Austrian artist Valie Export, a powerfully provocative yet playful force in feminist art, died on May 14, three days before her 86th birthday. The news of her death was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.
Export’s performances and filmed media works subverted – indeed, stomped on – notions of the male gaze and patriarchal society, reclaiming and reinterpreting the female body through guerrilla forms that circumvented the constraints of institutional spaces. Her contributions had a major impact on a Viennese society that, according to Export, was infected by the remnants of fascism and its regressive attitude towards the role of women.
Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Austria, Export felt this attitude keenly in the stigma she experienced for marrying young and having a daughter at 18. She rejected the role of traditional housewife, placed her daughter in the temporary care of her sister and moved to Vienna to create a new identity, taking the name VALIE EXPORT. The nickname, taken from the Austrian Smart Export cigarettes, not only rejected the traditional conventions of taking the name of a husband or father, but also established it as an independent and unique brand.
She studied painting, drawing and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna in the 1960s, amid the rise of the Viennese Actionism movement. Inspired by her guttural rejection of a sleepwalking Viennese society in its use of blood, bodily fluids and taboos, Export pursued her own adjacent and independent role of ‘Feminist Actionist’, using her own body to confront accepted political and social norms. In 1968, she performed “Genital Panic,” in which she walked the aisles of an arthouse cinema in Munich wearing crotchless pants so that her genitals were at eye level with the audience, subverting the experience of safe distanced viewing of the screen into actual physical closeness. In photographs of the performance taken by Peter Hassmann the following year, Export also holds a machine gun, simulating how the screen, dominated by people’s ideals and intentions, captures the audience’s gaze.
“VALIE was the one who coined the term ‘actionism’: these are not performances, but actions,” Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova wrote in a tribute to the artist on Instagram. “Changing the way people speak and perceive reality is the highest achievement of all.”
Export further blurred the boundaries between passive spectatorship and forced physical contact in “Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema)” (1968). In central Vienna, she strapped a model theater stage to her chest and invited passersby to touch her bare breasts through the curtains, while her colleague Peter Weibel, brandishing a megaphone, recorded every interaction with a stopwatch. The action caused outrage.
Further experimentation with time-based media continued to challenge the role of women and their bodies in society, reclaiming the female voice in works that reflect an interest in language and semantics. In “Visual Text: Finger Poem” (1968–73), Export used her fingers to copy sentences letter by letter, such as “I say the sign with signals in the sign of the saying,” a nod to Martin Heidegger. In “… Remote …. Remote …” (1973), the artist mutilates her cuticles with a knife for twelve minutes as a condemnation of society’s beauty standards. ‘Facing a Family’ (1971) broadcast the image of a bourgeois Austrian household eating and watching TV to Austrian families at home who were probably doing just that, holding up a mirror to domestic roles.
Her practice of allowing the physical female voice to be heard casually and independently remained a constant throughout her practice: in 2008, she placed a microscopic camera up her nose to record her body’s internal machinations as she recited her written words.
Export’s influences extend far beyond the fields of performance and conceptual art. In 1972, the artist published ‘Women’s Art: A Manifesto’, which encouraged women to find an alternative way of life, outside the dictates of patriarchal norms. “If reality is a social construction and men are its engineers, we are dealing with a male reality. Women have not yet come into their own, because they have not had a chance to speak to the extent that they have not had access to the media,” Export wrote.
She co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968 and released her first feature film, “Invisible Adversaries,” in 1977, which follows a young female photographer who discovers that the people around her are being controlled by a hostile alien force. At the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in 1975, Export fulfilled the role of curator and art historian with the exhibition MAGNA. Feminism: art and creativitya groundbreaking show of female artists. In 1980, Export and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale.
From 1995 to 2005 she was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and in 2016 she opened the Valie Export Center in Linz, based on her archives and promoting research into international and interdisciplinary performance art.
Towards the end of her life, Export noted that her work would likely face greater oppression and outrage today, arguing that despite enormous developments in women’s voice and representation, it represents minute progress in the longer timeline of oppression.
“I have to say that despite everything that has changed, it is still a struggle for me. I am not just fighting for myself or my art: I continue to fight for real, authentic representation of women,” she said in an interview with Il Giornale dell’Arte this year. “Working women, women at home, young, old. There are many images of women, and they all need to be seen, recognized and accepted.”
