Valie Export Research Articles

Finding the conditio muliebris in Postmodernism: Mimetic exploration and aesthetic understanding of female nature


 
 
 The paper addresses the exploration of women’s nature, intended as a peculiar conditio muliebris, focussing on woman artists that reflected on the female body with Postmodernist artistic means. Starting with an analysis of the theoretical propositions of Art Feminism practitioners such as Lucy Lippard, Valie Export, and Mary Kelly, who highlight the alterity of female nature and, thus, of woman’s art, the paper later discusses three art installations addressing bodily explorations by woman artists belonging to different generations: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973- 79), Mona Hatoum’s Corps étrangers (1994), and Sondra Perry’s Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon coming on (2016). The paper argues that these installations substantiate the mentioned theoretical propositions and form a thread of bodily awareness that allows woman artists and the wider public to ascertain female nature by means of a fully aesthetic mimesis. The relationship between art and nature thus becomes one of mimetic exploration of the female body that leads to the acknowledgment of a gender-specific corporal feeling.
 
 

On Peter Weibel

Abstract He was always the youngest in the group. In 1966, the core participants in what he—with Valie Export—would later dub “Viennese Actionism” applied for government funding to attend the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. The group sent him, just twenty-two years old, to the ministry to argue their case. He remained their go-to spokesperson. On June 7, 1968, at the Kunst und Revolution event in Lecture Hall 1 of the University of Vienna, it was he who introduced the wild proceedings with an “Inflammatory Speech,” his raised right asbestos-gloved hand in flames. Ending quickly in a cry of pain—kerosene on his naked forearm caught fire—his oration, titled (after Lenin's pamphlet) “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” gave way to the more scandalous, though perhaps less cunning, actions of his older comrades. Otto Muehl, a “former middle- school teacher,” as one “memory protocol” described him, screamed obscenities while whipping a bandaged man until he bled. Gunter Brus, after undressing onstage, cut himself and (again the protocol) “masturbated for about 20 minutes” before shitting and pissing in the audience's direction. Oswald Wiener, his speech drowned out onstage by grunting, was falsely heard to say that the shitting should move from the lecture hall to St. Stephen's Cathedral, the city's holy of holies. Meanwhile he, the event's “inflammatory” opening speaker, was the only actual student to address the Austrian Socialist Students’ Union (the hapless host of Vienna's infamous “hot quarter-hour”), and he had come well equipped. He brought with him a water bucket to extinguish his burning glove and wore safety goggles to protect his eyes against flames and, as things turned out, against blood, excrement, and urine. When he died this year, just four days short of his seventy-ninth birthday, Peter Weibel seemed perennially youthful. He had led the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for almost a quarter century, indefinitely postponing his retirement by mounting art exhibitions—sometimes as many as seven in one year—that reshaped the definition of art exhibitions. It was Weibel, earlier and more consistently than anyone, who gave museological form to our posthuman, postmedium, anthropocenic condition. Sprawling, experimental, and provisory, these exhibitions yielded mighty catalogues: about surveillance, futurity, and digital art, about forgotten contemporaries (like Vilém Flusser) and emergent stars (Weibel was early in celebrating William Kentridge and Olafur Eliasson). Of these many shows, the four co-curated with Bruno Latour, who passed away five months before Weibel, were the most significant. Weibel and Latour called them Gedankenausstellungen (“thought exhibitions”). With challenging titles like “Making Things Public,” “Reset Modernity,” and “Critical Zones” and conceptual in what they displayed and how, they blurred the lines between science and art, gallery space and laboratory, aesthetic object and political debate while remaining fun to visit and popularly appealing.

Les hétérotopies perturbatrices

Since Menstruationsfilm (1966-67), the pivotal work of Valie Export, many contemporary artistic creations highlight the menstrual value of “gendered blood,” to use the term of Mary Jane Lupton in Menstruation and Psychoanalysis (1993: 3). In the form of painting, performance, installation and video, these creations apply “menstrual blood” in a feminist context, as was the case with the first works made with this type of blood. This article will focus on the crucial link between these works and the concept of heterotopia. On the one hand, we will show in what sense these works can constitute heterotopias and/or how they integrate this concept of by their subversive dimension. On the other hand, we will seek to understand how these works contribute to the extension of heterotopias, both in mental spaces, than in those of the real in our time

Expanded Cinema, Recycled Cinema

VALIE EXPORT and Agnès Varda both made moving-image installations about ping pong (EXPORT’s 1968 Ping Pong and Varda’s 2006 “Ping Pong, Tong, et Camping”), a subject each returned to on multiple occasions in subsequent works across different media forms. Apprehending ping pong as a cinematic thing and gesture, this essay considers how EXPORT and Varda, each in her own way, unsettle and expand the rules of the game in ways shaped by their distinct, and distinctly feminist, politics. This essay explores these works and the artists’ repeated returns to ping pong by staging a “volley,” alternating between different scenes and iterations across Europe and the US, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Additional works discussed include EXPORT’s 1980s television documentary on avant-garde film, The Armed Eye, and Varda’s final two documentaries, Faces Places (2017) and Varda by Agnès (2019).

