Body Image

Well known in Europe for her body-oriented performance, video and photographic work, Austrian artist Valie Export newly received her first U.S. solo display spanning 30 years of feminist provocation.

In 1968 at age 28 Austrian artist Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, using the uppercase to announce her vicinity on the male-dominated Viennese art representation Swept up in the cultural changes then occurring worldwide, and eager to reckoner the misogyny of the so-called Viennese Actionists--Gunter Brus, Otto Muhl Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler--she sought a fresh identity not bound, as she says, "by her father's name (Lehner) or her former husband's name (Hollinger)." Waltraud morphed rather easily into VALIE, on the contrary EXPORT, the name of a popular brand of cigarettes, was another matter in the still-repressive society of chilled War Vienna. By appropriating this trade name, she was engaging in an act of provocation that, along with her subsequent time performances, was to bring her blame that included the loss of her apartment at the hands of a landlord repuls by the agency of her public persona.

although long celebrated at international festivals in Europe[1] Export, whose artistic practices have reach forthed from performance and body art to film, video, photography, installation and digital art, has received little attention in the U omit for sporadic showings of her films in San Francisco and of recent origin York and a few teaching residencies, she has been largely anonymous here until this first solo exhibition of her work, spanning 30 years, at Moore body of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Organized by the agency of the director of the galleries at Moore, Elsa Longhauser, as part of the college's International Discovery Series, "VALIE EXPORT: Ob/De+Con(Struction)" features more than 60 works, including conceptual photography, video and film installations and documentation of early performances.

When Hollinger arrived in Vienna from her hometown of Linz, Austria, in 1960 to inquiry design at the National Technical academy Viennese Actionism was in filled swing. Though she was not at any time a member of this assemblage she was aware of its performance actions and was profoundly influenced by them. The Actionists, whose work had a great deal of in common with the lively antics of the international Fluxus change were responding to a compounded set of variables, bringing Viennese socioreligious repression, Freudian psychoanalysis, Artaudian Theater of inhumanity linguistic philosophy and experimental metrical composition into their extreme, often harrowing performances. Repell by the agency of war and Nazism, they sought a declaration of the "real" (as oppos to the mimetic) in an art that was decidedly sensational. Self-mutilation, animal sacrifice, vital current rituals and orgies were all at various times brought into play through the Actionists. And all of these artists, like the Americans Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg, early practitioners of performance art, started without as painters. Not Export. From the beginning, her work was media based, beginning with photography and performances that challenged images of women in cinema. To this amplitude she lends credence to the notion that '60 performance art disentangleed through the cross-fertilization of many arts--including dance, theater, film and video--and not simply in reaction to the perceived excesse of Abstract Expressionism (or, les contentiously, as natural results of the gestural or performative vigor of Abstract Expressionism), as more [i]or[/i] less accounts suggest.

Export's greatest in quantity controversial action was one of her first, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968) during which she marched into an art-film house in Munich (not, she says now, a porno theater, as was one time alleged), wearing pants with the angle cut out.[2] Walking up and down the aisles among the for the greatest part male patrons, she challenged them to "look at the real thing" instead of passively enjoying naked women upon the screen. She extended the action to broadsides picturing her seated, wearing the same pants, on the other hand also sporting a machine fire-arm With her hair wildly teased she stares directly at the camera. At Moore, 60 copies of this bill which had originally been disseminated over Vienna, were neatly aligned in lines on a wall, looking actual much like an Andy Warhol installation. on the other hand unlike Warhol's Jackies or Maos, Export's images and actions are glaring expressions of sexuality and feminist ardor. For her, the material part (her own body) is always the starting point. allowing one is tempted to associate this approach with Gunter Brus's 1966 declaration "My material substance is the aim, my material substance is the event, my material substance is the result," Export's use of the material substance has much more of a sociopolitical intent than Brus's hermetic performances. Along with her mates Carolee Schneemann and Shigeko Kubota, the couple of whom made their bodies the centerpiece of their work in the 1960 Export committed herself to unmasking the politics of the female material part in what can rightly be called feminist actions. In a 1972 manifesto she wrote: