Educated in a convent until the age of 14, the pioneering feminist artist VALIE EXPORT would spend her life removing the shackles of her religious upbringing. “My artworks are still a rebel against the Catholic faith,” she said in an interview in 2019.

Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria in 1940, she was higher known by her nickname ‘Walie’. In 1967, she renounced her father’s and her ex-husband’s names to forge a recent identity – VALIE EXPORT. The one woman artist among the many Vienna Group of motion artists within the Nineteen Sixties, EXPORT created the notion of ‘Expanded Cinema’, a form of interactive performance by which she typically used her own body as subject and object. Aligned with the emerging feminist movement of the Seventies, she was one in every of the primary female artists to critically examine representations of girls in mass media to challenge and poke fun on the sexual politics of the day.

In celebration of her profession spanning greater than half a century, VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, is the primary exhibition to give attention to her photographic oeuvre. Curated by Walter Moser, the show considers her use of photography as a way to interrogate types of representation, bringing into sharp focus her avant-garde agenda. 

Below, we revisit vital moments within the life and work of VALIE EXPORT.

SHE WALKED THE STREETS, INVITING STRANGERS TO TOUCH HER BREASTS IN A MAKESHIFT CINEMA

Between 1968 and 1971, EXPORT enacted one in every of her most influential and scandalous performance works, “TAPP und TASTKINO (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA)”. Encapsulating her concept of expanded cinema, the performance involved the artist walking the streets of 10 European cities wearing a makeshift Styrofoam ‘movie theatre’, by which curtains might be drawn to reveal her bare breasts beneath. By difficult the general public to interact with an actual woman – moderately than on a screen – and coaxing pedestrians to achieve contained in the box and fondle her chest, EXPORT satirised and reversed the traditional functions of cinema. Not could the feminine body be voyeuristically consumed by passive spectators within the obscurity of a dark room. The artist’s provocative mobile cinema – by which the body and screen turn out to be one – accentuated and inverted the very act of looking. Chatting with Dazed, the show’s curator Walter Moser adds: “The artist shows the objectification of girls in mass media: the participant can literally ‘grasp’ and experience what his gaze normally desires to ‘touc’’ in cinema.”

SHE CHALLENGED THE STEREOTYPE OF DOCILE FEMINITY WITH PROVOCATIVE GENITAL-EXPOSING TROUSERS 

In Munich 1968, EXPORT took her subversive performances one step further with “Motion Pants: Genital Panic”, which is taken into account to be her signature work and nods towards the strategies of avant-garde movements similar to Fluxus, the situationists and, in fact, Viennese actionism. Wearing crotchless trousers that exposed her genitalia and pubic hair, the artist walked through an art cinema, winding her way through rows of seated viewers – genitals exposed at face level. 

On this grainy photograph taken by Peter Hassmann, the artist will be seen in her infamous crotchless trousers holding a machine gun. “The inclusion of a machine gun on this work is an element of a thought-through self-staging process that goals to undermine female stereotypes and to recode images of girls – the weapon and the fetishistic relationship to it, are traditionally male connotated and belong to the male sphere in classical interpretations,” explains Moser. “Along with the spread legs, the cut-out jeans, the direct gaze into the camera, the phallic machine gun will be understood as a provocative ‘attack’ on patriarchal society and its images of girls.” 

SHE LEAD A HIGH-PROFILE MALE ARTIST AROUND ON A DOG’S LEASH 

On this legendary performance, EXPORT led the conceptual artist and curator Peter Weibel on a leash through Vienna. Crawling behind her on all fours like a dog, Weibel and EXPORT travelled the town’s busy Kärntner Strasse to the shock of onlookers. Because the curator Moser explains, this performance reversed “traditional gender power relations and exposed gender roles – in a traditional approach males have a superior advantage over females.”