An austrian avant-garde ed. by Patrick Greaney and Sabine Zelger

Reviewed by: an austrian avant-garde ed. by Patrick Greaney and Sabine Zelger Helga Mitterbauer Patrick Greaney and Sabine Zelger, eds., an austrian avant-garde. Translated by Patrick Greaney with additional translations by Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts. Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2020. 352 pp. The volume an austrian avant-garde, edited by Patrick Greaney, who also translated the German literary texts into English and teaches at the German studies program of the University of Colorado Boulder, and Sabine Zelger, who teaches German pedagogy at the Hochschule Vienna/Krems, definitely offers a fresh view on its subject. By using the indefinite article "a," the two editors mark their "distance from attempts to identify […] with a single understanding of avant-garde practices" (16). This opens the field in several directions: in time, as the volume covers a period from the 1950s until today; in writers represented and in genre, by reaching far beyond prose; and in giving up the claim to be "on the forefront" of a new trend—usually considered inherent in the definition of avant-garde. By emphasizing the conflicting potential of the idea, the editors attempt to include a wider range of writers and emphasize the role exclusion plays in constituting the avant-garde. Given this, the title of the introduction, "Everything Can Also Be Called Something Else," can be read as a programmatic guideline for the arrangement of the texts. An extremely open conceptualization of avant-garde such as this and the lack of a clear definition of the term may disappoint some readers. However, it is very important that a volume like this has been published: [End Page 174] First of all, it gives insight into a field of Austrian literature that is definitely worth reading. Editing an English volume of texts that are often hermetic and challenging for every translator has to be recognized as very meritorious. The choice of texts integrated in the publication is also striking: Greaney and Zelger have chosen a feminist approach to the Austrian avant-garde that is usually connected with the Vienna group around Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener. Aside from all the credit they deserve for their anti-conservative transcending of Austrian postwar literature, which was still being written within the frame of Nazi aesthetics, this group is also notorious for its misogynistic attitude toward the production of female writers and artists. Well-known remarks by Elfriede Gerstl, Friederike Mayröcker, VALIE EXPORT, and others bear witness that women were only accepted at their tables in the Viennese cafés as long they remained silent. By focusing on "Another Avant-garde," Greaney and Zelger shine a light exactly on Austrian female writers of the avant-garde who are still underrated. This statement concerns the generation of Ilse Aichinger, Gerstl, and Mayröcker as well as the following generation with Margret Kreidl and Ilse Kilic and the even younger one featuring Ann Cotten, Kathrin Röggla, and Lisa Spalt. A volume on Austrian avant-garde with a feminist approach would certainly not be complete without a contribution by Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek. Her play After Nora (2013) completes a triumvirate of outspoken feminist texts. While Jelinek's play criticizes the capitalization of fashion, Margret Kreidl's "dramolett" (a term of Jelinek's) Ladies' Program (2005), denouncing the social pressure put on women, demonstrates the great poetic strength of this Viennese writer. Although the editors emphasize their feminist approach, the volume is well balanced for texts written by female and by male writers: with the exception of Oswald Wiener, examples by all members of the Vienna Group can be found in the volume; texts penned by Heimrad Bäcker—whose journal and edition neue texte served as an important vehicle for publication by avantgarde writers in the 1970s and 1980s—and by Andreas Okopenko (one of the authors orbiting around the Vienna Group) are also integrated in the volume. Further, we find an excerpt from Herbert J. Wimmer's volume Membran reflecting on the loss of his long-term companion Elfriede Gerstl, with whom he co-authored books as well as their cards. An important discovery are the computer-generated...

