“The center of my work is the body and moreover the female body.”
VALIE EXPORT
When VALIE EXPORT (born Waltraud Lehner) was 13 years old, she wrote in her notebook, “In the beginning was the word and the word was a man.” It was 1953, and despite the stifling environment of post–World War II Austria, she was already dreaming of women’s liberation. As a teenager, she processed her environment through poetry and dressed up in men’s clothing for her first-ever self-portraits. Five years later, in an act of feminist self-determination, EXPORT shed her given name, breaking with the convention of carrying her father’s or husband’s name. She wanted to create herself from scratch. She would be VALIE EXPORT—in all capitals—announcing her arrival in the art world as a newly constructed entity.
EXPORT arrived in Vienna in the late 1960s and worked in proximity to the Viennese Actionists, a group of artists, all men, who expressed their rage at repressive societal norms and the devastation of war through transgressive, publicly staged performances often involving bodily fluids, animal sacrifice, self-harm, and sex acts. EXPORT positioned herself as distinct from this movement; as a self-proclaimed “Feminist Actionist,” her early work was more akin to that of American artists Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, who also used their bodies to bridge the personal and the political, creating a new feminist language in the process. EXPORT spent these early years of her artist life exploring gender in self-portraits and writing theoretical feminist texts and manifestos. She found a home in the world of expanded cinema with works like Abstract Film No. 1, a film projection without film, which casts projector light through running water on a mirror. Expanded cinema—a movement that had been kicking around the US avant-garde for some time, but was in its infancy in Austria—interrogated conventions of cinema through experimental projection environments, performance, light, and sound. For EXPORT, it meant disrupting and traditional concepts of cinema with the most intimate medium possible: her body.
Like the Actionists, EXPORT performed in the streets, which allowed room for her intentionally aggressive and provocative work in a way that conservative art museums of the time did not. In 1968, she performed Genital Panic in an arthouse cinema in Munich. EXPORT entered the theater in a pair of crotchless pants and walked between the aisles, her genitalia at eye level, disrupting the on-screen, male-constructed fantasy with the physicality of a woman’s actual body and challenging the audience’s voyeuristic perspective. Genital Panic has gone on to become an avant-garde touchstone, and in a photograph (Action Pants: Genital Panic) she staged a year later to capture the action, the addition of a machine gun in her hands only amplified her declaration of power. For EXPORT, the moving image was a crucial tool of communication, but one dominated by men and used to sell a certain version of womanhood. Describing her aims at that time, she said, “Our attempts to cultivate a direct and uncontrolled language in art were based upon the idea that the dominant language was a form of manipulation. The plan was to circumvent these forms of social control and to develop other forms of language outside of the system dominated by men.”
In the short video Finger Poem (1968), EXPORT explores the construction and transformative possibilities of the written and spoken word, which had fascinated her since her teenage years. She stands before the camera and, without speaking, uses her hands to spell, “I say the showing with the signs of the legend,” which is only intelligible when the text appears on-screen at the end of the piece. Forty years later, in 2008, EXPORT fulfilled a longtime desire to physically enter her own body and capture language as a picture in the video piece …i turn over the pictures of my voice in my head. With a microscopic camera inserted up her nose, she captured her throat reciting her written words: “The rebellious voice, the split voice. The voice is suture, the voice is seam…the voice is my identity, it is not body or spirit, it is not language or image…. It is a sign of symbols….” Now, seven decades into her art-making practice, EXPORT continues to write theoretical texts and create art, disentangling body, gender, place, and violence. By repurposing her body as a canvas and cinema screen, EXPORT created a visual language both vulnerable and aggressive.
Brittany Shaw, independent scholar, 2024
NOTE: Opening quote is from VALIE EXPORT – “I Created My Own Identity” | Artist Interview | TateShots, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cNz1NobxI.