-Angry Little Girls.Kate Millet (b.1934), she is one austere woman. You wouldn't think so, because she's so crazy - moving to Japan with only a few bucks, and staying there for 6 years, protesting, getting arrested, affairs with crazy Japanese artists, like Fumio Yoshimura, protesting Marijuana enforcements at a University lectures. She is a woman of the 60s.
She is as heavy as a boulder, unmoveable, and disciplined. She could have been a cult figure if she was more affluent with pop culture. But she was more about the beatniks - CC-'counter-cultural'.
She regimented her life in Japan. I'm sure she viewed her life as a kind of monastic training. 6 hours of reading, 6 hours of making art, 6 hours of work, 6 hours of eat, sleep, drink and play.
Kate Millet wrote a bunch of books. Most of her writings are hard for me to read, but every word is infused with power.
Sexual Politics - 1970
The Politics of Cruelty - 1994
Mother Millet-2002
One of her artworks was a series of manekin doll legs mounted beside urinals. A commentary on Vietnam War. The correlation between women's body as drainage is a powerful metaphor.
Another writer, David L. Pike used the same metaphor in his article "Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in nineteenth-Century Paris and London". Pike compared the stratical social hierarchy of each culture to the city's vertical strata. The powerful elite were associated with the Penthouse, whereas the prostitutes were associated with the sewage that ran beneath the city. Peculiar, because prostitutes don't actually live in sewage systems, but they were linked with the city's drainage system.
I can't really relate to this metaphor of a woman's body. For one thing, it's too simplistic of a model. The article is well done, inspirational, powerful, fluid, but can't buy into it.
Times have changed and we are in a mobile, transient span. It's the new millennium baby. In our modern age, we are not interested in forced regiments, in identity, in authenticity. Rather, fluidity, anxiety, instantaneous gratification, Chinese women with British accents, craigslist, and DIY everything rules the time. Let's steal everything.
Why am I visiting Kate Millet's work? It is regressive?
There is still something very romantic about this hero culture, that had passed. But more than that, it's kind of like a herritage at this point. I am idolizing her free spirit, yet unmoving will. I am part of the camp, of those who are sick of this current culture. I would rather act dumb than to be confrontational - in the new millineum, unlike the 60s, people went to work. And that's what we do at work, we play dumb. We don't have emotions... I'd rather be trouble sometimes.
1 comment:
Hi, since I learned of Norman Mailer's death I've been thinking about Kate Millet and how her book, Sexual Politics, changed my life. As a result of her book, I never read anything by him until earlier this year. Strange how both were sort of marginalized by the media during the 80's, the Reagan years. I loved your comment at the end about working and lying.
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