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

El género en combate: Las estrategias del cuerpo en las primeras performances de Valie Export

Este artículo propone rescatar, reivindicar y analizar los primeros trabajos de la artista Valie Export (Linz, 1940) llevados a cabo durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Además de su indiscutible calidad artística y trascendencia política, la importancia de estas primeras performances de EXPORT radica en la inteligencia y originalidad con que la creadora supo traducir al campo artístico los principios ideológicos de la lucha feminista del momento. Será precisamente en esta época, cuando brota con fuerza un arte producido por mujeres que denuncia con valentía los desmanes de una sociedad abiertamente machista. Dentro de este colectivo de artistas, la obra de EXPORT mantiene una personalidad destacada, revelándose como una de las poéticas más inteligentes e influyentes de su tiempo.

„Да бъдеш свободен през 1968 означава да вземеш участие“. Aкцията “Tap and Touch Cinema” на Вали Експорт и идеите на Ги Дебор като провокиращ акт на освобождение на публиката чрез участие

The desire to participate in the 1960s was symptomatic of this period. Through the “Tap and Touch Cinema” action of Valie Export and “Society of Spectacle” a movie of Guy Debord, attempts have been made to present two methods for making the audience an active participant. What connects two authors is their struggle against alienation and passivity.

Poéticas dissidentes na arte urgente: um princípio indisciplinar na sociedade contrassexual

The world is inhabited by different bodies, which produce in their experiences instaurative urgencies of thoughts and actions, as well as modes of conduct and resistance. It is by betting on the power of these multiple bodies that we launch in this text a look at the dissident poetics that circulate and promote the creative and political encounter of abject voices (of the bodies, read as insignificant and monstrous), queer (strange bodies) and contrasexuals (of the society that rejects the sexual labels). Voices, bodies and existences that echo and rebel against this colonizing system of capitalist-neoliberal power, centered on patriarchy and whiteness. In view of the disruptive power of these dissenting poetics, we will analyze in this article some contemporary art productions, which we will call here of urgent art, since they are configured as artistic manifestations that affirm the body as a multitude and are positioned within a contrasexual society (PRECIADO, 2014). Using the Queer Theory and the contributions of the philosophy of difference of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, we present here a cartography of dissident artists who claim a multiple body and affirm life in its infinite diversity. Feminist artists such as Valie Export and Marcia X, as well as other artists who express what we call urgent art, will be analyzed and presented here as a way of resisting and/or figuring ways of living and desiring that undermine the norms that tend to dock our subjectivities.

Contradictions in Time

Taking as its starting point Ingeborg Bachmann’s comments that the National Socialist ‘virus of crime’ was not surpassed, but merely retreated into the fabric of society’s moral codes, this article examines how non-synchronous notions of time (Bloch, 1935) are engaged with in art in the aftermath of National Socialism in Austria. Austria, a context which was both first to embrace National Socialism in 1938, and first to be ‘freed’ from dealing with this history in 1943, saw protest and political action most often led by artists and artistic forms. The most incisive political and social critique appeared in the realm of art and literature. By looking to the work of artist and filmmaker VALIE EXPORT and novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, this article asks how film and literature – specifically, works that address gender relations critically – follow in Bachmann’s footsteps and engage with a notion of para-history. Moreover, I argue that such works help us to understand residual tendencies and continuities in relation to both media and gender, in resurgent fascism today. By looking to the film, theatre-texts and essays by EXPORT and Jelinek I situate them in their historical context, and reread them as a history of feminist resistance to and urgent critique of contradictory forces which make fascism appealing, both in the decades following World War II and again today.

Estetyka wobec feminizmu

When we talk today about women’s art, we think about three phemonena, quite loosely related. We think about feminist art, about the way that the feminist’s statements and demands were expressed in the creativity of Judy Chicago and Nancy Spero, Carolee Scheemann and Valie Export, Miriam Schapiro and Mary Kelly, and in Poland in the creativity of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL or Ewa Partum. We think about female art, the forgotten, abandoned, neglected artists brought back to memory by the feminists with thousands of exhibitions and reinterpretations. Lastly, we think about the art created by women – women’s art. However, we do not know and will never know, whether the latter two phenomena would develop without the feminist movement. What is more, it is about the first wave of feminism called “the equality feminism”, as well as the dominating in the second wave – “the difference feminism”. The feminist art was in the beginning a critique of the patriarchal world of art. In a sense it remains as such (see: the Guerilla Girls), yet today we are more interested in the feminist deconstruction of thinking about art, and thus the question arises: should feminism create its own aesthetics – the feminist aesthetics, or should it develop the gender aesthetics, and as a result introduce the gender point of view to thinking about art? In this moment the androgynous feminism regains its importance, one represented by Virginia Woolf, and referring – in the theoretical layer – to Freud as read by Lucy Irigaray. Freudism, which the feminists became aware of in the 1970s, is the only philosophical movement, which assumes a dual subject, that is, in the starting point assumes the existence of two subjects – man and woman, even if the woman is defined in a purely negative way, by the deficit, as a “not a man”. Freudism replaces the Cartesian thinking subject (consciousness) by the corporeal and sexual being, and forces us to re-think the Enlightenment beginnings of the European aesthetics.

