Important Art by VALIE EXPORT
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.
Seeking to complicate the structures of film and its reception in a work of expanded cinema (briefly defined as the exploration of the possibilities of the medium beyond the projection of a film strip on a screen), EXPORT claimed it as "the first real women's film". She states: "As always, the screening takes place in the dark. Only the movie theatre has become a bit smaller. There's only room inside for two hands. In order to see the film, meaning in this case to sense and feel it, the viewer (user) must guide his or her two hands into the movie theatre by way of the entrance. With that, the curtain, which up till now was raised only for the eyes, is finally raised for both hands too. The tactile reception stands against the deception of voyeurism [...] Tapp und Tastkino is an example for the activation of the audience through new interpretation."
Tapp und Tastkino then, offers a challenge to the patriarchal structures of film and, in art historian Roswitha Mueller's terms, represents "a woman's first step from object to subject." EXPORT's examination of the ways in which the body - especially women's bodies - are rendered passive in film preempts later critiques such as Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) which considers how women on screen are objectified and presented so as to invite a sexualized male gaze. Seeking to complicate the existing understanding of the body in cinema, as well as the presumed hetrosexuality of the gaze, Tapp und Tastkino offers a physical engagement between the viewer/user and the artwork, moving beyond conventional modes of viewing and acting as an early example of EXPORT's feminist challenge to cinema.
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.
The image relates to two performances - Gentialpanik 1 and Genitalpanik 2 which took place on 22nd April 1969 in the Augusta Lichtspiele, an independent cinema in Munich. Wearing her Aktionhose, EXPORT walked through the rows of a movie theater turning to face those seated so that her exposed genitals were at the viewer's eye level in order to create "indirect sexual contact with the audience". Demonstrating her continued and developing interest in the ways in which film invites voyeurism (also seen in Tapp und Tastkino), Genitalpanik 1 and 2 challenged the fear and repression of the female body through this combative gesture. Interrupting the voyeuristic pleasure of looking at the female body with its actual reality, EXPORT intervened into the depiction of passive sexualized women with an active and confrontational female body. This was in the service of reimagining sex in both representation and practice; EXPORT explains that "as long as the citizen remains satisfied with a reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state will be spared a sexual revolution".
In Aktionhose: Gentialpanik, this gesture is both recorded and amplified. The addition of the gun, along with the artist's antagonistic pose and confrontational stare into the camera, registers the artist's aggression against the conventional expectations of the presentation of women and their bodies. That artist's insistent stare seems to issue a challenge to the viewer that demands recognition of not only her own biological reality but also her subjecthood, refusing to conceal her sexuality - literally and figuratively - and at the same time rejecting the passive role that sexualized women are expected to adopt.
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.
This image is related to the artist's name change. Waltraud Höllinger was now VALIE EXPORT, having changed her name as a symbol of her refusal of patriarchal structures, rejecting both her father's and her ex-husband's surnames and instead creating something new. In this photograph, she announces her chosen identity to the current art scene. Through the engagement with everyday objects, SMART EXPORT connects this to the artist's interest in mass media and advertisement. Unlike the apparently affirmative treatment of mass cultural by Pop artists like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, she adopts its language in order to propose something aggressive and challenging, adulterating its appearance in order to transform herself into a brand and a product. However, this is not done as part of an uncritical embrace of capitalism but instead is a challenge, visible in the artist's self-presentation in this image where her pose and facial expression are rebellious and insolent, and her dress and defiant stance which evoke the youth protest movements of the 1960s.