModern Art anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and was lished in The Village Voice, 19 November 1970: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1983). impressed with the Japanese patrons' kindness, ClarkWh elton, "Bars & Stripes Forever," 1, 20; their "forgiving and peaceful " attitude toward her. John Perreault, "Flags," 21-2; and Howard Moody, 10. See, especially, Lipton's piece entitled Great As an American, she felt "guilt and responsibility," "From Symbol to Fetish: A Sermon on the Flag," Bird (1959). Given the direction of Millett's which she understood as both "purposeless in a 1,22.Thanks to Jon Hendricks,one of the work starting in 1967,Lipton's Imprisoned way, and real in another way." arrested artist-organizers of the Flag Shaw, Figure (1948) is also of interest. for details concerning the event (telephone 18. Some of the artists with whom Millett was conversation with the author,August 1996). 11. Even more influential than these sculptors friendly in Japan, besides the Yoshimuras,were was the under-recognizedAbstract Expressionist Ay-0,On Kawara,Yoko Ono (who was in Japan 5. Tilis statement,and all subsequent quotes or painter Jean Sherman who,as a lesbian and during a portion of Millett's time there), and paraphrased comments attributed to Millett, artist, served as Millett's mentor. See Keating, the artists who in 1963 grouped together as unless otherwise noted, are from a series of 348-51. Hi Red Center. interviews I conducted with Millett between January 1993 and August 1996. Segments of 12. LindaNochlin, "Why Have ThereBeen No 19.For another assessment of the influence of these interviews appear in a videotape accom­ Great Women Artists?" in Women, Art, and Dada and Surrealism on Millett's work (as well as panying the exhibition (produced by Joanna Power, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & the influence of Fluxus), see Keating, 329-406. Raczynska). Row, 1988), 150.Tilis essay originallyappeared in a special issue of Art News on women's 35 20. Dawn Ades, "Dada and Surrealism,"in 33. ln Marie-Claude Wrenn, "Women Arise," Life, 40. Rita Reif, "When the Sculptor's Art Crosses 2d ed., ed. Nikos 4 September 1970, 16-24.The photograph was Paths with Furniture Design," Concepts of ModernArt, New York Times, Stangos (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1981), 112. in a segment devoted to Millett, subtitled "The 4 March 1967, 14. FuriousYoung Philosopher Who Got It Down 21. Ibid., 121. on Paper,"22-3. The writer described Millett as 41. "Eye-Fooling Furniture,"Life, 9 June 1967, "married and a sometime artist" (22). 111-6. 22. Millett, "Words about Things," n.p. 34. Millett cannot recall the exact date of her 42. An especially substantive source of informa­ 23. See Munroe, 151-2. divorce from Fumio-a testimony to the ongoing tion on Fluxus is Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan nature of their friendly relationship. Fumio has Rothfuss, eds., In the Spirit of Fluxus 24. Ibid., 149. remained supportive of Milieu's career as an (Minneapolis:Walker Art Center, 1993). artist, and vice versa. His sculpture consists of 25. Ibid., 150. objects carved out of wood-realistic renditions 43."Eye-Fooling Furniture," 116.This provedto of bicycle wheels, kites, French horns, etc. Millett be an overly optimistic sentiment in regard to 26. Ibid., 159. wrote a catalogue essay for one of his recent Millett's work. Great hope came from the exhibitions.See Kate Millett, "The Art of Fumio enthusiastic interest of dealer Lily Dache. 27. Kate Millett, untitled statement in catalogue­ Yoshimura, " in Fumio Yoshimura: Haroest of a Millett and Dache could not work out viable brochure for Mod Donn Art: 11 Women Artists Quiet Eye (Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood arrangements for the sale of the pieces, (New York: Public Theater, 1970). The exhibition Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1993). however. None were sold. was held at the Public Theater in conjunction with the staging of a "feminist musical," MOD 44. See Fluxus Codex,ed.Jon Hendricks (Detroit 35.lbis introduction was reprinted in "Sexual and NewYork:The Gilbert and Lila Silverman DONNA. Polittcs:TwentyYears Later;ed. Florence Howe, Fluxus Collection, in assoc. with Harry N. Women's Studies Quarterly 3 & 4 (1991): 37-40. 28. Millett, "Words about Things," n.p. Abrams, 1988), 403-5. Hendricks, besides filling the roles previously mentioned, has for some 36. A connection can be made to the work of 29. Millett refers to this relationship in several of time been an indefatigable archivist for Fluxus. Venezuelan-French female sculptor Marisol, also her books, but see especially 1n the he logged artworks"listed or A.D., A Memoir. working in New York.Marisol's life-sized sculp­ Codex, described in a Fluxus publication or... turalarrangements fromhuge blocks of wood­ 30. "Kate Millett," in mentioned in correspondence by George CurrentBiograpoy partially carved, partially drawn on, adorned 410. Maciunas as being planned as a Fluxus Yearbook, with found objects-comically represented work" (25). Note that Maciunas referred to human figures, often couples in family settings. 31. See "Women's Llb:A Second Look," 14 Millett's Time, Millett saw Marisol's workin NewYorkexhibi­ MetapoysicalFood, Food for Thought December 1970, 50. For Millett's reflection on (1%5) generically as "Dinnerware"(403). tions, so it is possible Marisol influenced the Columbia event, see her (NewYork: Flying "Furniture Suite." Random House, Ballantine Books, 1974), 17, and 45. Millett has said that she considers virtually "The Shame is Over," Ms., January 1975, 28.Also all of her sculpture to be Fluxus. See my "Fluxus 37. Robert E. Haywood, "Heretical Alliance:Claes see Keating, 234-42. Feminus," 41 (Spring Oldenburg and the Judson Memorial Church TDR (The Drama Review) 1997). Other works fromthis time included in in the 1960s,"Art History18 Qune 1995): 185. 32. ln Flying,Millett describes the disquiet she Kate Mtllett, Sculptor:The First 38 Yearsare: observed among prospective students following (1964), a tribute to Millett's 38.Telephone conversation with the author, Portrait of Nobori the media's representation of her sexuality:"Just Japanese friend who photographed her work in August 1996. by taking my course they acquire the taint of Japan, and Traveling Sales Kit (1966) (plate 6), a eccentricity. Now [article cited in n. 31) tribute to Millett's mother. Time 39. Harriet Morrison,"Sculptor TumsHer Hand has told them I discredit the movement. Their to Furniture,"World journal Tribune, 5 March faces readthe magazines. We are all believers. 46. Morrison, 7. 1%7, sec. 2, 7. The media lives in each of us" (21).