ESTHETICS TOWARDS FEMINISM

When we talk today about women’s art, we think about three phemonena, quite loosely related. We think about feminist art, about the way that the feminist’s statements and demands were expressed in the creativity of Judy Chicago and Nancy Spero, Carolee Scheemann and Valie Export, Miriam Schapiro and Mary Kelly, and in Poland in the creativity of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL or Ewa Partum. We think about female art, the forgotten, abandoned, neglected artists brought back to memory by the feminists with thousands of exhibitions and reinterpretations. Lastly, we think about the art created by women – women’s art. However, we do not know and will never know, whether the latter two phenomena would develop without the feminist movement. What is more, it is about the first wave of feminism called “the equality feminism”, as well as the dominating in the second wave – “the difference feminism”. The feminist art was in the beginning a critique of the patriarchal world of art. In a sense it remains as such (see: the Guerilla Girls), yet today we are more interested in the feminist deconstruction of thinking about art, and thus the question arises: should feminism create its own aesthetics – the feminist aesthetics, or should it develop the gender aesthetics, and as a result introduce the gender point of view to thinking about art? In this moment the androgynous feminism regains its importance, one represented by Virginia Woolf, and referring – in the theoretical layer – to Freud as read by Lucy Irigaray. Freudism, which the feminists became aware of in the 1970s, is the only philosophical movement, which assumes a dual subject, that is, in the starting point assumes the existence of two subjects – man and woman, even if the woman is defined in a purely negative way, by the deficit, as a “not a man”. Freudism replaces the Cartesian thinking subject (consciousness) by the corporeal and sexual being, and forces us to re-think the Enlightenment beginnings of the European aesthetics.

Disfiguration, Obliteration: What remains of the body in the works of Unica Zürn and VALIE EXPORT

This essay explores the place of the body in the work of VALIE EXPORT and Unica Zürn through the notion of ‘disfiguration’, a notion which connotes an undoing, a deformation. In considering the political implications of artistic practices which disfigure, or deform the body, this essay reflects on the historical significance and conceptual underpinning of this practice. By tracing the history of the cut, as both injury and technique in EXPORT’s work, I show that the Riß (a word that gives meanings that encompass tear, rent, crack, split, rip, break, gap and laceration, and which emerges from the cut), should be understood as both, a technique in art, and the result of societal disfiguration or distortion. Through analysing EXPORT’s Expanded Cinema works, performances, texts and unfinished films, by tracing the transmutation of writing and drawing to media such as video and photography this essay explores the methodological and historical influence of Unica Zürn on EXPORT’s work. Through their disfiguration, I argue these works figure an ‘underground history’, and as such a (return of the repressed) temporally placed para-present of the body, where instincts and passions are understood as deformed and dis-figured (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). By reading EXPORT and Zürn back onto this ‘underground history’ I want to ask how this distortion is gendered. How and why do they disfigure the body anagrammatically through image and language to its eventual obliteration? What are the conditions of possibility for these practices? And considering these practices, which tend towards their own break (Riß), what is left of the body in art?

P for PROJECTION

Abstract This text laces the parenthetical comments from an essay on female spectatorship by a key figure in feminist film studies - Mary Ann Doane - taken from a 1982 issues double issue of SCREEN Magazine on ‘Sex & Spectatorship’ with Austrian artist Valie Export’s narrative of her 1969 performance work, Genital Panic.

Speaking of Bodies: Performative Practices, Visual Arts, and Art History

In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Marina Abramovic formulated the problem of a history of performance in her own terms. Her project, which took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, planned to perform a new piece after six evenings during which she restaged six historical performances (including only one of her own, Thomas Lips, along with works by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman and Gina Pane). As Marina Abramovic writes in her memoirs, this reenactement was a way of ...

