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Valie Export is a pioneer of feminist media and performance art. A new exhibition at the Fotomuseum Winterthur focuses on her photographic oeuvre.
Her name is both a brand and a gesture: «VALIE EXPORT» – written in capital letters, it sticks in your mind. Like her art. In the fight for more equality, she even had a garter belt tattooed on her thigh. For her, this was an expression of female enslavement and heteronomy.
Legend:
A garter belt tattooed on the thigh: “Body Sign B”, 1970 (Albertina Vienna/The ESSL Collection).
2022, ProLitteris, Zurich/Gertraud Wolfschwenger
In her polemic “Feminist Actionism” she called for a feminine body language that is no longer subject to the laws of advertising and the desires of the male gaze.
“Women must use all media as a means of social struggle and as a means of social progress in order to liberate culture from male values,” says the 82-year-old.
Legend:
The artist Valie Export 2022 in Salzburg.
IMAGO / SKATA
Valie Export, born in Linz in 1940, lives and works in Vienna. She is one of the pioneers of performance and conceptual art. In 1967, in a radical gesture at the time, she ditched both her father’s and her ex-husband’s names to claim a new identity, naming Valie Export.
Her works have been shown worldwide in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The artist taught at various international institutions and worked from 1995 to 2005 as a professor for multimedia performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
Against the male gaze
Her medium was photography. In doing so, the Austrian emancipated herself from patriarchal power structures. Valie Export was no longer the sitter, she became the performer. Provocative and almost aggressive, she appeared in front of the camera in 1968 for “Aktionshose Genitalpanik”.
The artist sits, in a leather jacket, with a machine gun at the ready, her legs spread wide. The jeans in the genital area are cut out so that the view falls on her hairy vagina. “I didn’t pose for the male gaze, but how I wanted to portray my body.”
Legend:
Provocative shot: Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic” from 1969.
Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac/ProLitteris Zurich/Peter Hassmann
On a leash through Vienna
For Valie Export, this was feminist art: she quickly reversed the role assignments, showed herself with male attributes, her vagina in this photo was more threatening than erotic.
Her performance “From the folder of dogness”, in which she led the media artist Peter Weibel through Vienna like a dog on a leash, also became legendary.
In the “Tapp und Tastkino” campaign, she invited men and women to feel their bare breasts through a box that they had strapped to their upper body. In the photos you can see how she is looking for the gaze of the other person. “That was the most interesting thing: how the looks corresponded with each other – visitor and I as an actor,” says the artist.
Important work by Valie Export
Valie Export was a pioneer of feminist action and media art. By grappling with the rules of photography, she also came closer to her own ideas of femininity. Just as the picture is always only a temporary image of reality, the depiction of the woman is not something naturally given, she realized.
Self-empowerment through wax
Valie Export repeatedly injures herself in her work, she re-enacts the battle of the sexes on her own body. “I can photograph the body from different perspectives. It will always be a body, but it will always be presented differently. And of course it also allows for leaps in identity,” she says.
What she meant by that could be observed in the performance “ASEMIE – The inability to express yourself through facial expressions”. She doused her hands and feet with hot wax. The photos document how the wax gradually hardens, her limbs freeze and finally she frees herself from the freeze.
This act of self-empowerment is powerful and it continues to permeate her work to this day.