VALIE EXPORT
Austrian Photographer, Filmmaker, and Performance Artist
Movements and Styles: Feminist Art, Body Art, Video Art, Viennese Actionism
Born: May 17, 1940 - Linz, Austria
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"Art is a synthesis, a connection of perception, imagination, and idioms into a kind of knowledge always to be seen in its social, scientific, and technological relation. Knowledge: seizing of an object by a subject in a world of variable condition."
Summary of VALIE EXPORT
VALIE EXPORT's work is expressly political, questioning the ways in which society functions, and particularly how women are perceived and treated. She is recognized as one of the most important early feminist artists, who reconsiders the ways in which the body is presented and challenges its representation as passive in conventional film and media, offering complex and challenging depictions of women's experience. Developing her practice during the 1960s in an Austria that was still coming to terms with its role in the Second World War, and influenced by Viennese Actionism, her early work consisted of performances in which she challenged public audiences with sexualized actions that asked them to examine women's experience, with a focus on the ways in which their bodies were subject to the male gaze in cinema. She explored these ideas in a range of mediums, taking an approach that encompassed different styles and techniques in her practice and writing texts that outlined the importance of feminism in art and film. Over her long career she has continued to make work about gender and society and to teach on avant-garde practice and its relationship to political work.
Key Ideas
From an early age, VALIE EXPORT was attuned to the social injustices around her and particularly to gender inequality. She recalls noticing that "something was really not right, that boys were allowed to do so much more than girls." Raised amongst women, she was born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Austria and lived with her mother, a teacher, and her three sisters (her father had died in combat in Africa fighting in the Second World War for the Nazis when she was an infant). As a young child she was raised religious and studied in a convent school until she turned 14. Entering adulthood in a resurgent Europe that was still in the process of restructuring itself in the aftermath of war and nationalism, but was also marked by a youth movement in which people were beginning to explore new ways of thinking about society, EXPORT became interested in issues of justice particularly as they related to gender and turned to art as a means to express these.
Important Art by VALIE EXPORT | |
 Artwork Images | Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema) (1968)Artwork description & Analysis: Walking in the street during a film festival in Vienna, EXPORT wore a styrofoam box extending roughly six inches from her body, a hole cut out of the front with a curtain covering it, resembling the architecture of a movie theater. Moving through the crowd, EXPORT invited passersby to put their hands under the curtain and touch her naked breasts, denying them the more conventional visual experience of the erotically charged gaze at the sexualised female form, and instead offering the experience of touch in order to critique the ways in which women's bodies were shown in cinema. Performance; Video, 1.08 minutes - Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
 Artwork Images | Aktionhose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) (1969)Artwork description & Analysis: Aktionhose: Genitalpanik is possibly VALIE EXPORT's most notorious work. This silkscreened poster shows the artist sitting in her 1968 Aktionhose (Action pants) - a pair of Mustang jeans that had their crotch cut away so that the artist's genitals would be visible when wearing them - with legs open and hair messed up to frame her face, she holds a machine gun and stares out at the viewer. Stamped with the words VALIE EXPORT in what looks like an official endorsement of the image, the poster registers a distinctly female aggression that unashamedly pictures women's sexuality as part of a revolutionary posture. Screenprint - Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
 Artwork Images | SMART EXPORT (1970)Artwork description & Analysis: SMART EXPORT is a photograph in which the artist replaces the branding on a pack of cigarettes with her own image and logo. The pack of Smart Export cigarettes, an Austrian brand associated with working class men, is altered by the artist: the brand "Smart", written in curling cursive, is replaced with "VALIE" written in capital letters; a map of Europe is overlaid with a picture of EXPORT's face. The photograph shows EXPORT holding the packet at arm's length, presenting it to the camera defiantly. She stands in the background of the image with a cigarette held in her mouth, one hand on her hip and staring back at the viewer. Gelatin silver print - Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
More VALIE EXPORT Artwork and Analysis:
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Content compiled and written by Vitoria Hadba-Groom
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Vitoria Hadba-Groom
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 16 Jul 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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