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Valie Export, the Austrian artist and filmmaker who turned men on their faces in provocative, shocking and highly entertaining ways, has died at the age of 85.
The artist’s foundation announced Thursday evening that Export had died in Vienna earlier that day, three days before his 86th birthday.
He is best known for the low-cost performances that swept Austria and Germany in the late 1960s, but he was recognized as an important figure in feminist art by highlighting the importance of the female body.
The most famous was 1968’s Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), in which Export strapped a theater stage to her chest and invited shoppers in downtown Vienna to touch her bare breasts through a small curtain. Fellow artist Peter Weibel encouraged passers-by with a megaphone, timing each “do” with a pause.
The zeal with which he uncovered the power of the ancestors was also reflected in his 1980 exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The name Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), showed an enlarged female belly with legs curled up on a mattress, red neon strip lights coming out of her genitalia, and a TV broadcasting a Catholic mass where the head would be.
“Valie was one of the greatest feminists ever to appear Europe in the second half of the 1900s,” his art expert Thaddaeus Ropac said in his statement: “His death shows the loss of a common sense in modern art, which affected artists in many generations. His pioneering work continues to accelerate.”
Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Export attended a convent school as a child but left at the age of 14 to study at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. She married and had a child before she turned 20, but soon decided to divorce and put her daughter in a temporary place with an older sister to study in Vienna. “I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother,” she he told the Guardian in 2019.
The right to custody of his daughter was temporarily revoked by a judge when he was convicted of pornography in 1970, for collaborating with a Viennese Actionist cartoon.
Export came up with her name in 1967 – a first name taken from her childhood name and a name inspired by a brand of cigarettes called Smart Export – because she didn’t want to be known by her father’s or ex-husband’s names.
In 1968, she founded the Cooperative of Austrian Filmmakers, and participated in many international exhibitions, including Kassel’s documenta in 1977 and 2007, and the 1980 Biennale, where she and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to fill the hall.
His film The Practice of Love, about a journalist who becomes drawn to a crime while investigating a crime scene in Hamburg’s red light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 1985 Berlin Film Festival.
He was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne from 1995 to 2005, and in 2015, Linz opened the Valie Export for media and performance art in a former tobacco factory.
His work was introduced to a new generation in 2005, when Marina Abramović recreated Genital Panic as one of the seven important plays of the 20th century in the exhibition Seven Simple Pieces, at the Guggenheim museum in New York City.
