From men on the dog leads to cheating in society, the art of Valie Export wanted a complete feminization | Art

Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny, Valie Export was a hero to many women. Beginning in the 1960s, they were fueled by the radical belief that art and media would play an important role in women’s emancipation: that women should capture their reality in the name of social progress. In Feminist Art: A Manifesto (1972), wrote that women should “use art as a means of expression, in order to understand all of us”. What they wanted was a revolution.

I return to his work. I can’t stay away. I’ve written about her in relation to violence in women’s art. His work was fraught with fear and obvious pain, and he displayed the violence of forcing women’s bodies into homes he had not prepared. For the 1973 performance Hyperbuliashe climbed naked through a corridor of electric wires, exposing himself to shock.

He allowed me to use his 1976 collage The Birth Madonna for the cover of my book Systems of Nature. Showing a Renaissance Madonna-like woman sitting on a dryer spitting out a bloody towel is still shocking. I wrote about the two challenges that Export faced as a mother: from the Catholic Church on the one hand, and a new group of consumers on the other.

I recently wrote about sex and power, and the 1968 performance From the Portfolio of Doggednesswhere he leads Peter Weibel crawling through the streets of Vienna with a guide dog. Weibel was wearing a business suit, which confused the people walking around him. The export is dead, although you can see a hidden smile. As I discovered in 2019, when I asked The Guardianhe really had a happy heart.

Export was very vocal about his work and the ideas behind it. He’s also candid about how he came up with the boldness of his early writing: “Marriage, the Christian church, and the culture of Vienna at the time – the Nazi empire that was in place – all influenced the work I wanted to do,” he told me.

His father died in the war, and he was sent to a convent together with his two sisters while their mother was a primary school teacher. The first of his expulsions happened when he was 10 years old when he was found searching a nun’s house. His childhood experiences were constraining – having little control over his life. He longed for the self-control that seemed like a grown man. At the age of 18, he ran away from his mother’s home to get married. Within a year she had a daughter, but the vision of freedom that marriage provided turned into a trap. “I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother.” She filed for divorce, left her daughter in the temporary care of her sister, and moved to Vienna to study.

Through the few options available – being a woman, being a mother, using household income, or the life of a disgraced divorcee who is suspected of having sex – she realized that she had a world that was not built to meet her needs. That instead she was living in a society that said her body was there to enjoy sex, to give birth and raise children, to nurture and nurture. In 1967, at the age of 27, she changed her married name Waltraud Höllinger to VALIE EXPORT. The cigarette brand drama, written in capital letters, was a definite rejection of the patriarchal design. She would not be known by her father’s name, or her ex-husband’s name.

His work was designed to explode the tools that he had – in films, in art and in many groups. In Active Pants: Fear of Publicity (1969) walked the lines of the Munich cinema with its flamboyant figures and the faces of acrobats, and plastered the walls of Vienna with its posters in unrolled trousers while holding a gun. For Tap and Touch Cinema in 1968, she performed in a box strapped to her chest, with people on the street invited to reach into the dark and touch her breasts as they looked at them. The transcripts of the show show a strong dynamic between Export and the men who accept the call. It was very confusing and confusing.

I pity him very selfishly: there were many things I wanted to ask him. Having survived years when women’s art was derided and ignored, she had a lot to tell us. Like an idiot, I kept postponing the scheduled interview. Now the time is up.

Her 1972 manifesto explained how a revolution led by women’s creativity could lead to radical social change. It concludes by saying the importance of documenting and honoring the lives and works of those who came before, as we should do to him. “The future of women will be the history of women.”