‘Artists should break rules,’ says Austrian feminist icon VALIE EXPORT
The trailblazer reflects on fifty years of pushing boundaries and why she’s focused on the future
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‘I don’t want to carry the past into the future,’ the Austrian artist and feminist icon VALIE EXPORT told Art Basel recently. This seems surprising, given her 50-year career and her substantial influence on feminist art history. EXPORT is best known for her explicit performances, in which she used her body as a tool to lift the lid on the inherent moral hypocrisies of the 1960s and beyond. In her 1969 performances of Genitalpanik (Genital Panic), EXPORT walked through the rows of a cinema in Munich, wearing a pair of jeans that had been cut to expose her crotch and seeking direct eye contact with members of the audience. The same performance in a strip club or a bedroom, even in 1960s Bavaria, wouldn’t have created such a stir. But by confronting the viewer with overt female sexuality in a public place dedicated to entertainment and consumption, EXPORT hijacked the parameters of so-called common decency and exposed a double standard still in place today, as comparison with Instagram’s censorship of nipples shows.
However, the artist wouldn’t want Genitalpanik to be recreated: ‘You can’t reenact these pieces, because elements of them, fragments of them, are always directly linked to the times in which they took place. And context is not something you can transport.’ But this doesn’t mean that she thinks the transgressive methods she employed are antiquated. ‘Artists should break rules to develop their practice,’ she says. ‘They have the possibility to create their own set of rules, their own boundaries. They should push these boundaries as far as they can.’
EXPORT’s concept of ‘expanded cinema,’ which emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinarity and using unusual techniques for the times, such as a split screen and the mounting of cameras on door handles, is a good example of this conviction. So is her early commitment to rebranding herself – she was born Waltraud Lehner, in 1940 – to create an artistic identity freed from personal references, which seems especially relevant when today’s preoccupation with identity and individual expression is considered. Yet EXPORT doesn’t appear to revel in this legacy; instead, she prefers to look ahead. ‘There are so many unknown elements in the future, and I am waiting to see what they will be,’ she says enigmatically, adding that she spends a lot of time thinking about what she calls ‘the now.’
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EXPORT has experimented widely with practices and materials. These have included symbolic liquids such as water, milk, and oil for her austere installation Fragmente der Bilder einer Berührung (Fragments of Images of Contingence) (1994); the monumental buildings of Vienna’s Ringstrasse for her performative photo series ‘Körperkonfigurationen’ (‘Body Configurations’), realized in the 1970s and early 1980s; guns for her sculpture KALASHNIKOV (2007); and a laryngoscope – and, once again, her own body – for the voice as performance, act and body (2007), a performance given at that year’s Venice Biennale, during which she filmed her larynx’s movement while reciting a text about the meaning of voice itself. EXPORT is interested in innovation, especially within contemporary art. Indeed, she is ‘very enthusiastic’ about the concept of social media as an artistic practice – she feels that, as with any other medium, those who deal with it should study it in depth. ‘You need to be extremely familiar with your medium before you start expanding it,’ she says .‘Then you will find ways to increase the magnitude of your creative statements.’ This isn’t just a lofty claim: EXPORT doesn’t shy away from discussing the theoretical aspects of her work, such as the differences between transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in her films, or the story told by a medium itself. She does so at length and with ease.
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Now, however, EXPORT’s visionary oeuvre is receiving the attention it deserves, both nationally and internationally. Her gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, hosted exhibitions of her work in its Salzburg and Paris spaces last year; Ropac will also host the artist's first major UK solo show come November in London. In addition, at this year’s Unlimited sector at Art Basel in Basel, the gallery presented the artist’s video work SYNTAGMA (1983), in which a female protagonist keeps encountering her doppelgänger in public and private spaces. It exposed a wide audience to an aspect of EXPORT’s practice that is perhaps, more than any other, essentially experimental. The day after the show opened to the public, EXPORT was awarded the prestigious Roswitha Haftmann-Preis, a Swiss prize given annually since 2001 that rewards a living artist for their outstanding contribution to visual arts with CHF150,000 (about €134,000). She joined an illustrious crowd of previous recipients who include Cindy Sherman, Hans Haacke, Lawrence Weiner, Sigmar Polke, and Rosemarie Trockel. And while she appears cautious about admitting this, EXPORT is feeling a renewed appreciation – including from a generation of younger artists who look up to her. ‘I do notice it, and it is nice, of course. I also see some of my work’s formal elements in younger people’s work. And when the surroundings permit it, I really like to discuss this with them, to share my experiences.’