PHOTO: VALIE EXPORT-The Photographs

Since the late ‘60s, VALIE EXPORT has concentrated on the body in her work, with the intention of challenging – in a society characterized by a false egalitarianism of gender – contradictions, pressures, and violence toward women. In her practice, performance is a means of investigating physical and psychological limits or is used as a device to destabilize sexist ideologies.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fotomuseum Winterthur Archive

“VALIE EXPORT – The Photographs” is the first exhibition to focus on the photographic oeuvre of the artist VALIE EXPORT, whose at times provocative performances and experimental installations have been a source of controversy. The show examines EXPORT’s use of photography as a critical exploration of processes of depiction and representation. At the interface of film, video art, drawing and body art the photographs offer a new perspective on her creative oeuvre. VALIE EXPORT’s multimedia work eludes any simplistic categorisation or definition. As a pioneer of performance art, installation art and video art, EXPORT has consistently broken through the boundaries separating media genres, while using her own body as an artistic medium. Photography has always played a key role in her practice – be it for documentary or experimental purposes, as an element in multimedia installations or as art in its own right. EXPORT has had a constant awareness of the importance of visually recording her performances. Back in 1968 two of her best-known performances, “TAPP und TASTKINO” and the action “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit”, were attended by photographers and filmmakers. For the performance “TAPP und TASTKINO”, a request was put out by megaphone asking spectators and passers-by to touch EXPORT’s breasts, which were covered by a box inspired by a cinema auditorium with a curtain that the artist wore like a garment. Participants had to maintain eye contact with EXPORT for a defined period of time while touching her, with the artist thereby reversing the voyeuristic male gaze, a typical feature of cinema. For “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit”, EXPORT took artist Peter Weibel through the centre of Vienna on a lead, with him crawling on all fours, provocatively drawing attention to the prevailing gender relations and power dynamics by reversing them. Photography was not merely used to make a complete document of EXPORT’s work. Rather, action and photography entered into a dialogue, creating a mutual dependency between them: on the one hand, actions were recorded (and ultimately communicated too) by means of photography; on the other, by virtue of their production, publication and reception – especially of key moments such as the interaction between artist and participants in “TAPP und TASTKINO” and their switch of perspective – EXPORT’s action photos acquired a status that was independent of the performances. EXPORT’s focus on the critical examination of mechanisms of representation dates right back to the start of her career, when she began dealing with the different characteristics of the photographic image and imaging media, questioning the way they worked and subjecting photography to conceptual analysis by lifting the lid on the conditions governing the technical processes of image-making. Deconstructing the photographic gaze and its implicit power structures were of key importance here.  For EXPORT, the critical analysis of systems of representation invariably went hand in hand, in the context of both media and society, with a questioning of the male gaze directed at a body viewed as female. Making reference to her own body, she repeatedly probed the role of the woman, the artist and the subject in patriarchal sociopolitical structures. “Action Pants: Genital Panic” is a set of six identical posters from a larger group that the artist produced to commemorate an action she performed in Munich in 1968. The posters show EXPORT sitting on a bench against a wall out of doors wearing crotchless trousers and a leather shirt and holding a machine-gun. Her feet are bare and vulnerable, as are her genitals, and she holds the gun at chest level, her hair stands up in a wild mop above her head, emphasising the strangeness of the image. The action that gave rise to the photograph “Action Pants: Genital Panic” has become the subject of apocryphal art historical legend. EXPORT performed “Genital Panic” a movie theater in Munich. Wearing trousers from which a triangle had been removed at the crotch, the artist walked between the rows of seated viewers, her exposed genitalia at face-level. The posters were then fly-posted in the streets. “I wanted to be provocative, to provoke, but also aggression was part of my intention…I sought to change the people’s way of seeing and thinking”, the artist has said. In 1970 EXPORT had a garter tattooed on her thigh for “Body Sign Action” to give visible expression to the woman’s status as a sexual object and projection surface for male fantasies. Besides capturing the act of being tattooed, EXPORT also took photographs of the tattoo itself. The work expresses the pain involved – quite literally – in having patriarchal norms inscribed on a body that is seen as female. With her series “Body Configurations” (1972–1982), EXPORT investigates the relationships between the subject and power-political structures through body postures too. She explicitly couches her critique of the processes of depiction and representation in feminist terms: her work centres on the relationship between subject and space, body and gaze, femaleness and representation.

Photo: VALIE EXPORT, Verletzungen I, 1972, Wien – The ESSL Collection, © VALIE EXPORT, 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich, photo: Hermann Hendrich

Info: Curator: Walter Moser, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, Winterthur, Switzerland, Duration: 25/2-29/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotomuseum.ch/