Exposed

The article focuses on VALIE EXPORT’s Transparent Space, a 2001 public art project in Vienna that is, at once, an autonomous artwork and a dedicated women’s art space. The analysis is concerned with the contradictions encountered in this double function of Transparent Space, as they relate to feminism, and, in particular, to feminists making and curating art. Also known as Cube EXPORT and Women’s Bridge, Transparent Space is implicated in urban transformation dynamics in their longitudinal dimension as they alter infrastructures and their redistributive (in)justice. Equally, it is implicated in questions that arise about public art commissions and neoliberal restructuring austerity measures which precarise long-term provisions for use and maintenance, but also in the legacies of second-wave feminist art making alongside current and ongoing practices of feminist art work and the labour involved. Transparent Space exposes – ie renders visible – a lack of infrastructural support that may be seen to undermine the agenda of ‘making women visible’. The analysis therefore asks whether Transparent Space is found to both honour and harness the ‘labour of love’ performed by women and feminists making art.

Angry Women AT 25

Angry Women AT 25 Jonathan P. Eburne, Moderator and Judith Roof, Moderator Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of the Culture Wars, the San Francisco-based punk magazine series re/search published angry women, an anthology of interviews with fifteen contemporary performance artists, writers, musicians, and activists. The anthology marked something of a turning point in the history of feminism, its expression of renewed anger marking a tentative break with identity politics and a recognition of the need for “a renaissance of hope which anger can bring—stuck as we are in the midst of an existential, angst ridden culture of cynicism which has helped implant a widespread attitude of passivity and submissive acceptance,” as its editors remarked.1 In 2016 we continue to live in times of active cultural as well as geopolitical warfare; how much have the conditions of cynicism and repression changed since 1991? There is, after all, still a whole lot to get angry about. Beyond its political claims, we consider the anthology to play no less significant a role in changing the genealogy and discourse of experimental artistic practice, particularly in the United States, where the work of collecting and circulating experimental art by women remains deeply necessary. In light of the twenty-fifth anniversary of angry women we asked a number of scholars and artists, including some of the artists originally featured in the issue, to reflect on the relevance—as well as the inevitable shortcomings and frustrations—of the anthology today. What are we to make of the anthology’s framing concerns: [End Page 199] its frank, aggressive sexuality, its unapologetic recourse to myth, and its claim that “we need an electric revitalization of our life force; a reconnection to the world; a heightened conviction that we can change life”?2 Into what kinds of contemporary genealogies of experimentalism do we—or should we—place the likes of kathy acker, susie bright, wanda coleman, valie export, karen finley, diamanda galás, bell hooks, holly hughes, lydia lunch, suzy kerr and dianne malley, linda montano, avital ronell, sapphire, carolee schneemann, and annie sprinkle? And what are the continued stakes of anger in the arts of the present? Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Angry Women, edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale. Notes 1. Andrea Juno and V. Vale, introduction to Angry Women (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1991), 5. 2. Ibid. [End Page 200] Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Architectures of Exchange: Feminism, Public Space, and the Politics of Vulnerability

This essay reads the work of two experimental feminist video and performance artists in the 1960s and ’70s (Yoko Ono and VALIE EXPORT) alongside concurrent transformations taking place within their urban landscapes, in particular the widespread emergence of pornographic media arcades. The sets of practices examined here are situated within mutually implicated urban economies, systems of exchange that were undergoing unprecedented renegotiation during this period. Within the ecosystem of the 1960s metropolis, public sexuality served as a mobile force that shifted the aesthetics and traffic of city life. Mapping these shifts sheds new light on the material conditions that engendered feminist approaches to media, performance, and site specificity. Resonant between each phenomenon is a burgeoning affective economy that rewrote the architectures of commerce in the city, creating entirely new systems of service labor and amplifying the circulation of images, particularly images of women, as privileged commodities. Reexamining Ono9s and EXPORT9s performances in this context, this essay suggests that vulnerability and risk provide artistic and political strategies for negotiating shifting cultural terrain.

Female Sexuality in Performance and Film: Erotic, Political, Controllable? The Contested Female Body in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT

Coming of age on the cusp of the second wave feminist movement, which brought with it liberation of sexuality for women, Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT defied the traditions of western, patria...

Ästhetische Travestie: Zur Inszenierung des Geschlechts in der österreichischen Aktionskunst der 1960er Jahre

This article addresses the coherencies linking subjectivity, power, and gender in the Austrian performance art of the late 1960s. It focuses especially on cross-dressing, that is, on performative gender-switching. Based on the confrontation of two exemplary works by Günter Brus and valie export , the following questions are crucial to this study: What kind of subjectivity is negotiated through this identification with “the other”? Furthermore, what type of role-playing challenges traditional sexual power relations and, finally, what differences result from the opposing approaches of the two artists?