36 47. Kate Millett,"From the Basement to the (New York: Viking Kestrel, 1988), 150-1. Millett Madhouse," Art Papers, May/]une 1988, 23-8. For has spoken of this march, as others have, as "the discussion of Millett's experience in the context day [protestors I tried to levitate the Pentagon." of"conversion," see Laura Nova, "The Myth of the Fall: TheArtistic Conversion of Kate Millett," 54. Interestingly, "Baby Carriage" was the only unpublished essay, 1996 (available in exhibition segment of Situations that was vandalized. reading area). Students frequently stole the balloons, an act Millett found touching, since the balloons 48. Time, 6 May 1966, 25-6 (not the source constituted the only fanciful aspect of the piece. quoted by Millett). Millett's goal in this installation had been to produce a visual "essay about the environs."The 49. Millett felt honored that sculptor George college was in a particularly "soulless section of Segal visited Trap. Segal had become well Brooklyn," she said, and she saw the cages as known for his installations of plaster casts of rendering vulnerable that which was usually human figures (cast from live models) situated encased behind concrete walls. in environments suggesting isolation and alienation. Segal also took a turn toward more 55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The specifically socio-politicalthemes in 1 %7. Birth of the Prison, trans.Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 201. 50. Hendricks edited a compilation of state­ ments by the artists documenting their perfor­ 56. See Millett's account of this time period in mances. See Mantpulations,ed.Jon Hendricks her 1990 introduction to SexualPolitics. For a (New York:A Judson Publication, TheJudson recent reflection on the history of strikes at Gallery, 1%7). Columbia, see Neil MacFarquhar, "Protesters at Columbia Signal Spring," New York Times, 15 51. Kate Millett,"'No' an Event arranged by Kate April 19%, Bl, 3. Millett for performance at Judson Gallery at five-thirtyp.m. on October 21st, 1%7," included 57. Cf. Millett, SexualPolttics:"As the fundamen­ in Mantµl.lattons,ed. Hendricks. tal instrument and the foundation unit of patriar­ chal society the family and its roles are prototyp­ 52. Ibid.At the end of her statement, Millett ical. Serving as an agent of the larger society, the wrote: "Cages are not new to me: I have known family not only encouragesits own members to them for a long time and had already made adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the reference to the fact last July when I did one government of the patriarchal state which rules large Trap environment in a basement on the its citizens through its family heads" (33). Bowery. I expect to deal with them again in the future as there are so many everywhere." 58. Foucault, 233. Foucault's book was originally It is clearthat Millett's choice of the cage as a published in France in 1975.Theextensive metaphor for the experiences of Sylvia Likens research for this book is emblematic of an entire was also meant as a metaphor for Millett's own generation's concerns,internationally, with issues past experiences of entrapment-entrapment of incarceration.Though beyond the scope of by the very social and cultural constraints she this essay, it would be valuable to contextualize would later write about in SexualPolitics and Millett's work more fully among expressions of other books. such concerns in art, music, theater, dance, film, fiction, nonfiction,as well as political activism 53. For an account of this protest, see James aimed at prison reform. Haskins and Kathleen Benson, The 60s Reader 37 59. laura Coningham, "Eating from the Dinner 63. Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful: A Metaphysics of Acts," in In the Spin"t of Party Plates and Other Myths, Metaphors, and An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Fluxus, 79, that Chicago's Dinner Party had an Moments of Lesbian Enunciation in Feminism Liberation Movement (NewYork: Vintage antecedent in Millett's "dinnerware"(Millett's and Its Art Movement,"in Sexual Politics: Books, 1970). Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic Metaphysical Food, Food for Thought [ 1965], Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party"in Feminist of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New see n. 44 above). Art History, ed.Amelia Jones (Berkeley York: Bantam Books, 1970). Predecessors of & Los Angeles: University of California Press, Millett who influenced her feminist writings 69.Madhouse, Madhouse was exhibited atthe 1996), 214-5. include Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Noho Gallery, NewYork, March, 1987.The Noho (NewYork:Alfred A. Knopf, 1953; first French Gallery, an artists' cooperative, was founded in 60. Millett, Flying, 28. edition, 1949); Betty Friedan, The Feminine 1975. Millett was an original member and Mystique (NewYork: Norton, 1963); and Mary remains active. Millett also published the state­ 61. For reviews of Tenninal Piece, see: Benha Ellmann, Thinking about Women (NewYork: ment from the exhibition announcement in Harris, "Terminal Piece: Sculpture by Kate Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). For an excellent Heresies 7, no. 1 (1990): 96. (Note that else­ Millett," Ms. ,July 1972, 24-5;April Kingsley, historical overview of feminist political activity where, Millett cites 1973 as the year of the "Kate Millett," Art News, May 1972, 52.Also see in the art world from 1968 into the 1990s, see family intervention; see n. 71.) Victoria Schultz, "Another Side of Kate Millett," Mary D. Garrard,"Feminist Politics: Networks Changes.June 1972, 3-4. and Organizations," in The Power of Feminist 70. Another sculptor using a cagelike structure Art, ed. Broude and Garrard, 88-103. to address the incarcerating aspects of the 62. For particularly useful scholarship on the mental health system is Edward Kienholz; dynamics of stardom, see Joshua Gamson, 64. AmeliaJones, "Sexual Politics: Feminist see his 1966State Hospital. Millett does not Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary Strategies,Feminist Conflicts, Feminist recall seeing this particular piece but admires America (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University Histories; in Jones, ed., 24. Kienholz's work. of California Press, 1994). Interestingly, in the wake of her stardom, Millett made a film 65. Ibid., 23.Jones goes on to contribute to this 71.Kate Millett, Loony-Bin Trip (NewYork: (entitled Three Lives, ca. 1972), thus joining a goal in her other cogent essay in the catalogue, Simon & Schuster, 1990), 72. ln the preface, history of artists who, after becoming stars for "The 'SexualPolitics' of The Dinner Party:A Millett cites 1973 as the year of her initial their accomplishments in one medium, tum Critical Context,"82-118. For additional contex­ dealings with the mental health system.For to filmmalting. tualizing of 1970s feminist art practice, theory, Millett's most recent thoughts on this system, and criticism, cf.Ann Reynolds, "Visibility see Kate Millett and Betsy Hinden, "Adventures as Sexual Politics" (paper presented at the of a Feminist," in Feminist Foremothers in annual meeting of the College Art Association, Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Boston, February 1996, on a panel entitled "The Health, ed. Phyllis Chesler, Esther D. Rothblum, Invisible Seventies; audiotaped by Audio and Ellen Cole (NewYork:The Hawonh Press, Archives International,la Crescenta, CA). 1995), 347-oO.For a provocative investigation of connections between manic depression and cre­ 66.Jones,"Sexual Politics:Feminist Strategies,"in ativity,see Kay RedfieldJamison, Touched with Jones, ed., 22. Millett quote is from her Sexual Fire:Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Politics, 24-5. Temperament (NewYork:The Free Press, 1993).

67. Coningham, 213-4. 72. Millett refers here to Francisco Goya's The Naked Maja (before 1800). 68.For discussion of Chicago's shifts in style in the early 1970s, see laura Meyer, "From Finish Fetish to Feminism:Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in CaliforniaArt History,"in Jones, ed., 46-74.Also see Kristine Stiles's suggestion in "Between Water andStone, Fluxus Performance: 38 73. For discussion of the Celtic tale of Tristan 79. For reviews of The Trial of Sylvia Likens, Fusion in the Americas (NewYork:The New and Isolde, see Joan Tasker Grirnbert,ed., Tristan see Karen Durbin,"The Sexual Aesthetic of Press, 1995), 37-63. and Isolde.-A Case Book (New York: Garland, Murder," The Village Voice, 13 February 1978, I, 1995). Millett was perhaps drawn to this tale 20-1; Barbara Flynn,"Kate Millett, Noho 89. Quote from Lynn MacRitchie,"Uneasy because of her Irish ancestry, to which she often Gallery,"Ariforum,April 1978, 61-2. Rooms," Art in America, October 1993, 61. refers in her writings. Also see Lynn Zelevansky, Sense and Sensibility: 80. Millett, The Basement, 4-5. Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties 74. Laura Meyer,"A Feminist Chronology, 1945- (NewYork:The Museum of Modem Art, 1994), 95," in Jones, ed., 241.The three women named 81. For a review of Madhouse, Madhouse, see 14-8. also founded the Woman's Building. For a history R. Hansen, "Art from Anguish:Kate Millett," of the Woman's Building through 1983, see Women Artists News.June 1987, 26. 90. See the exhibition catalogue by Todd Gilens Arlene Raven,At Home (Long Beach, Calif.: Long and Julie Courtney, eds., Prison Sentences: Beach Museum of Art, 1983). 82. Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty: An The Prison as Site/The Prison as Subject Essay on the Literature of Political (Philadelphia: Moore College of Art and Design, 75. Kathleen Hendrix, "The 'Naked Ladies'of Imprisonment (NewYork:W.W.Norton, 1994). 1995). Kate Millett," Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1977, Some of the background for the Middle East sec. IV, I. Other reviews of this project include section came from Milieu's 1979 trip to Iran to 91. See Richard Tyler,"Eastern State Penitentiary: Elaine Woo,"Kate Millett: Pondering the Limits speak at a rally celebratingInternational From Closure to 'Prison Sentences,'" in Prison of the Eternal Feminine," Los Angeles Herald Women's Day.After a complicated series of Sentences, ed. Gilens and Courtney, 8-11. Examiner,18 December 1978, Bl, 4; Shirl Buss, events, she was deported. She documented this "Kate Millett: Omnipotent Nudes and experience in her book, Going to Iran (New 92. William G. Nagel, The New Red Bam:A Subterranean Terrors," Lesbian Tide, MayI.June York: Coward, Mccann & Geoghegan, 1982). Critical Look at the ModernAmerican Prison 1977, 4-5. (NewYork:Walker and Company, 1973), 1, 23. 83. Millett,Politics of Cruelty,69. Another book published out of this research 76. Millett refers to her relationships in many of project was Norman Johnston, The Human her books, but especially in (New York: Sita 84.Ibid., 11. Cage:A. Brief History of Prison Architecture Farrar,Straus & Giroux, 1977). According to (NewYork:Walker and Company, 1973). Millett, the New York Times advertisement for the The Lesbian Body exhibition, Chuck Levitan 85. Ibid., 113. 93. Angela Davis,Angela Davis.-An Gallery, NewYork, October 1977 (for which fig. Autobiography (New York: Random House, 13 served as the announcement and poster 86. For a review of the exhibition, see Lilly Wei, 1974), 52. image) constituted the first time the newspaper "Kate Millett at Noho," Art in America, had printed the word lesbian. December 1995, 92. 94. Duchamp's use of found objects (his"ready­ mades," as he called them) was a highly charged 77. Keating, 333. 87. LawrenceGraver, Samuel Beckett, Waiting practice in general and, as evidenced in Milieu's for Godot, Landmarks of World Literature,ed.). exhibition, has been an important influence on 78. Kate Millett, The Basement: Meditations on P.Stem (I989; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge her thirty-eight years of sculpture. See Keating's a Human Sacrifice (I979; New York: Simon & University Press, 1996), 26. chapter "The Apprentice in the Sun,"329-406, Schuster, 1991), 99. forilluminating analysis of Duchamp's influence 88. For an explanation of this performance and on Millett. a history of ethnographic display of"human specimens," see Coco Fusco, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance,"in English is BrokenHere: Notes on Cultural

