Body, Transformation, and Time – Celebrating VALIE EXPORT
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The oeuvre of VALIE EXPORT pinpoints contemporary artistic discourse while embodying an adamant element of global art history. It is thus that honoring her artistic practice and person on the occasion of her 80th birthday also means paying tribute to her decades of artistic and theoretical work and their immense influence on subsequent generations.
EXPORT began her work as an artist under the premise of media critique, addressing political issues, concerns associated with the public sphere, and matters of the body on both performative and gender-emancipatory levels, thus being very much in tune with the international avant-garde in general and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in particular.
The issues tackled by this artist include the body as a cultural signifier, visual trope, and representational apparatus for political transformation—as evidenced by the very first works purchased for the Kontakt Collection in late 2004: “Body Sign Action” (1970), and “Body Configurations in Nature” (1970s). In these, the artist herself embodies the pictorial subject and projection surface for the concerns of the female self in order to heighten the status of “woman” and reverse past modes of repression as well as maladaptations of the psyche associated therewith.
EXPORT inscribed textual and visual symbols onto her body, which functions as a live canvas that emphasizes the dichotomy between object and subject, thereby unleashing emancipatory potential via media-analytic language. The latter is visible in one of her earliest and most important works in the context of Expanded Cinema, “Cutting” (1967/68), a filmic action whose title refers to aspects of the filmmaking process per se while the work itself medially transfers the notion of celluloid onto other materials, thereby effecting a process of deconstruction.
Language and media critique represent essential elements in EXPORT’s performative and filmic work as seen in “Metanoia,” a collection of 29 shorts produced between 1967 and 2010 that synchronize bodily gestures in and with idioms that reflect (upon) language. Within this compilation, “Touch Cinema” (1968) exemplifies the artist’s approach to activating the body as a screen in the context of theater, a process that unfolds only via radicalized physical interaction in public space.
EXPORT’s multifarious oeuvre comprises a plethora of visual art practices, curatorial work, lectures, and writings, all of which are characterized by the closest possible scrutiny of societal issues and new technological developments that the artist has never hesitated to probe in the interest of artistic progress.
Silvia Eiblmayr and Walter Seidl
Silvia Eiblmayr is a curator and author. She lives and works in Vienna.
April 2020
EXPORT began her work as an artist under the premise of media critique, addressing political issues, concerns associated with the public sphere, and matters of the body on both performative and gender-emancipatory levels, thus being very much in tune with the international avant-garde in general and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in particular.
The issues tackled by this artist include the body as a cultural signifier, visual trope, and representational apparatus for political transformation—as evidenced by the very first works purchased for the Kontakt Collection in late 2004: “Body Sign Action” (1970), and “Body Configurations in Nature” (1970s). In these, the artist herself embodies the pictorial subject and projection surface for the concerns of the female self in order to heighten the status of “woman” and reverse past modes of repression as well as maladaptations of the psyche associated therewith.
EXPORT inscribed textual and visual symbols onto her body, which functions as a live canvas that emphasizes the dichotomy between object and subject, thereby unleashing emancipatory potential via media-analytic language. The latter is visible in one of her earliest and most important works in the context of Expanded Cinema, “Cutting” (1967/68), a filmic action whose title refers to aspects of the filmmaking process per se while the work itself medially transfers the notion of celluloid onto other materials, thereby effecting a process of deconstruction.
Language and media critique represent essential elements in EXPORT’s performative and filmic work as seen in “Metanoia,” a collection of 29 shorts produced between 1967 and 2010 that synchronize bodily gestures in and with idioms that reflect (upon) language. Within this compilation, “Touch Cinema” (1968) exemplifies the artist’s approach to activating the body as a screen in the context of theater, a process that unfolds only via radicalized physical interaction in public space.
EXPORT’s multifarious oeuvre comprises a plethora of visual art practices, curatorial work, lectures, and writings, all of which are characterized by the closest possible scrutiny of societal issues and new technological developments that the artist has never hesitated to probe in the interest of artistic progress.
Silvia Eiblmayr and Walter Seidl
Silvia Eiblmayr is a curator and author. She lives and works in Vienna.
April 2020