Valie Export

Valie Export (born May 17, 1940 in Linz as Waltraud Lehner,) is an Austrian artist. She is a pioneer of media art, Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts.Valie Export lives and works in Vienna and Cologne.

Educated in a convent until the age of 14, Export studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna, and briefly worked in the film industry as a script girl, editor, and extra. Austrian feminism was forced to address the fact that by the 1970s there was still a generation of Austrians whose attitudes towards women were based on Nazi ideology. They also had to confront the guilt of their parents’ (mothers’) complacency within the Nazi regime. Export herself, before her political and artistic revolution, was a mother and a wife. In 1967, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT (written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo, shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes).

With this gesture of self-determination, Export emphatically asserted her identity within the Viennese art scene, which was then dominated by the taboo-breaking performance art of the Vienna Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Of the Actionist movement, Export has said, “I was very influenced, not so much by Actionism itself, but by the whole movement in the city. It was a really great movement. We had big scandals, sometimes against the politique; it helped me to bring out my ideas.” Like her male contemporaries, she subjected her body to pain and danger in actions designed to confront the growing complacency and conformism of postwar Austrian culture. But her examination of the ways in which the power relations inherent in media representations inscribe women’s bodies and consciousness distinguishes Export’s project as unequivocally feminist.

From 1965 onwards, she increasingly turned to the medium of film and in 1966 wrote a screenplay titled "AUS ALT MAKES NO NEW - a test of senselessness. Metaphorical image association, project ". In 1967, she adopted her artistic name VALIE EXPORT as an artistic concept and logo, with the prescription of writing it only in verses.

The early work of Valie Export is characterized in particular by the examination of feminism, the art of action, and the medium of film, especially by the movement of Expanded Cinema at the end of the 1960s. One of her most famous actions was the Tapp- and Tastkino. Together with her new partner Peter Weibel, for which she had concluded a relationship with Friedensreich Hundertwasser, she realized it for the first time at the 1st European Meeting of Independent Filmmakers in Munich. At this performance in public places, Export carried a curly wig, was dressed and wore over her naked breasts a box with two openings. The rest of the upper body was covered with a cardigan. Peter Weibel went through a megaphone and invited the guests to visit. They had twelve seconds to stretch with both hands through the openings and touch the artist's naked breasts. VALIE EXPORT later said to this action: "(...) the Tapp- and Tastkino - that was street action, it was feminism, it was Expanded Cinema, it was film; I called the Tapp- and Tastkino at that time also Tapp- and Tastfilm. (...), because I said at the time, every human being can do this filmmaking, film installation, there is no original. "

Export’s early guerrilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. Tapp- und Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema) was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. In this avowedly revolutionary work, Valie Export wore a tiny "movie theater" around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the "theater." She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her. The media responded to Export's provocative work with panic and fear, one newspaper aligning her to a witch. Export recalls, "There was a great campaign against me in Austria."

Some of her other works including, "Invisible Adversaries," "Syntagma," and "Korpersplitter," show the artist's body in connection to historical buildings not only physically, but also symbolically. The bodies attachment to the historical progression of gendered spaces and stereotyped roles represent Export's feminist and political approach to art.

Although she had direct contact with the "Viennese Aktionisten" through her personal relationships, Export repeatedly stressed the differences to the group's actions. Later she said in an interview: "Part of my work is certainly linked to Viennese actionism, although there are serious differences. I feel part of the whole direction of actionism; I see myself, besides my work as a media artist or filmmaker, above all as an action and performance artist. But I would not compare this with Viennese actionism, because it was aesthetically, substantively, and formally distinguished from my forms of work. "

In 1970, she became aware of the concern for her daughter. The production of VALIE EXPORT was marked by VALIE EXPORT in the same year in the work VALIE EXPORT - Smart Export by the partial overpainting of a cigarette pack of the Austrian brand "Smart Export", which was very popular at the time, with the "VALIE" label 1] This was intended as a feminist critique of patriarchal capitalist attribution practices: before a proper name covers the individual feed into the market, it is better replaced by a logo. Also in 1970, she made her body for the work "Body Sign Action" on the canvas and had a garter tattoo on the thigh. In 1972 Peter Weibel and they parted.

