Location and Dislocation: The Media Performances of VALIE EXPORT

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 Abramović 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. The two simultaneous investigations of the self in relation to physical and social space set the stage for a re-evaluation of the “classic” confrontational EXPORT, even though the aim of the exhibition is to reconsider her whole oeuvre, getting away from the myth of the feminist warrior. Both exhibitions were curated by Angelika Nollert, since 2007 the ambitious new director of the New Museum Nuremberg. There was a real effort to avoid Actionist clichés: for the garden of the Belvedere, a new sculpture of two giant pairs of scissors (entitled Doppelgängerin, the female version of the double) has been cast in aluminum; in Needle (1996/97, reconstructed for Linz 2010), three giant metal bolts push through a child’s dress. The machine gun of Genital Panic also returns, now standing for real conflict: Kalashnikov, produced for a Moscow exhibition in 2007, consists of 109 Russian Kalashnikov rifles piled in a tower that faintly recalls Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, resting in a metal tub filled with waste oil.

Two videos, consisting of found footage downloaded from the Internet, show executions in China and war scenes in Iraq. The work is a respectable conversation piece in the style of recent political art, addressing dwindling global resources and the globalization of conflict. Yet through all this, references to EXPORT’s past gleam like beacons of possibility: what is shown is not only political powerlessness but the power of the artist as political agent, as expert manipulator of images.

In the late 1960s, EXPORT and Peter Weibel (her sometime-collaborator, who is not mentioned in the show) were early European proponents of “expanded cinema,” which meant not only avantgarde subject matter and production techniques, but also the mixture of live action and film (e.g., a film screen showing a moving spot, which should be struck with a ping-pong ball), film taken with cameras attached to the body, or film as a metaphor for the presentation of the body itself. (EXPORT’s famous Touch Cinema...