39 Figure 16 "City of Saigon," Trapinstallation, 307 Bowery, New York, 1967. Millett in rear. Photo:George Maciunas.

40 fHOM TH[ BAS[ Hf HT TO THf MAUHOUSf

Reproduced from Art Papers, May/June 1988 (dates in brackets reflect updated scholarship).

After thirty years of building a surreal interior landscape in wood sculp­ ture, I am asked to write about it. A greatopportunity. For I am a writer as well. But the writer balks: Language might reduce the mystery of sculpture to mere words, diminish that difficultly-realized series of pieces, few and slowly constructed, assembled, carved, laminated. Wood is solid, refractory. You do not spout it; it is not just verbiage. And finally, to put sculpture-the silent art-into words? The facility, the magic intangibility of language trying to parallel the obdurate tangibility of the Kate three-dimensional? To "say" what sculpture says, to signify through the fluid diaphanous counters of diction, what sculpture with so much more power and visible actuality means. Is, in fact. Because if it works, if it Mtllett succeeds-and how difficult it is in sculpture to succeed-then the object made is its own meaning, stronger and better than words could say it. I Words, insubstantial nominators facing the thing: height, mass, weight, solid and in space, so clearly defined you could fall over it. Sculpture is a symbol as well as a mass. An image realized. You don't just hit upon it like a piece of diction, you arrive at it through days, weeks, years of conceptualization, emotional struggle. This visual image must be so irrefutable that it lingers in the viewer's mind like something memorized, or presaged. Perceived so powerfully and understood so deeply and with such feeling that it cannot be dislodged. If painting delights, sculpture must embody; and the impression so embodied comes from far down in consciousness. If it succeeds. And success in sculpture is the most difficult success. For a long time I made sculpture out of a happiness with form itself. And so myearly work, Pop and fantasy furniture, was intent upon ingenuity, a Mozartian wit and grace. I had a wonderful time. Then one day in 1966 I came across something in a magazine that changed my life. It also changed my sculpture. Something happened, a devastation of the spirit like the collapse of a building. But the rubble revealed a certain door; perhaps it had always been there.

41 On October twenty-sixth, 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the starved body of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens was found in a back bedroom of Gertrude Baniszewski's house on New York Street, the corpse covered with bruises and with the words "I am a prostitute and proud of it" carved upon the abdomen. Sylvia's parents bad boarded her and her younger sister Jenny Likens with Gertrude in July. The beatings and abuse Sylvia suffered over the summer had increased so by September that the last weeks of her life were spent as a captive in the basement of the house.

Everything I have done since in sculpture has depended upon that paragraph. And much that I have done as a writer as well: Sexual Politics and The Basement, which is a series of meditations upon that death. My road to Tarsus. But it is one thing in writing, another in sculpture. And what I have done with this jolt in the figures and cages I have con­ structed ever since is something I would not dare to write. Too frighten­ ing. Too deep. Too far into the core of the self. Fear itself. Powerful because unnamed, still magic, still overwhelming. My own fears. The fears of others. Of our times in fact. Confinement. Any and all confinement. The terror of isolation. Of being tied up, of being helpless, held in a room, incarcerated in enclosed space. Dread of death, of the death thatis worse than death because it is death in life, buried alive but still alive though buried. Torture, in short: the prolongation of pain and distress, the torment of being someone's amusement, someone's job in that they are employed to torment you. Who are the food of guards and watchmen, their bland indifferent eyes. The captured, pawns of the state, of faceless government, disinterested army personnel, attendants of "corrections" or the "mental health system." Salaried bullies over the lone Giacometti-like stick of a citizen reduced to a number, a cell, a punch card, a clinical or criminal history.

42 Imagine destitute men who lie all day covered in bandages, even the eyes swathed while the television blares its empty B-war movie dialogue between commercials-the blurred vapid little black and white pictures jumping along unseen. Only that horrible blare of the sound track reaching the victim as it is bounced offthe distorting cement walls of the institution where he lies in the regulation cot within the regulation cell of bars, cage within cage. And the inescapable diabolic noise of the 1V screaming the machinery of his oppression into his mind-even invading that, prohibiting silence or privacy or thought. Writing upon his soul like the engine that carves into the prisoner's flesh in Kafka's penal colony. The victim here is archetypically male. As are most prisoners, "criminal" or political. As are most inhabitants of flop houses: the piece is named for the men of the Houston Hotel, an abandoned hotel for vagrants near my own studio on the Bowery. I was once offered the space and had to refuse it, so present still were the men of its past and so intrusive it felt to compete with their ghosts. It was their place, not mine. But my visit gave me their companionship forever. I could, in a sense, "be" one of them, one of the men in Folsom where I visited for many years, one of the men in clandestine jails all over South America about whom I read each day in connection with a studyof torture I am now writing. I have gone that far. With women, I have always known. That was our life--conf"tnement. Confinement within confinement, a Chinese nest of boxes; custom has even nominated child birth as "confinement." Reducing our miracle to another more drastic imprisonment. With us everywhere sex is grabbed afterand converted to a rotor driving our herded, constricted existences. And our sexuality, which is but one aspect of self-an aspect that veers toward vitalityand liberty-is captured and snared and accused and convicted and made thereafter the verdict, the evidence, the crime, and the punishment. Allthat was merely theoretical until Sylvia likens. Now the repression of sexuality, even the personality was made clear. This spunky kid, this humorist and fighterwas punished unto death for her energy, her potential sexual vitality. I was too young to be her mother; more likely she was my lost child self. It could have been me, and in a sense it was. I joined the underground people. Thereafter they would be my subject, what I sculpted. 43 Trap (1967), the first work done under Sylvia's influence, did not even acknowledge her, or not directly. She is there in the shadows, a truncated legless mannikin behind bars, nearly tangential to the more sweeping generalizations made through her. For this big environment is about the larger world: money, politics, war. Trap filled the entire basement of a building in New York: extrapolating her terror, it poisoned major institutions, projected the same deadly imprisonment and penury that were Sylvia's finalsurroundings. Atrocity makes everything look different. That anomie spread still further in the next exhibition. I want to say "her exhibition" so entirely had Sylvia's vision at the end of her life taken me over; listless, finally omniscient through evil and suffering. Taking as my site a thoroughly ugly courtyard at Brooklyn Community College, a paved and overhung space surrounded on every side by huge soulless structures (apartment houses), I made each of the five pieces in my next environment a com­ ment upon this landscape itseH; the milieu where windows might open but no one stirred to help Catherine Genovese. The neighbors heard Sylvia's screams but never did call the police. My sculpted cages, sur­ rounded by these monstrous exteriors, were the fragile divisions of apartment life, their own interiors, exposed and extruded in plain air. The so personal and vulnerable shape of a toilet bowl, placed in a cage and left out in a landscape so merciless, public, and observant. The domestic safety of a dining room tabl�now rigidly enclosed in bars­ becomes the site of those awful dinners where the food is execrable, the conversation is an argument, and you cannot leave the table. Watch­ towers with guards, their faces behind the bars usually associated with teller's windows, so that they are a curious and inexplicable mixture of finance and the police-military state. The bed I encaged is an army cot, iron legs as adamant as the buildings who stand around it. And as if to mock and even ridicule the deadened domestic life in this compound where thousands of people did have to live, I included a baby carriage with a group of balloons attempting to carry it aloft and out of its cage-­ which was open at the top. The response was perplexed and almost daily my carefully made papier mache balloons were stolen out of a vandalous anxiety. The art-buddy who got me this show, because she had a part-time teaching job there, got fired. In those days you didn't do

