Location and Dislocation: The Media Performances of VALIE EXPORT

Abstract

PAJ 99 (2011), pp. 53–59.  53 How can an artist who became famous for one or two radical performances in the 1960s frame an oeuvre of more than forty years that ranges from live actions to films, media installations, and ultimately monuments? Riding on the subway in urban Vienna, we pass a construction site that gives way to the back side of a residential house: on its grey wall, we see the blown-up photograph of a standing woman with a machine gun, a triangle cut out of her pants around the crotch. It is the defining image of Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, the image that stands for her infamous action Genital Panic, which Marina Abramovic recently reconstructed at the Guggenheim Museum. The choice of this image as poster for her retrospective at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, Time and Countertime (Zeit und Gegenzeit) asks us to see EXPORT as aggressive feminist performer, disrupting male hegemony in the most public ways possible. The retrospective stretches across public space, opening simultaneously in two geographically distinct venues: the other part of the show was in the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, a city two hours’ drive west of Vienna, where the artist was born in 1940. In Linz, the poster differs, evoking related but subtler issues. Printed in black and yellow, we see EXPORT in the mid-70s, jumping through the air in a nightgown, mobilizing her own body in space—but not without an awareness of the cultural and erotic implications of making a public appearance in a costume representing the epitome of bourgeois privacy. EXPORT has, all this time, been exploring the constitution of subjects in public and private space. The ongoing nature of this investigation allows the spectator to see EXPORT’s whole oeuvre, with its sharp turns from performance to photography to film to digitally modified imagery, as an intellectually consistent undertaking. Location and disLocation The Media Performances of VaLiE EXPoRt