Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85 | Austria
Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and filmmaker who inverted the male gaze in provocative, shocking and often wildly entertaining ways, has died at the age of 85.
The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export had died in Vienna earlier that day, three days before his 86th birthday.
She is known for her scandalous low-budget performances in Austria and Germany in the late 1960s, but have since been recognized as milestones in feminist art for exposing the objectification of the female body.
The most famous of these was 1968’s Tapp und Tastkino (Touch and Touch Cinema), in which Export straps a model theater stage to her chest and invites shoppers in downtown Vienna to touch her bare breasts from behind a small curtain. His artist colleague Peter Weibel gathered passers-by through a megaphone and timed each “action” with a stopwatch.
His zeal for exposing patriarchal power structures was also demonstrated in the centerpiece of his exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Official Geburtenbett (Birth Bed) showed a large female belly with bow legs on a mattress, red neon strip lights streaming from her vagina, and a TV broadcasting a Catholic mass where the head would be.
“Valie was one of the most forward-thinking feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century,” her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac said in a statement. “His passing marks the loss of a singular perspective in contemporary art that influenced generations of artists. His pioneering work continues to assume great urgency.”
Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz in 1940, Export attended a convent school in his childhood but left at 14 to study at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. She married and had a child before she was 20, but soon decided to divorce and place her daughter in temporary care with her older sister to study in Vienna. “I thought: Being married and a mother is not my life,” she told the Guardian in 2019.
His daughter’s custody rights were temporarily withdrawn by a judge in 1970 after he was convicted on pornography charges for co-editing a book on Viennese Actionist art.
Export found its nickname in 1967; She took this nickname from her childhood nickname and her surname, inspired by a cigarette brand called Smart Export, because she did not want to be associated with the name of either her father or her ex-husband.
She co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers’ Cooperative in 1968 and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Kassel documentary in 1977 and 2007, and the 1980 Biennale, where she and Maria Lassnig were the first female artists to fill the Austrian pavilion.
His feature film The Practice of Love, about a reporter who becomes embroiled in a crime case while investigating peep shows in Hamburg’s red light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 1985 Berlin film festival.
From 1995 to 2005 he was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and in 2015 he opened a Valie Export center for media and performance art in a former tobacco factory, Linz.
His work was introduced to a new generation in 2005, when Marina Abramović revived Genital Panic as one of the seven important performances of the 20th century in her show Seven Easy Pieces at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