44 "press releases"; it was the spring of '68, the world was up in arms and the whole country was alive with understanding. I called the piece Situations, bland enough-but it was understood. Still, I'd rather show you a picture than tell you what I mean; the picture increases meaning, the words might diminish. But, chancing it, let me explain in the crudest way what my images mean to me. Even foregoing the power of their silence, the silence around the figure that does not cry out, spill blood on the wall, preach or shrill-but holds all outrage inside itself, too dignified to implore or even deplore. The Maja Rediscovered [1975), TerminalPiece (1972), Approaching Futility [1975): each lost in solitude, becoming its fate. Since each knows beyond all knowing that there is no help; that if assistance arrived as suddenly as the moment they are "seen" (an opening night crowd once tried to "rescue" the figure in Terminal Piece) they have already endured what the viewer only now discovers, endured it so long that no remedy could erase that duration, their past. They have already become it, they are therefore the essence of an event; historical fact, if you will. More certain than the future. For there is no help and they know it. The Terminalwoman among her empty chairs, the Maja with her sneering flowers, the child of Futilityon its ladder. Their perspectivemore eternal, cynical, seasoned,

and canny than that of "politics." Another compartment of my life, necessarily naive and founded on hope. But these symbols, the experience represented by the cages is older, more permanent, stretching way back into time and, more dismally, forlornly forward as well. Everywhere now the state advances its powers to mystical proportions. The structures over us more controlling, more general, appropriating more to themselves. In our time the practice of torture is revived; once universally and finally

abolished, it returns, spreads, thrives, hardens into policy. Freedom loses ground to totalitarianism in every rivulet of life. Authority encroaches, takes technological means unto itself. The air around us strangles. New pieces not yet made will come to say this: secret rooms, the interrogator. Still a mystery.

45 The shock and dismay, the abrupt disillusion of discovering Sylvia Likens had taken its effect. It has already changed the world by Trap, a subterranean installation in a basement. In Situations, with its inhos­ pitable cement forum. Refined in Small Mysteries [1975]. But Sylvia likens was never yet confronted directly. Her ordeal a hidden engine powering a vision she had authored. Not until The Trial of Sylvia Likens [1978] is her experience, her story dealt with head on. Even in words, the story written out on the wall, recited on audio tape (a reading from the text of TheBasement), visitors sitting quietly on the floor listening for long periods. A critic who had the incident branded on her soul while growing up in Indianapolis did a long piece forthe Village Voice and the bare cooperative gallery was thronged. Quiet as a funeral, the room fraught with pity. That show would get it out of my system, I thought. It did get me out of the cage. Perhaps one could express frustration more powerfully with­ out it, come upon the invisible handcuffsof the psyche. There could be another way to represent entrapment: although imposed from without it might be silken, subtle, nearly traceless for having triumphed over the inner being. But it would be more fluid than wooden bars--for all their comfortable geometry. The Trial of Sylvia Likens advanced me toward sophisticated mixed media, part narrative, part theatre, part journalism; it summed up what had come before. But it did not stop the impulse. Free of Sylvia, I was freed for myself. There were other caverns to explore. When I first read about Sylvia in '66, I had not yet been a prison­ er myself. Still innocent of the hells I came to know of later, first through the prison movement in California, the political prisoners of the Gulag (Terminal Piece owes much to The First Circle which I was reading that winter) then the prisons official and clandestine-of Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Iran (both the Shah's and the Ayatollah's), South Africa. All knowledge of the present, fornow I spend my days in such places of despair while researching the book against torture. But these were once "other people's lives." I was a free person, even with a free person'sjoy and pride who had never lost that virginity of the ·animal who has never known capture. Then I came to know.

46 In 1972 through misguided family intervention I was caught and held in a California madhouse.And again in 1980, this time in Ireland where my sympathy with the hunger strikers and my "record" made it possible for the police to commit me indefinitelyto a back ward asylum in CountyClare. I was fortunate that both imprisonments were brief Few are so fortu­ nate. But I have a record now; it could happen again.Any time.

These were the words with which I announced the Madhouse, Madhouse exhibition (1987). Of course this was to risk much. The last vulnerability. Hadn't I kept face for years: if there were rumors, if "friends" knew, my public artist and writer self was still sane and had never been questioned. It's likely that no one in my co-op gallery knew and the show must have surprised the membership a good deal. Subject matter of this kind, so "personal," so squeamish. You sit these shows yourself: people who gape at the artist now get to gape at the madwoman as well. It is after all her face in the coffin, it is her head about to go underwater, even her hair spread under the brace of iron clamps, drowned Past captivity into death. We know the worst fears early. Only we do not know the shape of their realization. That they might come to pass, but not the manner of their doing so. If I was Sylvia Likens, if I could be struck with pure terror imagining myself in her predicament-what if they did that to you, to yourself at 16--go white with fright or red with shame, the old paralyzing sexual shame imposed on all young females to break their necks and initiate them into the condition of slaves... yet thinking I could beat that, reverse it, rescue myself and the rest of us and even Sylvia posthumously through Sexual Politics, and then the thing still not solved to its core, descend further and battle head on in The Basement... ! had still not foreseen the window in Clare.

47 Landed in this strange place in a foreign country I waited until all were asleep and then tried the window: it opened eight inches and no more. They had me. And, this being a provincial backwoods snake pit, they could keep me forever and probably would. I never dreamed they'd get me this way. I'd lived the first bust down, called it an accident, a freak, a reactionary and later regretted gesture on the part of a family mystified by doctors and authoritarian state psychiatry. So many years went by that I forgot and grew unaware of the power of the "record;" imagined it worn away, erased. The mark, the brand, the legal fact of the stigma. So across borders and by transatlantic telephone it could snap into place like an electronic lock. And the hand in the window is all that is left of me. I have become disembodied. In fact I had become "disappeared," one of the growing bands of invisible people. In bins, in clandestine prisons, beings over whom the state, acting in partial or entire secrecy, has assumed supernat­ ural power, the power to cause them to vanish from the earth. At any moment. Because they are marked. It is on their chart, computer card. Soon there will be electronic supervision. Already there is "outpatient commitment" where persons at large in the community are subject to instant arrest if they miss an appointment for forced drugging with an injection that controls consciousness foras long as three weeks at a time. Fail to appear and you will be picked up and incarcerated at once; with­ out hearing, trial, defense or any stated length of confinement. It is all about not knowing if you will ever get out alive. Will you ever see the sun again, drink wine, make love, look at a fire, walk in the countryside, see the horizon, go out for dinner, swim, read the book of your choice, see an exhibition. Will you ever draw again, sculpt, write. Could you, given the chance? Will you have a mind left, mental capacity. Because this is what you fight them for. To keep your mind. While theytry to take it away, poisoning it with drugs that short curcuit con­ sciousness and distort perception, the functions of the mind. Deliberately causing this beautiful, holy, nearly divine instrument to misfunction, hallucinate, disintegrate, destroy its range and accuracy, burn out its cells' electrolytes and energies. So you eat oranges, drink coffee, exercise,

48 hoard apples, bananas---frnit, caffeine-and-water-baths, showers. Maintain a meticulous order about your person and belongings, become a samurai of survival Your death's head is already in a plain wooden box, your spirit is captured in steel and glass, your hair floats just above the water in the worst trap medieval military engineering could conceive-- the watergate. The race memoryof everywitch who ever burned whispers that you are "between crossed locks," the code for capture, the way barred on either side. Only patience now. Hope. Or the soul dies of despair. The coffin is already built.And the disembodied hand speaks so quietly. Most suffering is endured in silence. Whether through futility or dignity. Thoreau speaks of lives lived in "quiet desperation." That is what I mean to convey in these images of mine. So long in conception and execution. Beyond words. Because it would take so many words and they would reduce, narrow, depreciate. And, whether their quietude is acceptance or impotence scarcely matters; one does not blame the victim. Yet the verybeauty and patience and restraint, the nobility of such quietude, is an outrage. After, and perhaps only after we have appreciated it-for fortitude is a great human achievement--can we assume the responsibility these symbols confer on us. There is no Sadean glorification of anguish at issue, no sentimental gloating over wretched­ ness-they are there to be liberated. In their infinite drunken good nature the crowd at the opening who set about to rescue the woman in TerminalPiece, taking her from behind bars and sitting her out in their midst, a rigid figure who could neither drink nor converse while they chattered and milled about-still had the right idea. And were drunk enough to act on their own best impulses. But you really have to go further and tear down the cage. I tried this out on real people once and it worked. The very day in [October]of ['67] when the Movement "levitated" the Pentagon, I did a per­ formance piece at Judson Church whose title was simply and emphatically No. Unsuspecting, my guests trooped into the darkened basement gallery only to hear the nails hammered down putting the last pieces into place which would imprison them. When the lights went on there were a

49 hundred art world types, friends and only a few moments before well­ wishers, confined in a cage. With the patience that one brings to avant­ garde art they grew acquainted and conversed, argued about smoking and non-smoking, endured occasional black-outs and a tape of flushing toilets, crying babies and militarymusic. Until it became clear there would be no rescue beyond their own ingenuity. The cage was actually easy to escape; the wooden bars would bend if people would cooperate, were removable if they could concentrate. ill Picard, the art critic, had to be on television that evening-time was getting short. The motivation (an appointment with media) was ironic and ambiguous, but efficient: she organized her fellow prisoners. Some of whom drifted off, some of whom stayed to drink red wine and admire the object of their confinement, now only a room sized cage, a neutral, even rather beautiful object; finally we had a party. There is the snare ...and there is empowerment.

