Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny, Valie Export was a hero to many women. Since the 1960s, she was driven by a fierce conviction that art and media would play an essential role in women’s liberation: that women must picture their own reality in the name of social progress. In Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972), she wrote that women must “use art as a means of expression, so as to influence the consciousness of all of us”. What she demanded was revolution.
I keep returning to her work. Can’t stay away. I have written about her in relation to violence in women’s art. Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain, and she made evident the violence of forcing women’s bodies to inhabit structures that were not designed for them. For the 1973 performance Hyperbuliashe crept naked through a corridor of electrified wires, exposing herself voluntarily to shocks.
She allowed me to use her 1976 photocollage The Birth Madonna for the cover of my book Acts of Creation. Showing a woman positioned like a Renaissance Madonna seated on a drying machine from which spews a bloody towel, it still provokes shock. I wrote about the twin pressures Export had experienced as a mother: from the Catholic church on the one side, and the new consumer society on the other.
More recently I have written about sexuality and power, and the 1968 performance From the Portfolio of Doggedness, during which she led Peter Weibel crawling through the streets of Vienna by a dog lead. Weibel was dressed in a business suit, a disturbing echo of the commuters milling around him. Export is deadpan, though you can spot a barely concealed smile. As I discovered in 2019, when I interviewed her for The Guardian, she certainly had a sense of fun.
Export spoke with tremendous clarity about her work and the ideas underpinning it. She was also forthright about the circumstances in which she produced her explosively bold early works: “Marriage, the Christian church, and the traditional side of Vienna at the time – this fossilised Nazi realm – all this influenced the work I wanted to do,” she told me.
Her father died during the war, and she was sent to a convent with her two sisters while their mother worked as a primary school teacher. The first of her many expulsions came aged 10 when she was discovered exploring the nun’s living quarters. Her experience of girlhood was of constraint – of having little or no control over her own life. She longed for the self-determination that adulthood seemed to offer. Aged 18 she escaped her maternal home by getting married. Within a year she had a daughter, but the vision of independence offered by matrimony turned out to be a trap. “I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother.” She applied for a divorce, left her daughter in the temporary care of her sister, and moved to Vienna to study.
Through the limited options available – wifehood, motherhood, compliant domestic consumerism, or the life of a scandalous divorcee assumed to be sexually available – she came to understand she occupied a world that was not constructed for her needs. That instead she lived in a society that dictated that her body was available for sexual pleasure, for the bearing and raising of children, for caregiving and nurture. In 1967, aged 27, she swapped her married name Waltraud Höllinger for the moniker VALIE EXPORT. A play on a cigarette brand, written in capital letters, it was a decisive rejection of patriarchal structures. She would be known neither by her father’s name, nor by her ex-husband’s.
Her work was intended to explode the structures containing her – in cinema, in art and in the wider society. In Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) she walked along the rows of a Munich art cinema with her exposed pubic region level with punters’ faces, and plastered the walls of Vienna with posters of herself in crotchless trousers holding a gun. For Tap and Touch Cinema in 1968, she constructed a theatre in a box strapped to her chest, with people on the street invited to reach into the darkness and touch her breasts while she watched them. Documentary of the performance exposes the shifting power dynamic between Export and the men who accept the invitation. It was brilliantly subversive and unsettling.
I grieve her in the most selfish way: there were so many things I wanted to ask her about. Having survived decades in which women’s art was marginalised and ignored, she had so much to tell us. Like a fool, I kept delaying a planned interview. Now it’s too late.
Her 1972 manifesto described how the spark kindled by women’s art might ignite far-reaching social change. It concludes by stating the importance of documenting and honouring the life and work of those who had come before, as we must now do hers. “The future of women will be the history of woman.”
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