Valie Export (1940)
Austria


Biography :

"A major post-war artist, it is from his name, even before his own body, that VALIE EXPORT poses, in a radical way, the question of sexual identity and of his identity in short. Borrowed from the Smart Export cigarette brand – with a strong virile connotation, like the Gauloises –, she adopted this conceptual logo, written in capital letters, as a pseudonym in 1967. Like other female artists, from Yōko Ono to Niki de Saint Phalle or Martha Rosler, she places her approach within the framework of a gender battle. Her multidisciplinary practice (video, performances, photography, installations, drawings) questions the rules, codes and conventional representations of the female body, which she contributes to deconstruct. This radical emancipation, where subjectivity plays a predominant role, aims to denounce normative images of femininity. In this, she is close to the Austrian writer, Elfriede Jelinek, with whom she has also worked. Since 1973, she has written extensively on contemporary art. In the actionism movement, she became a member of the Institute for Direct Art, founded in 1966 by Günther Brus and Otto Muehl, where she organized an exhibition on the feminist aspects of the Austrian art scene, then she participated in the founding of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative. Two major differences distinguish it from Viennese actionism, with which it has often been associated: on the one hand, its refusal of spectacular violence; on the other hand, his experimental use of media to construct his identity through language and socially mediated rituals.

From 1968, she undertook cinematographic experiments, those of expanding cinema (Abstract film No 1, 1966-1967), then produced urban performances like Tapp und Tast Kino (1968), where her own body becomes the subject and the object of his work. These works inaugurate series that have become iconic, such as Identity Transfer (1968), Body Sign Action (1970), or Body Configurations (1972-1976), conceptual photos or performance videos, where the artist uses his body to render the visible alienation and become “a means of exploring social reality”. This approach compared it, in the 1970s, to body art. It was in 1969 that the famous performance took place in a porn cinema in Munich, from which the poster Aktionhose, Genitalpanik was born. Moving away from feminist actionism, VALIE EXPORT develops a protean work, often conceptual, whose activism diminishes in its later works. From the 1990s, she pursued less radical work, which used videos and interactive experimental installations. What concerns “video sculpture” or video installations deconstructs, on the one hand, the language specific to this medium and to photography, and, on the other, the concepts of author and identity. She thus develops the notion of pathos by applying psychological qualities to expressive postures of the body. In a performance broadcast simultaneously on a video screen (The Pain of Utopia, 2007), she delivers her glottis and vocal cords to the introspection of a camera, even as she strives to pronounce a text on breath and voice, to explore the close links between body and language. More recently, his work is aligned with international policies, particularly since the Iraq War; Kalashnikov (2007) is a work that can be seen as a critique of the status of increasingly violent images circulating on the Internet. VALIE EXPORT was notably exhibited at the Moscow and Venice Biennales (2007), as well as at the Belvédère Museum in Vienna (Time and Countertime, “temps et contretemps”, 2010). " Claire Béret, Excerpt from the Universal Dictionary of Designers , 2013. (Source, website, Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions)

Works :
lien
Country