50 Plate 1 Tbe American Dream Goes to Pot, People's Flag Sbow e,,_h.ibition, Judson Memorial Church. NewYork, 1970. Photo: Gianfranco Mantegna. Courtesy of Jon Hendricks.

51 Plate 2 He and Sin, 1964-65. Phom: Fumio Yoshimurn.

52 Plate 3 Bacbelor's Apartment, 1967. Photo: Diane Yamaguchi.

53 Plate 4 Roller Skate Table, 1965. Photo: George Maciunas. Courtesy of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Flu:Kus Collection, Detroit.

Plate 5 (facing page) Metaphysical Food, Food for Thought, 1965. Photo: George Maciunas. Courtesy ofTI1e Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fiu:KUs Collection, Detroit.

Plate 6 Traveling Sates Kit, 1966. Photo: George Maciunas.

54

Plate 7 "Toilet," Situations installation, Brooklyn Community College, NewYork, 1968. Photo: Fumio Yoshimura.

Plate 8 (facing page) "The Maja Rediscovered," SmallMysteries installation, Noho Gallery, New York, 1976. Photo:Jack Beshears.

56

Plate 9 "Homage to the Old Men at the Houston Hotel," SmallMysteries installation, Noho Gallery, New York, 1976. Photo:Jack Beshears.

58 Plate 11 "Window in Clare;' Madbouse, Madbnuse installation, Noho Gallery, New York, 1987. Photo: Kate Millett.

Plate 10 "The Trial Scene," Tbe Trial of Sylvia Likens installation, Noho Gallery, New York, 1978. Millett in rear. Photo: Cynthia MacAdams.

59 Plate 12 Waiting for Godot, Flu."r:Sculpture exhibition, Noho Gallery,New York, L995. Photo: Kate Millett.

60 K A T f M I l l f T T: A T I M f l I H f O H G f H O f H, S f H U A L I T Y. A H O C U LT U R f 1gsg-1gg7

Maurice I Berger

MauriceBerger is Senior Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, NewSchool for Social Research, New York, and Adjunct Curator, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County. His most recent book isWhite lies: On the Myths of Race and Whiteness (Farra,;Straus & Giroux, 1998). Gender and Sexuality Millett

1959 Percentage of women receiving Moves to New York, after completing professional degrees has reached a one-year teaching stint at the its lowest point since before University of North Carolina, WorldWar I. Greensboro, and begins working as a sculptor.

1960 Oral contraceptives are approved Kindergarten teacher, New York for sale in the U. S. Public School System.

1961 First Presidential Commission on Relocates to Tokyo, where she makes the Status ofWomen. sculpture.

Instructor, English literature, Waseda University (fokyo).

1962 Book: Irving Bieber, et. al., Homosexuality:A Psychoanalytic Study; gays protest Bieber's homo­ phobic book.

1963 U.S. Congress passes the Equal Solo Exhibition: Things (sculpture), Pay Act. Minami Gallery (fokyo).

First gay picket line organized in U.S.: protest of violations of draft record confidentialitypertaining to homosexuality (New York).

Book: Betty Friedan, TheFeminine Mystique.

62 Millett Gender and Sexuality 1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act Instructor, English Literature, forbids sexual discrimination in the BarnardCollege. private sector.

Free Speech Movement (Berkeley).

First woman to run for presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party: Margaret Chase Smith (R., Maine).

New York Academy of Medicine report characterizes homosexuality as an acquired illness subject to cure.

1965 Feminist activities raise issue of Marries Japanese sculptor Fumio women's rights at the conference Yoshimura. (Remains married until of Students for a Democratic Society early 1980s.) (SDS).

1966 National Organization forWomen Chairperson, Education Committee, (NOW). NOW.

Gay men, lesbians, and clergy demonstrate outside the Civil ServiceCommission against unfair hiring practices (Washington, D.C.).

63 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1967 Los Angeles police raids on gay bars Joins New York Radical Women prompt street demonstrations. (NYRW).

Solo Exhibition: Furniture Suite (sculpture),Judson Gallery (New York).

Site-Specific Installation: Trap, 307 Bowery (New York).

Performance: No, a segment of"12 Evenings of Manipulations" series, Judson Gallery (New York).

1968 First African-American woman Exhibition: 25 CaliforniaWomen of Site-Specific Installation: Situations, elected to the U.S. Congress: Art, Lytton Galleries of Brooklyn Community College. Rep. Shirley Chisholm ContemporaryArt (Los Angeles). (D., New York). Loses teaching position at Barnard College as punishment for participation Radical feminists disrupt Miss in May 1968 Columbia University strike. America Pageant(Atlantic City, NewJersey).

Newsletter: Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement.

Women's Equity Action League.

Book: Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women.

64 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett Three New York radical feminist Women Artists in Revolution (WAR). Joins the Redstockings and the New groups are formed:the Feminists, York Radical Feminists. the Redstockings, and the New York Radical Feminists. Director, Barnard and Columbia Experimental College. Publication: RedstockingsManifesto.

First university-level women's study program:Cornell University.

FBI initiates an investigation of the women's movement for possible subversive activities.

Stonewall uprising in New York, a rebellion against a police raid on a gay bar, helps to spur a gay-rights movement in the U.S.

Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activist Alliance (GAA).

Canada legalizes homosexuality and abortion.

65 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1970 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Women, Students, and Artists for Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Commission defines and prohibits BlackArt Liberation (WSABAL). Columbia University. sexual harassment. Los Angeles Council of Women Book: Sexual Politics. First states to liberalize abortion laws: Artists (LACWA). Hawaii,Alaska, and New York. Appears on the cover of Time Judy Chicago establishes the magazine. U.S. Senate holds hearing on an Equal Feminist Art Programat Fresno Rights Amendment to the State College. Comes out as a lesbian. Constitution for women, the first since 1956. Joins the Radicalesbians.

National Women's Strike for Equality Instructor, Department of Sociology, (New York). Bryn Mawr College.

Journals:Off Our Backs, Ain't I a Exhibitions: Mod Donn Art: 11 Woman?, and It Ain't Me, Babe. Women Artists,Public Theater (NewYork); contributes The Sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal American Dream Goes to Pot to offices prompts $7,000 "donation" The People'sFlag Show.Judson to found the NewYork City Women's Memorial Church (NewYork). Liberation Center.

Radicalesbians.

Gay Activist Alliance organizes "zaps" at various political functions in order to bring about a national awareness of gay political issues.

Books: Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex:The Case for Feminist Revolution and Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood isPowerful.

66 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1971 Constitutional Amendment lowering After pressure from feminist groups, the voting age to 18 in all elections representation of women increases is ratified. almost 20 percent in the Whitney Museum annual. New York Radical Feminists host all-day Speakout Against Rape. Women in the Arts (WIA).

Women's studies curriculum is Journal: Women in Art Quarterly. introduced into public high schools (Berkeley, California). Exhibition: Where We At: Black Women Artists (NewYork). National Women's Political Caucus.

FBI infiltratesWashington, D.C., area chapters of the Gay liberation Front and the Gay Action Alliance.

Book: Germaine Greer, TheFemale Eunuch (American edition).

1972 U. S. Senate approves an Equal Women's Caucus forArt (WCA) Attends Angela Davis's murder and Rights Amendment to the of the College Art Association. conspiracytrial in California;Davis Constitution banning discrimination is acquitted. against women and sends the TheFeminist Art Journal. measure to the states for ratification. Installation: TerminalPiece, Women's Installation: Womanhouse Interart Center (NewYork). Equal Employment Opportunity Act (Los Angeles). sanctions legal proceedings against Documentary Film: Three Lives sexual discrimination. ASCO (Chicano artist group). (writer and director).

