Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export has died at the age of 85. Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny — she was a hero to many women. Since the 1960s, she was driven by a fierce conviction that art and media would play an essential role in women's liberation: that women must picture their own reality in the name of social progress. In her 1972 manifesto, Women's Art: A Manifesto, she wrote that women must "use art as a means of expression, so as to influence the consciousness of all of us." What she demanded was revolution.
Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain, making evident the violence of forcing women's bodies to inhabit structures that were not designed for them. In the 1973 performance Hyperbulia, she crept naked through a corridor of electrified wires, exposing herself voluntarily to shocks.
Early Life and Influences
Export spoke with tremendous clarity about her work and the ideas underpinning it. She was forthright about the circumstances in which she produced her explosively bold early works: "Marriage, the Christian church, and the traditional side of Vienna at the time – this fossilised Nazi realm – all this influenced the work I wanted to do," she told an interviewer in 2019.
Her father died during the war, and she was sent to a convent with her two sisters while their mother worked as a primary school teacher. The first of her many expulsions came at age 10 when she was discovered exploring the nuns' living quarters. Her experience of girlhood was of constraint — of having little or no control over her own life. She longed for the self-determination that adulthood seemed to offer. At 18, she escaped her maternal home by getting married. Within a year she had a daughter, but the vision of independence offered by matrimony turned out to be a trap. "I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother." She applied for a divorce, left her daughter in the temporary care of her sister, and moved to Vienna to study.
Through the limited options available — wifehood, motherhood, compliant domestic consumerism, or the life of a scandalous divorcee assumed to be sexually available — she came to understand she occupied a world that was not constructed for her needs. Instead, she lived in a society that dictated that her body was available for sexual pleasure, for the bearing and raising of children, for caregiving and nurture. In 1967, aged 27, she swapped her married name Waltraud Höllinger for the moniker VALIE EXPORT. A play on a cigarette brand, written in capital letters, it was a decisive rejection of patriarchal structures. She would be known neither by her father's name nor by her ex-husband's.
Groundbreaking Performances
Her work was intended to explode the structures containing her — in cinema, in art and in the wider society. In Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), she walked along the rows of a Munich art cinema with her exposed pubic region level with punters' faces, and plastered the walls of Vienna with posters of herself in crotchless trousers holding a gun. For Tap and Touch Cinema in 1968, she constructed a theatre in a box strapped to her chest, with people on the street invited to reach into the darkness and touch her breasts while she watched them. Documentary footage of the performance exposes the shifting power dynamic between Export and the men who accept the invitation. It was brilliantly subversive and unsettling.
In the 1968 performance From the Portfolio of Doggedness, she led Peter Weibel crawling through the streets of Vienna by a dog lead. Weibel was dressed in a business suit, a disturbing echo of the commuters milling around him. Export is deadpan, though a barely concealed smile can be spotted. As discovered in a 2019 interview, she certainly had a sense of fun.
Her 1976 photocollage The Birth Madonna, showing a woman positioned like a Renaissance Madonna seated on a drying machine from which spews a bloody towel, still provokes shock. She allowed the use of this image for the cover of a book on women's art, and it captures the twin pressures Export experienced as a mother: from the Catholic church on one side and the new consumer society on the other.
Legacy and Grief
I keep returning to her work. I have written about her in relation to violence in women's art. Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain. I grieve her in the most selfish way: there were so many things I wanted to ask her about. Having survived decades in which women's art was marginalised and ignored, she had so much to tell us. Like a fool, I kept delaying a planned interview. Now it's too late.
Her 1972 manifesto described how the spark kindled by women's art might ignite far-reaching social change. It concludes by stating the importance of documenting and honouring the life and work of those who had come before, as we must now do hers. "The future of women will be the history of woman."