Yet, then again, there are other layers of meaning: “The ‘doggish’ behaviour may also be interpreted as the results of the ability – and repression mechanisms of the conservative and patriarchal post-war society in Austria on the time,” Moser adds. Speaking in regards to the work, Weibel also emphasised its broader critique of structural power: “Here the convention of humanising animals in cartoons is turned around and transferred into reality: Man is animalised – the critique of society as a state of nature.”

SHE HAD A SYMBOL OF FETISHISED FEMINITY TATTOOED ON HER BODY IN AN ACT OF DEFIANCE

In 1970, EXPORT had a garter tattooed on her thigh in front of a public audience in Frankfurt. On this photograph, she hoists up her belted dress and stares out on the viewer defiantly, as she reveals the tattoo on her upper left leg. Designed in order that the garter isn’t attached at the highest – and only attached to a sliver of stocking at the underside – it creates the illusion of being suspended on the leg. An emblem evoking fetishised femininity and male fantasy, the act of tattooing a garter permanently onto her skin satirically subverted the sexual connotations of the garment itself.

The act of self-branding expresses the pain involved – quite literally – in having patriarchal norms inscribed on a female body. In her own words, EXPORT explained the symbolism of the tattoo: “The feminine body peels off and discards the imprint of a world which has never been a lady’s world, with a view to arrive at a human world by which women can autonomously define their existence.”

SHE DEFIED THE PATRIARCHY BY REJECTING HER INHERITED SURNAME AND TAKING A NEW NEW INSPIRED BY A BRAND OF CIGARETTES

In 1970, the artist modified her name to adopt the daring [and always emboldened] alias VALIE EXPORT. Inspired by the branding of Smart Export cigarettes, she was drawn to the word ‘export’, which signified her departure from gendered and artistic norms. An Austrian brand related to working-class men, on this photograph, the text Smart Export cigarettes is replaced with “VALIE” written in capital letters and a map of Europe is overlaid with an image of the artist’s face. She holds the packet at arm’s length, which she presents to the camera defiantly, a cigarette clasped between her lips.

Born as Waltraud Lehner, and later Waltraud Höllinger after marriage, the name change symbolised her refusal to participate in patriarchal structures. In her own words, she explained: “VALIE EXPORT is a registered and guarded name, similar to Coca-Cola. The concept of the stamp got here just a little later. Changing my name was an absolute necessity to oppose the principles, the daddy’s name, the husband’s name, to free myself from all this stuff. I conceived it as an act of rebel.” 

SHE TRANSFORMED HER BODY INTO A SCULPTURAL TOOL 

Between 1972 and 1976, EXPORT created a body of labor generally known as Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations), for which she used her body as a measuring and pointing device in public spaces – almost transforming her body right into a sculptural tool. Her peculiar actions were also designed to defy the conformist culture in Austria in the course of the post-war period.

Chatting with Dazed, Moser says: “For me personally, the Body Configurations belong to EXPORT’s most discursive and visually stunning group of works. EXPORT considers the general public space as a manifestation of social-political relations and patriarchal structures which regulate the body and one’s behaviour. The positioning of her own body – but in addition that of a model – in the town, is a public intervention and private appropriation of public space. The body postures on the one hand express inner psychic states and then again try and examine the connection between the body and its surroundings.”

SHE IMPELLED WOMEN TO SPEAK OUT AND SELF-DEFINE THEIR OWN IMAGE

Referring to the medical condition of asemia – being unable to speak with the outer world through words or gesture, in addition to the lack of ability to grasp or express signs or symbols – this performance took place in 1973. In keeping with Moser, it served “as a place to begin to reveal the absence of communication women face in consequence of the oppression of society. In her performance, the artist repeatedly shows this through symbolically charged materials. For instance, she pours hot wax over her hands and feet and thus transforms right into a lifeless sculpture.”

It’s not coincidental that EXPORT created Asemie a 12 months after publishing her manifesto Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972), by which she advocated for girls to “speak in order that they’ll find themselves, that is what I ask for with a view to achieve a self-defined image of ourselves and thus a unique view of the social function of girls.” 

VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs is running at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, until May 29 2023.

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