National Conference of Puerto A.I.R. Gallery (women's collabora­ Rican Women. tive, NewYork).

Magazine: Ms. Prostitutes organize a union,COYOTE (Cut OutYour Old Tired Ethics). 67 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1973 U.S. Supreme Court rules, in Roe v. Woman's Building (Los Angeles). Book: The Prostitution Papers:A Wade, that a state may not prevent Candid Dialogue. a woman from having an abortion Soho 20 (women's collaborative during the first six months of gallery, New York). Distinguished Visiting Professor, pregnancy. Sacramento State University. Feminist Art Workers. National Black Feminist Organization.

NOW appoints a National Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism.

National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

National Gay Task Force (NGTF) and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

1974 Coalition of Labor Union Women Women Writers Program,Woman's Book: Flying. (CLUW). Building (Los Angeles). University Lecturer, University of Association of Mexican American Californiaat Berkeley. Women.

First woman governor elected in her own right: Ella Grass (D.,Connecticut).

Lesbian Herstory Archives (New York).

Demonstrators at the Los Angeles Times demand positive coverage of lesbians and gay men.

Book: Angela Davis, Angela Davis, An Autobiography.

. 68 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1975 American Indian Women's Becomes founding member of Leadership Conference the cooperative Noho Gallery (New York). (New York).

First women's bank (New York).

First feminist conference on health: Our Bodies, Ourselves (Harvard).

United Nations designates InternationalYear of the Woman; U.N. Conference held in Mexico City.

American Psychological Association removes homo!!exuality from its list of mental disorders.

1976 The GeneralConvention of the Exhibitions: Women Artists:1550- Installation: Small Mysteries, Noho Episcopal Church announces 1950, Los Angeles County Museum Gallery (New York). its support of the ordination of of Art and LasVenas de la Mujer, women. Woman's Building (Los Angeles).

President GeraldFord vetoes Lesbian Art Project. comprehensive childcare bill. Journal:Womanart. NOW organizes a task forceon domestic violence.

National Alliance of Black Feminists (Chicago).

Book:Jonathan Katz,ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. 69 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1977 First U.S. Congressional Women's Journals: Heresies and Chrysalis. Book:Sita. Caucus. Installation: Naked Ladies, Woman's Congress approves "Hyde Building (Los Angeles). Amendment," which prohibits use of federal Medicaid money for Solo Exhibitions:Andre Wauters Gallery abortions. (New York) and The Lesbian Body, Chuck Levitan Gallery (New York). National Women's StudyAssociation.

Entertainer Anita Bryant begins her anti-gay "Save Our Children" campaign (Dade County, Florida).

NewYork City Gay Liberation Day march swells to 75,000 from 15,000 the year before.

1978 U.S. Congress grants five-year exten­ Lesbian Art Project begins a Begins summer program at Millett sion of ERA ratification deadline. one-year "Sapphic education" Farm, an art colony for women program (LosAngeles). (Poughkeepsie, NewYork). National Feminist Lesbian Organization. Installation: The Trial of Sylvia Likens, Noho Gallery (New York). Gay activist Harvey Mille is assassinated in San Francisco; gay and lesbian communities wage protests across the United States.

70 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1979 National Abortion Rights Week. Feminist Art Institute (New York). Book: TheBasement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. Wayne Lee is beaten by three Installation: Judy Chicago, Dinner U.S.Army Rangers for alleged Party,San Francisco Museum of Travels to Iran to speak at the homosexual advances in an adult ModemArt. International Women's Day Rally. bookstore (Savannah, Georgia). Less than two weeks after arrival, Artist Mary Kelly completes her Millett and her companion Start of the right-wing "pro-family" influential Post-Partum Document. are deported for having made movement. "provocations" against the new government. Book: Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Solo Exhibition:Elegy for Sita, Noho Gallery (New York).

71 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1980 Equal representation of both sexes Women's Art Journal. Solo Exhibition: Lesbia Erotica, is achieved at the Democratic Galerie de Ville (New Orleans), National Convention. Galerie Andere Zeichen (Berlin), Galerie Amazone (Amsterdam). Republican Ronald Reagan is elect­ ed President of the United States; his right-wing policies will prove destructive to U.S. civil rights initiatives for women and people of color.

U.S. Census officially stops defining the head of household as the husband.

Feminist Hispanic conference (San Jose, California).

1981 First female justice of the Book: Rozsika Parker and Griselda Solo Exhibition: Lesbia Erotica, U.S. Supreme Court: Pollock, OldMistresses: Women, Women's Salon (NewYork), Sandra Day O'Connor. Art, and Ideology. Galerie des Femmes (Paris).

More than 300,000 demonstrators from labor and civil rights organizations protest the regressive social policies of the Reagan Administration in a Solidarity Day March in Washington, D.C.

Women in the U.S. earn $.59 for every dollar earnedby men.

Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC).

72 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1982 The Equal Rights Amendment for Book: Going to Iran. women is defeated after a 10-year struggle forratification.

First state Gay Rights Bill: Wisconsin.

1983 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights warns that positions taken by the Reagan Justice Department could result in continued discrimination against minorities and women; the Commission later criticizes the President forfailing to appoint more women and minorities in high-level federal positions.

U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms women's right to an abortion and, in another ruling, forbids sexual discrimination in retirement schemes.

National Council of Churches publishes a collection of anti-sexist biblical texts.

First American woman to travel in space: Sally Ride.

Book:Ann Snitow, et. al., eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality.

73 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1984 First female vice-presidential The Guerrilla Girls (activist art group candidate of a major U.S. political committed to fighting sexism and party: Rep. Geraldine Ferraro racism in the New York art world). (D., New York). Exhibition: Difference:On Represent­ International March for Gay and ation and Sexuality,New Museum of Lesbian Freedom (New York). Contemporary Art (New York).

1985 Emily's List (political action group to help elect women to the U. S. Senate).

Lesbians and gay men participate in protests at the White House as part of the April Actions for Peace, Jobs, and Justice.

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD, New York).

Book:Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics:Feminist LiteraryTheory.

1986 U. S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers Solo Exhibition: Hell's Kitchen Gallery v. Hardwick that private, consensual (Provincetown, Massachusetts). homosexual acts are not protected by the U.S. Constitution, a blow for gay and lesbian rights.

U.S. Public Health Service adds AIDS to the list of"dangerous contagious diseases" that prohibit entry into the United States.

74 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1987 U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board Exhibition:Race and Representation, Installation: Madhouse, Madhouse, estimates that during a two-year Hunter College Art Gallery Noho Gallery (NewYork). period sexual harassment cost the (New York). government $267 million in lost productivity and turnover. Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.). GLAADrepresentatives persuade TheNew York Times to change its editorial policy and use the word gay instead of homosexual.

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).

Book: Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (American edition).

1988 The number of married working Book: Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, mothers rises to 66 percent from and Power. 48 percent in 1975.

Pope John Paul Il issues an apostolic Jetter listing women's vocations as "virginityand motherhood."

Republican GeorgeBush is elected President, continuing the pro-life, anti-gay, and anti-civil-rights slant of the Reagan administration.

75 Gender and Sexuality Art andCulture Millett

1989 Women and their supporters stage a Controversy surrounding photographs massive March on Washington in by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres support of legal abortions, birth Serrano begins debate on public fund­ control, and women's rights. ing for the arts. National Endowment for the Arts becomes the subject of U.S. Supreme Court weakens a attack by conservative politiciansand woman's right to an abortion by religious leaders. upholding certain state-imposed restrictions; Pennsylvania becomes the first state to restrict abortions after the decision.

1990 Two out of three women surveyed in Book: The Loony-Bin Trip. a study of sexual harassment in the military say they have been sexually harassed.

One third of families headed by women live below the poverty line.

Books: Robert Bly, IronJohn:A Book About Men and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.

76 Gender and Sexuality Millett

1991 Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only Solo Exhibition:Freedom from African-American ever to serve on the Captivity,Cortland Jessup Gallery U.S. Supreme Court, retires; the U.S. (Provincetown,Massachusetts). Senate approves the nomination of African-American jurist Clarence Thomas to serve as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court after investigating allegations of sexual harassmentleveled against him by law professorAnita Hill.

NewYork Police Department reports that 15 percent of reported bias crimes are motivated by anti-lesbian and anti- gay hate.

Books: Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women and Naomi Wolf, The BeautyMyth.

