VALIE EXPORT
ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
A fascinating character of the 20th-century art scene, and one of the very public figures of second-wave feminism in Western Europe, VALIE EXPORT is many things, but ordinary. From passionately and controversially expressing her thoughts on gender roles and breaking barriers for female artists, to endless metaphors in her performance pieces, her art spans across areas and mediums. She began her career by tapping into performance art that involved mainly her body; she used it as a vessel for the messages she wanted to bring across to the audience. Much of her art stands on poignant but easy-to-understand analogies, that are meant to provoke (often through their overtly sexual connotation) and make the viewer re-evaluate his or her stance on topics such as the role of the female (artist) in society, gender roles and identity politics. The body remains an important instrument in her work throughout her career; she continues to stage performances as well as using herself as the subject for several photographic works over the course of decades.
VALIE is someone who is controversial but well-known among the Austrian public, yet to me, she was a new discovery that surprised me in many ways. I always like to walk through exhibitions and try to imagine the artist in their cultural and historical contexts. It helps me retrace some of their thoughts and ideas better, rather than viewing something from my own narrow and limited one. I also like it, when artists don’t take themselves too seriously, and VALIE seems to have a lot of fun in her works. While she addresses hard-hitting subjects and discourses, she manages to do so in a way that is often quite amusing, rather than somber and serious. Given the time period of some of her early works, she was not afraid to put herself in a vulnerable position, for the harsh gaze of the public eye to see. A great example of that is her work “Portfolio of Doggedness” made in collaboration with artist Peter Weibel and photographer Josef Tandl. The former was bound to VALIE by a leash and was walked along the Kärntner Strasse in a dog-like fashion, while the latter documented the whole ordeal. The result is a humorous depiction of a Viennese street in the 70s, with bypassing people expressing emotions ranging from amusement to disgust.
In her later years, her focus shifted more towards experimentation with film and photography. These works were visibly less controversial than her early works, yet they retained the same critiques and characteristics. She worked on series such as “Body Configurations”, which comments on the body in relation to the cityscapes it is placed in to emphasize its softness in contrast to some of the harsh realities of the urban landscape of our cities, once again re-iterating the power imbalance between the genders. Beyond that, VALIE also wrote many influential texts and continues to explore the possibilities of media and photography/film, venturing into some more avant-garde techniques, resulting in works like “Welle”. At 83, this was an impressive retrospective of her work and a great visit to Albertina, as per usual.