In the airy lobby of Miami's Nautilus hotel, you'll find a coffee bar, a constant stream of hipster beach babes, and—just before the elevators—a giant neon vagina. 'It lights up for 26.8 seconds," says its creator, Suzy Kellems Dominik, 'which represents a fantasy orgasm. Obviously,' she notes, 'the lights begin on the clitoris.'
Dominik's neon installation is called I Can Feel, and it's one of many yonic symbols at Art Basel Miami Beach—most created by female artists. There's a spread-eagle abstract by Vanessa Beecroft and a pastiche of glitter pussies by Joan Snyder (pictured below). Ruby Neri's 'traditional pot' is a full-frontal ceramics project, and Betty Tompkins' Women Words features female forms graffiti'd with 'CUNT,' 'HOOTCHIE' and other vaginal street slurs. Odes to Georgia O'Keefe abound, as do nude photos by Sally Mann with private parts gone public. There's even a vagina made from tree bark (really) at Scope Art Fair, along with many (probably too many…) dick picks disguised as fine art.
But Dominik's installation at the Nautilus is the most explicit of the pack, and therefore getting lots of attention. Since its debut this morning, it's appeared in over 100 Instagrams, with a constant line of women (so far, only women…) wanting selfies with the piece.
"I think it's great that everyone wants to interact with it," Dominik says. "Seriously. Take pictures. Take tons of pictures. We as women need to take up space. We need to be seen everywhere… We have a hundred mile Mojave race still to go, both in the way women are included in the artistic narrative and in society in general. Monsters walk among us clothed as elected officials. We're slut-shamed. Our reproductive rights are threatened and in some cases revoked. We have a long way to go before we're depicted as passionate, full, flawed, evolving, 360-degree people."
Dominik would know something about evolution. At 13, she was a Junior Olympic runner. By 16, she'd switched sports and become an All-American gymnast. She was a stay-at-home mom for more than 20 years before deciding—on her 50th birthday—to start showing the artwork she'd done in her rec room to the public. And the glowing vagina itself was inspired, in part, by another reinvention: after decades in a tough relationship, she recently chose the single life. 'I realised despite being a competitive athlete for so long, I had somehow become everyone's cheerleader, but I wasn't in the game myself. That had to change.'
It's cool—and empowering, sure—to hear about Dominik's evolution. But does that same empowerment extend to an art piece that's a faceless, nameless female sex organ? Or does it just turn women—and all our full, flaw, evolving, 360-degree lives—into a generic, sexy nightlight?
'I appreciate you bringing that up,' Dominik answers, 'Because to me, this work isn't faceless. It's a self-portrait in that I've poetically objectified myself as the 5'3 vagina in the centre of the piece. That's my actual height,' grins the 56-year-old. 'It's a self-portrait in every way it possibly could be. I distilled myself down by choice—and I understand that self-determination and self-objectification is a privilege, not a right. But I did it as an artistic device to make the most clear moment of how I felt.'
'It's like Freida Kahlo,' she continues, 'I can't liken myself to her, I can only bow down to her. But like her, I feel that the privilege and the obligation of being an artist means I have to rewrite my sense of self and put it out into the world for all women—and men, too.'
I ask if I Can Feel can make people have better sex, especially since she chose to install it in a hotel instead of a gallery. 'For goodness sake, I hope so!' Dominik proclaims. 'I'm giving people a map and telling them how to use it! But it's also deceptively harmless, and that's on purpose. It's all these soft pink tones. It's very sweet. But I hope it gives people the impulse to have connected, open, true sexual intercourse that's intimate. That would be remarkable, wouldn't it?'
It would. It would also be remarkable if the pervasive Millennial Pink had crossed over from fashion to the feminist art world. Alas, that's not why I Can Feel is all rosy shades. 'It's because nobody wants a red-hot vagina,' Dominik says. 'Seriously, it's true! One of my first notes about this piece was 'no red-hot vagina.' Because we've seen that already in art—mostly in men's art—and this vagina needs to seem innocuous. It's deceptively simple and welcoming,' she smiles, 'until you maybe see a flash of the Virgin Mary in the neon pattern, maybe even the outline of Christ. And then you realise, it's not so simple after all. The vagina is pretty but very complex.'