1992 DemocratWilliam "Bill" Clinton is Solo Exhibition:Making Paradise, elected President with heavy support Cortland Jessup Gallery fromAfrican-American, gay and lesbian, (Provincetown, Massachusetts). and female voters. The November elections also sweep in a number of newly elected African-American and female congresspeople.

Women'sAction Committee (WAC).

Colorado voters pass a measure that bans local anti-discrimination laws that specifically protect lesbian and gay men.

77 Gender and Sexuality Millett

1993 Second woman to be Solo Exhibitions:Making Paradise, appointed to U.S. Supreme Court: Noho Gallery (New York) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Small Clothes, Cortland Jessup Gallery (Provincetown, President Clinton meets with gay Massachusetts). and lesbian leaders, the first time such groups have been openly welcomed to the Oval Office.

Hundreds of thousands of people participate in a massive gay and lesbian rights march (Washington, D.C.).

Colorado Supreme Court nullifies state's anti-gay-rights measure. Gay and lesbian-rights activists end boycott of state businesses.

78 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1994 U.S. State Department's annual Exhibitions:Bad Girls,New Museum of Book: The Politics of Cruelty:An human rights report focuses for ContemporaryArt (New York) and Essay on the Literature of the first time on treatment of Wright Art Gallery, UCLA (Los Angeles) Political Imprisonment. women; it documents widespread and Black Male: Representations of day-to-day discrimination and Masculinity in Contemporary Solo Exhibition:Mother Millett, abuse of women in 193 countries. American Art,Whitney Museum Cortland Jessup Gallery (New York). (Provincetown, Massachusetts). U.S.Attomey GeneralJanet Reno orders federal civil rights Book: Norma Broude and Mary D. mediators from the Justice Garrard,eds., The Power of Feminist Department to take up their Art. first case involving harassment of gay people.

Kraft General Foods mandates that none of its commercials be aired during episode of 1Vshow "Roseanne" that deals positively with homosexuality.

1995 United Nations, Fourth World Book: Lucy Lippard, The Pink Swan: Book: A.D., A Memoir. Conference on Women Selected FeministEssays on Art. (Beijing). Solo Exhibitions:Flux Sculpture, Exhibition:Di vision of Labor: Noho Gallery (NewYork) "Women's Work"inContemporary and Leaving Paris, Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts Cortland Jessup Gallery (NewYork). (Provincetown, Massachusetts).

79 Gender and Sexuality Art and Culture Millett

1996 U.S. Supreme Court declares Exhibition:Sexual Politics."]udy Comes under fire from conservative Colorado anti-gay-rights measure Chicago's "Dinner Party"inFeminist politicians-including Speaker of unconstitutional; ruling represents Art History,Armand Hammer the House Newt Gingrich and the most important gay and lesbian Museum of Art (LosAngeles). Senator Bob Dole-for The American victory in the federal courts. Dream Goes to Pot, a work originally from 1970 that is installed in the group exhibition Old Glory.The piece, which includes an American flag draped across a toilet bowl, is thought to desecrate the Stars and Stripes.

1997 Accepts position as Visiting Professor, Women's Studies Program, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Exhibition:Kate Millett, Sculptor: TheFirst 38 Years, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County (Catonsville).

80 CHfCKLIST Of THf fHHIBITIOH

Dimensions are approximate, in feet, height by width by depth.

WORKS COMPLETED INJAPAN WORKSAFI'ER JAPAN

Humpty Dumpty,1962 Oksamma,1963 Portrait of Nobori,1964 Wooden industrial spools, swivel chair Wooden shoe lasts, wooden icebox, toy Paint, masonite, roller skates, Nobori's bottom steering wheel, bicycle wheels, iron shoes 41/2 X 4X 1 1/2 rods 4x2x2 4X 41/2 X 4 1/2 Long Car,1962 in memory of Mrs. Yoshiko Yoshimura He and She,1964--65 Child's toy car handle, iron machine d. February 20,1963 ,Tokyo Paint, masonite, wax apples, wooden parts, iron pot, wooden electric coil chess pieces spool, wooden concrete form 5x4x2 4x5x3 Blue-Eyed Marble Box,1965 Hiroshima,1962 Paint, masonite, coffee table, wood, Wooden apple box, baby carriage marbles wheels, wooden electric coil spool, 4x3x2 Japanese war helmet 21/2 X 21/2 X 1 1/2 Roller Skate Table,1965 Paint,masonite, shoes, roller skates, The Bowery,1962 cement, metal pipes, phlanges Oil drum, garbage can, rubber hat 4x3x3 (model form) 5x3x3 Metaphysical Food, Food for Thought, 1965 Number 1 FireDepartment, 1963 Restaurant plate, wooden objects Rubber boots, cement, pipes, wooden 1 x1/4 (each plate) concrete form,steel bucket, faucet, wooden electric coil spool, firehose Traveling Sales Kit, 1966 61/2x5x3 Typewritercase, shoe last, articulated mannequin hand, telephone, cable 2 x 4x 1/2 (opened)

Stool,1967 Paint, wood, cloth, leather boots 2X 1 1/2X 1 1/2

81 From Furniture Suite, 1965-67 "Toilet" "The Trial Scene" Wood, toilet Photographs, clothing, fiberglass, Chair, 1965 8x3x5 mannequins, paper Wood, bed ticking 5X 16 X 4 2 3/ 4X 1 1/2 X 1 1/2 From SmallMysteries, 1975 (installation, 1976) From Madhouse, Madhouse, 1987 Bed, 1965 (installation) Wood, bed ticking "Homage to the Old Men at the Houston 5x4x5 Hotel" "Window in Clare" Television monitor, wood, mixed media Window frame, wood, plaster hand Love Seat, 1965 12 X 8 X 8 5x3x2 Chairs, masonite, paint, wood, bed ticking 3x4x4 "The Maja Rediscovered" "Fear Death by Water" Wood, mixed media Iron, plaster, acrylic, water Dinner for One, 1967 8x5x6 4x4x3 Bar stool, paint, wood, bed ticking, ceramic plate "Approaching Futility" "Buried Alive" 4x2x2 Wood, mixed media Wood, plaster 8x4xll 5x4xl l/2 Bachelor's Apartment, 1967 Hat forms,wood, wooden box, toilet seat "Tristan and Isolde" From Flux Sculpture, 1995 4 x 1 1/2 x4 Papier mache, wood, soil 4X 2X 1 1/2 Bureaucracy From Trap, 1967 (installation) Wooden umbrella stand, cotton batting, "Domestic Scene" plastic-covered wires "City of Saigon" Wood, braided rug, grass 3x7 x4 Papier mache, wood, shoes 2x4x4 3 x 3 x 3(each, three components) Psychiatry From The Trial ofSylvia Likens, 1978 Steel and glass medicine cabinet, From Situations, 1968 (installation) (installation) glass jars 5x4x4 "Bed" "The Kitchen Table Scene" Wood, mattress, cloth Wood, bisque, plaster, mixed media Waiting for Godot 8x4x7 5x6 x5 Wooden machine forms,wooden bench 4x8x5 "Baby Carriage" Wood, baby carriage, papier mache, balloons 8x4xll 82 BIOGRAPHY RHO BIBllOGHRPHY