Export’s 1973 short film, "Remote, Remote," exemplifies the painful ramifications of the female body conforming to societal standards. In this piece she digs at her cuticles with a knife for twelve minutes, representing the induced damage originating from the female body trying to maintain beauty standards and tradition.

In her 1970 photograph, “Body Sign Action,” Export portrays a politically charged agenda through her performance artwork. The piece features a tattoo of a garter belt on Export’s naked upper leg. The garter is not attached at the top and only attached to a sliver of a stocking at the bottom- therefore suspended on the leg. Instead of the garter objectifying the body, the body objectifies the garter, flipping constructed societal roles in relation to the female body.

In her 1968 performance Aktionshose:Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), Export entered an art cinema in Munich, wearing crotchless pants, and walked around the audience with her exposed genitalia at face level. The associated photographs were taken in 1969 in Vienna, by photographer Peter Hassmann. The performance at the art cinema and the photographs in 1969 were both aimed toward provoking thought about the passive role of women in cinema and confrontation of the private nature of sexuality with the public venues of her performances. Apocryphal stories state that the Aktionshose:Genitalpanik performance occurred in a porn theater and included Export brandishing a machine gun and challenging the audience, as depicted in the 1969 posters, however she claims this never occurred.

The contrast with what is usually called "cinema" is obvious, and is crucial to the message. In Export's performance, the female body is not packaged and sold by male directors and producers, but is controlled and offered freely by the woman herself, in defiance of social rules and state precepts. Also, the ordinary state-approved cinema is an essentially voyeuristic experience, whereas in Export's performance, the "audience" not only has a very direct, tactile contact with another person, but does so in the full view of Export and bystanders.

Export's groundbreaking video piece, Facing a Family (1971) was one of the first instances of television intervention and broadcasting video art. The video, originally broadcast on the Austrian television program Kontakte February 2, 1971, shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV while eating dinner. When other middle-class families watched this program on TV, the television would be holding a mirror up to their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, spectator, and television. 1977 saw the release of her first feature film, Unsichtbare Gegner. For this film's script, she collaborated with her former partner, Peter Weibel. Her 1985 film The Practice of Love was entered into the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.

In 1977 she took part in documenta 6 in Kassel. In 1980 she and Maria Lassnig represented Austria at the Venice Biennale. In 1985 her feature film The Practice of Love was nominated in the book category and directed by the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1992, her work was presented as part of a retrospective in the Landesgalerie of the Oberösterreichische Landesmuseum in Linz for the first time in a single exhibition, followed by many more. At the same time, the public perception of their artistic work has diminished.

From 1989 to 1992, VALIE EXPORT was a full professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Fine Arts, from 1991 to 1995 professor at the Department of Visual Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts. During this time, she also met her later husband, Robert Stockinger. From 1995/1996 to 2005 she was a professor for multimedia performance at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln. In 2007, she participated in both the framework program of the documenta 12 and the Venice Biennial, where she also co-commissioned the Austrian pavilion in 2009.

Since 1995/1996 Export has held a professorship for multimedia performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

In her 1983 experimental film, Syntagma, Export attempted to reframe the female body by using a multitude of "...different cinematic montage techniques—doubling the body through overlays, for example". The film follows Export's belief that the female body has, throughout history, been manipulated by men through the means of art and literature. In an interview with "Interview Magazine", Export discusses her movie, Syntagma, and says, "The female body has always been a construction".

In another effort to expose the control of women by men, Export collected her powerful statements in a piece written for an exhibit she had organized titled MAGNA, Geminism: Art and Creativity. Within this piece titled "Women’s Art a Manifesto" (1972) she wrote empowering statements directed as a call to action, “let women speak so that they can find themselves, this is what I ask for in order to achieve a self-defined image of ourselves and thus a different view of the social function of women”. Here Export was pointing out the unjust way that women had been living their lives within the boundaries created by men. In this same Manifesto Export also says “the arts can be understood as a medium of our self-definition adding new values to the arts. these values, transmitted via the cultural sign-process, will alter reality towards an accommodation of female needs”. Here she is directly relating her own work to the progress of empowering women. With each new piece Export creates she is changing the way society views women.
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