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Can we realistically ask an artwork to correct ethical or political wrongdoings? Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe takes a close look at Terminal Piece (1972/2026)
\n\n\n\nIn 2018 American academic Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Brett Kavanaugh – Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee – of sexually assaulting her while they were both in high school. Having first come forward anonymously, she was ultimately compelled to testify before the Senate. Earlier that year, the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requiring websites to seek users’ consent to track and store their data. From Europe, following the latest American news, I visited The Washington Post and tapped a popup window, accepting that I would surrender details of my browsing habits to read about a case of historical sexual assault. With my finger on the montaged image – the consent popup blocking the paywall blocking the article – I smirked at the acute yet slight meeting of the dual contemporary anxieties: perspective – who gets to look, and permission – who grants access.
\n\n\n\nThe position from which one views and consumes is a pressing concern for Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare, director and chief curator respectively of Vienna’s Mumok. ‘Who is watching? Who is seen? Where do we position ourselves?’ they ask in the accompanying text for Terminal Piece, an expansive exhibition, staged in four ‘acts’ plus a ‘prologue’, broadly concerned with epistemologies of looking and organised around their recent acquisition of Kate Millett’s 1972 work of the same name. Millett’s Terminal Piece consists of two rows of 46 folding chairs, viewable between and behind a set of bars, in a dimly lit room. A single female form occupies one chair. She’s made of plastic, shop-bought, dressed in dark clothes, and wearing a cheap wig, her chin down and her expression faintly withholding. She could be witness or audience member, punter or adjudicator. The mute replica of a woman does not, and cannot, declare her stake. She is marginalised by the largescale installation; nonetheless the visitor tracks their attention on her, in this highly affective but austere work of art.
\n\n\n\nMillett is best known as the author of generation-defining works of feminist theory, including Sexual Politics (1970) and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (1994), but she often referred to herself as a sculptor. In a recent essay in The New Yorker, the novelist Rachel Cusk describes Millett’s turn to art practice as a crisis in language. Horrified by the highly publicised 1965 murder of Sylvia Likens – an American teenager extensively and sadistically tortured to death by her unofficial foster mother, foster siblings and members of their local community – Millett found herself unable to formulate a response in writing. The list of physical, psychological and sexual violations inflicted on Likens reads as an overwhelming catalogue of atrocities. ‘Unspeakable’ is the commonplace description of such crimes: rare events that, when they occur, puncture the social conscience.
\n\n\n\nMore than a decade later Millett did publish her written response to the Likens case, in The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979), but Terminal Piece came first. In Cusk’s interpretation, the long duration of Millett’s engagement with the Likens case opened a space of stuttering self-critique and self-pedagogy, the mannequin in Terminal Piece becoming a quasi-self-portrait, poised in ambivalence. Arguably, this is what Cusk, the author often credited with popularising autofiction as a literary genre, would make of one of the central figures of Second Wave Feminism (a movement whose ambitions and achievements are often distilled into the proposition that ‘the personal is political’). But who can be sure that the figure stands in for the artist? It could be any shabby, anonymous woman; it could be Gertrude Baniszewski, who led the abuse of Likens, or one of the bystanders whose silence made such a crime possible. That silence was eventually broken by gossip, door-stepping journalists and affidavits, producing a public narrative that now conditions the viewer’s response to the artwork.
\n\n\n\nFor the poet, performance artist and attorney Vanessa Place, law is an arrangement of words in space, an architecture that is both immaterial and concrete. Millett’s art, Cusk’s essay and the Mumok exhibition form a chain that both confronts and retreats from this proposition. They do this through their shared attention to resistance, silence and stillness, and their self-declared interests in the inheritance between women. Baniszewski’s role of caregiver had no biological or legal standing, and into that gap she poured perversion. The project of many feminist and queer thinkers, including Millett and her contemporaries, has been to argue for and secure informal and nonhierarchical bonds between women that can exist outside of the structures of violence. You may call these structures a patriarchy, except they are not always enacted by men; sometimes it is a woman, occupying the role of matriarch, who reproduces them. What should feminism do with a woman like that? There is almost certainly no fixed path and many of the suggestions have been futile. Futile, at least, if you view the feminist project as social contract or communal law. Millett’s Terminal Piece, with its dumb protagonist, is a public testament to this failure.
\n\n\n\nCentral to Hellberg and Flygare’s acquisition and installation of Terminal Piece was the work of artist and curator Jenni Crain, who presented Kate Millett: Terminal Piece at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, as her master’s degree thesis exhibition in 2021. Crain died prematurely the same year, of complications related to COVID-19, and left a remarkable legacy, to which peers such as Hellberg return in their own practices, reproducing and restaging her research. Millett’s sculptural installation takes an endpoint – Likens’s death – as the condition for an artistic process. Yet subsequent iterations have intervened against the implied finality of the work. Writers, artists and curators allow it to be remade, extended and transformed across different historical and technological conditions. The reinstallation of Terminal Piece sets death’s terminus against other forms of continuation: the capacity of an artwork, an image or a technical apparatus to exceed the lives that initiated it. Likens’s death, Millett’s death and Crain’s death are not equivalent events, nor did these women occupy equivalent positions in relation to the work. But their different relationships to mortality, agency and artistic transmission plot a discursive map around Terminal Piece in which ‘the terminal’ is presented as a stop point, but not a permanent foreclosure.
\n\n\n\nHellberg and Flygare have installed Terminal Piece in a room blacked out like a theatre stage. Orangey bulbs back- and toplight the work and are movement-sensitive. As the visitor enters the gallery they dim and intensify in a slight contraction reminiscent of a sleeping reptile’s eye or a responsive surveillance system. Or both, an animal’s movement triggering a technological response. Early in this text, I described Millett’s artistic austerity. I had also referred to myself, touching and ridiculing the absurdity of a digital law, by which I was asked permission to read about sexual consent. Scorn is a protective reflex, it distances, and in a media and image culture where all context is compressed and you are continuously compelled to engage, post, speak out, it can offer a semblance of shelter. However partial that structure may be.
\n\n\n\nAt Mumok, Terminal Piece is less a portrait than a trigger, activated as the viewer walks into the room, and activating of the works that have been installed across the museum. Megan Plunkett’s photographs of piles of objects collected by her dying mother are forensic almost to the point of abstraction. In the same room: Miroslav Tichý’s voyeuristic street photography, taken in Communist Czechoslovakia, is framed by the artist in soft, feminine, infantile handmade passe-partouts. In the basement are Nina Porter’s Inside Landscapes, large-format X-ray images that show an image of exposure from within a camera. Without hard disclaimers, these works and many others trouble not only the hierarchies attributed to vision, but the corrective systems applied to those hierarchies. Rather than resolving the question of who is permitted to look, this exhibition keeps us inside the query. It’s too much to ask an artwork to correct ethical or political wrongdoings, an impasse accepted and foregrounded by Terminal Piece. By refusing to convert the act of looking into a declaration of moral or political certainty, Millett leaves us with her mannequin: face-forward, observing, yet undisclosing.
\n\n\n\nTerminal Piece is on show at Mumok, Vienna, through 7 February
\n\n\n\nFrom the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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