KATE MILLETT 1976 Small Mysteries, SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Noho Gallery, NewYork Born September 14, 1934, 1977 Naked Ladies, Art-RelatedWritings by or about St. Paul, Minnesota Woman's Building, Los Angeles Kate Millett 1978 TheTrial of Sylvia Likens, Lives and works in Poughkeepsie, Noho Gallery, NewYork Ayres, B. Drummond,Jr. "Art or Trash? New York, and New York City 1987 Madhouse, Madhouse, Arizona Exhibit on American Flag Noho Gallery, NewYork Unleashes a Controversy." New York 1995 Flux Sculpture, Times,8 June 1996, 6. EDUCATION Noho Gallery, New York Buss, Shirl. "Kate Millett: Omnipotent 1956 B.A., magna cum laude, Nudes and SubterraneanTerrors." English Literature, BOOKS Lesbian Tide, May/June 1977, 4-5. University of Minnesota 1958 B.A., First Class Honors, 1970 Sexual Politics. Cottingham, Laura."Eating from the English Literature, Garden City, NY : Doubleday. Dinner Party Plates and Other Myths, St. Hilda's College, 1973 The Prostitution Papers:A Metaphors, and Moments of Lesbian Oxford University, England Candid Dialogue. New York: Enunciation in Feminism and Its Art 1970 Ph.D., Distinction, Avon Books. Movement." 1n Sexual Politics:Judy Comparative Literature, 1974 Flying.New York: Random Chicago's "Dinner Party"in Feminist Columbia University House, Ballantine Books. Art History,edited by Amelia Jones. 1977 Sita. NewYork: Farrar,Straus & Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of Giroux. California Press, 1996, 208-28. SOLO SCULPfURE EXHIBffiONS & 1979 TheBasement:Meditations on INSTALIATIONS a Human Sacrifice. Durbin, Karen. "The Sexual Aesthetic of New York: Simon & Schuster. Murder." TheVillage Voice, 13 February 1963 Things,Minami Gallery, 1982 Going to Iran. New York: 1978, 1, 20-1. Tokyo,Japan Coward, Mccann & Geoghegan. 1967 FurnitureSuite, 1990 TheLoony-Bin Trip. NewYork: "Eye-Fooling Furniture."Life, 9 June Judson Gallery, NewYork Simon & Schuster. 1967, 111-6. 1967 Trap, 1994 ThePolitics of Cruelty:An Essay 307 Bowery Street, New York on the Literature of Political Flynn, Barbara. "Kate Millett, Noho 1968 Situations, Imprisonment. NewYork: Gallery." Ariforum,April 1978, 61-2. Brooklyn Community College, W.W.Norton. NewYork 1995 A.D., A Memoir. NewYork: Hansen, R. "Artfrom Anguish: Kate 1972 TerminalPi ece, W.W.Norton. Millett." Women ArtistsNews,June Women's lnterart Center, 1987, 26. NewYork 83 Harris, Bertha."T erminal Piece: ___ . "Madhouse, Madhouse." O'Dell,Kathy. "Fluxus Feminus." TDR Sculpture by Kate Millett." Ms.,July Heresies 7, 1 (1990): 96. (TheDrama Review) 41 (Spring 1997). 1972, 24-5. ___ . "A New Kind of Woman." In O'Grady, Holly. "Kate Millett: Interactions Hendrix, Kathleen."The 'Naked Ladies' Emergence: Cynthia MacAdams. New between Sculpture and Writing." of Kate Millett." Los Angeles Times,13 York: E. P.Dutton, 1977, 5-6. FeministArt Journal 6 (Spring 1977): May 1977, sec. Iv,1, 12. 22-6. ___. "'No' an Event arranged by "Kate Millett." In Flu:xus Codex, edited Kate Millett for performance at Judson Raven,Arlene and Susan Rennie. by Jon Hendricks. Detroit and New Gallery at five-thirty p.m. on October "Interview with Kate Millett." Chrysalis York:The Gilbert and Lila Silverman 21st, 1967." In Manipulations, edited 3 (1977): 35-41. Fluxus Collection, in association with by Jon Hendricks. NewYork:A Judson Harry N.Abrams,1988, 403-5. Publication,The Judson Gallery, 1967, Reif, Rita. "When the Sculptor's Art n.p. Crosses Paths with Furniture Design." Keating,Anne B."'A World We Have New York Times, 4 March 1967, 14. Invented Here': Exploring Community, ___ ."A Personal Discovery." Ms., Identity and Art in the Construction of March 1973, 56-9, 113-5. Sahuc,Janine-Claude. "Kate Millett: 'The Farm,' Kate Millett's FetninistArt Oeuvres et mythes."These de troisieme Colony, 1978-1994." Ph.D. diss., ___. Untitled Statement. In Mod cycle, Universite ParisVII, 1985. University of Maryland at College Park, DonnArt: 11 WomenArtists.NewYork: 1995. PublicTheater, 1970, n. p. Sand,Antoine. "Kate Millett: Sculpture et ecriture-deux voies d'une meme Kiefer, Michael."T empest in a Toilet ___ ."Words about Things." In recherche?" Memoire de D.E.A., Bowl." New Times,6 June 1996, 63. Things.Tokyo:Minami Gallery, 1963, Universite Paris ill, 1984/85. n.p. Kingsley,April."Kate Millett."Art News, Schultz,Victoria. "Another Side of Kate May 1972, 52. Millett,Kate, and others."Mixed Gay Millett." Changes,June 1972, 3-4. Chorus " and "Stars Come Out for Millett,Kate. "The Art of Fumio NYFAI."In Mutiny and the Wei, Ll.lly."Kate Millett at Noho."Art in Yoshimura."In FurniaYoshimura: Mainstream:Talk that Changed Art, America, December 1995, 92. Harvest of a Quiet Eye. Hanover, New edited by Judy Siegel. NewYork: Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Midmarch Press, 1992, 214-6 and 128-9. Whelton, Clark."Bars & Stripes Forever." Dartmouth College, 1993, n.p. The Village Voice, 19 November 1970, Morrison, Harriet. "SculptorTurns Her 1, 20. ___ . "From the Basement to the Hand to Furniture."World Journal Madhouse."Art Papers, Mayf.June 1988, Tribune, 5 March 1967, sec. 2, 7. Woo, Elaine. "Kate Millett: Pondering the 23-8. Limits of the EternalFeminine." Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 18 December 1978, Bl, 4. 84 Wrenn, Marie-Claude. "The Furious Gilens,Todd and Julie Courtney, eds. The Haworth Press, 1995, 347-60. Young Philosopher Who Got It Down Prison Sentences: The Prison as on Paper."Life, 4 September 1970, 22-3. Site/ThePrison as Subject. Munroe,Alexandra.japaneseArt after Philadelphia: Moore College of Art and 1945: Scream against the Sky.New Context Readings Design, 1995. York: Harry N.Abrams,1994.

Armstrong, Elizabeth and Joan Rothfuss, Hess,Thomas B. and Elizabeth C. Baker, Nagel, William G. TheNew Red Barn: eds. In the Spirit of Flu:xus. eds.Art and Sexual Politics:Women's A Critical Look at the Modern Minneapolis:Walker Art Center, 1993. Liberation, Women Artists, and Art American Prison. NewYork:Walker History.New York: Collier Books, 1973. and Company, 1973. Blake, Nayland, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder, eds. In a Different Light: Howe, Florence, ed." Sexual Politics: Nochlin, Llnda. "Why Have There Been Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer TwentyYears Later." Women's Studies No Great Women Artists?" Art News, Practice. San Francisco:City Llghts Quarterly 3 & 4 (1991): 30-40. January 1971, 22-39, 67-71. Reprinted Books, 1995. in Women,Art, and Power; and Other Johnston, Norman. The Human Cage:A Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, BriefHistory of Prison Architecture. 1988, 145-78. eds. ThePower of Feminist Art: The NewYork:Walker and Company, 1973. American Movement of the 1970s, Perreault,Jeanne."Kate Millett's The History and Impact. New York: Harry Jones,Amelia, ed. Sexual Politics.Judy Basement:Te stimony of the N.Abrams,1994. Chicago's "Dinner Party"in Feminist Unspeakable." In Writing Selves: Art History.Berkeley & Los Angeles: Contemporary Feminist Autography. Churchill,Ward and J.J. Vander Wall, eds. University of California Press, 1996. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Cages ofSteel: The Politics of Press, 1995, 72-98, 138-9. Imprisonment in the United States. Llppard, Lucy. "Sexual Politics:ArtSty le." Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, In ThePink Glass Swan: Selected Rubin, David S. Old Glory:The 1992. FeministEssays on Art. NewYork:The American Flag in ContemporaryArt. New Press, 1995, 42-9. Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Foucault, Michel. Discipline and ContemporaryArt, 1994. Punish:The Birth of the Prison, Millett, Kate."The Shame is Over." Ms., translated by Alan Sheridan. NewYork: January 1975, 26-9. "Who's Come a Long Way, Baby?" Vintage Books, 1979. Time, 31 August 1970, cover, lo-23. Millett,Kate and Betsy Hinden. Frueh,Joanna, Cassandra L. Langer,and "Adventures of a Feminist." In Feminist "Women's Lib:A Second Look." Time, Arlene Raven, eds. New Feminist Foremothers in Women's Studies, 14 December 1970, 50. Criticism:Art, Identity, and Action. Psychology, and Mental Health, New York: HarperCollins,1994. edited by Phyllis Chesler, Esther D. Rothblum, and Ellen Cole. NewYork: 85 The text of this catalogue was set in Garamond, a well known Monotypeface that was adapted for computer use. An Old Style face, its heritage dates to Roman inscriptional letter/arms and Caroline Minuscules. Designer Claude Garamond developed the typeface, which bears his name. Headlines were composed using Modula, a font designed specifically for current technology.The catalogue was printed on Lustro Offset, dull and gloss.

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