Search for a command to run...
INTRODUCTION In the realm of 1960s performance art, VALIE EXPORT stands out as one of the most important and influential figures. She was a pioneer who delivered social critique sharply, sometimes almost confrontationally. EXPORT often shocked people with her performances, mostly in a productive, necessary way – because the shock opened new ways of thinking about the female gendered subject and the systems that shape it. «In her work, the document as an interface between a fictional 'past present' and a later encounter, could be understood as a screen used to mediate history to the future», Mechtild Widrich writes. And indeed, it is tempting to say that VALIE EXPORT became a kind of medium for the future, or even that she significantly shaped the way that future would come to look (Widrich, 2014, p. 53). Her performative work Touch Cinema (1968) is a perfect example (Abb. 1). Radically provocative and courageous for its time, the piece not only offer he possibility of touching the artist’s breast inside a wearable «cinema box». It also confronted viewers with urgent questions about sexualisation, the objectification of women, and the role of mass media as one of the most powerful and exploitative cultural machines of the twentieth century (VALIE EXPORT, 2023). It is important to acknowledge the existence of various feminist and para-artistic groups and formations active in the time of the 1960s–70s, from the Austrian women’s movement and the experimental circles of the Vienna Group, to broader European feminist collectives such as Rivolta Femminile, and the emerging networks of feminist performance artists across Europe and the United States. Widrich reminds us that EXPORT, born Waltraud Höllinger (née Lehner), studied textile design before entering the Viennese art scene in the mid-1960s. She adopted her artist’s name as a logo in capital letters in 1967 and even posed with a pack of the Austrian cigarette brand Smart Export to «legalise» her chosen identity. In the late 1960s, she developed a coherent body of films and performances under the title Expanded Cinema, a concept she elaborated together with Peter Weibel. At that moment, EXPORT was loosely associated with the Viennese Actionists, but by the 1970s, tensions with the group pushed her toward working independently, in a mode she herself called feminist actionism (Feministischer Aktionismus) – a deliberate departure from the machismo of the core Actionist circle (Widrich, 2014, p.53). There is, however, one significant connection between EXPORT and the Actionists: the Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film (1970), informally known as the Vienna Book (Wienbuch), which contains the first published description of Genital Panic. As the cover states, the book was edited by Weibel «with the collaboration of» EXPORT – a phrase that, then as now, often masked the undervalued labour of the female co-editor. The volume became the first anthology and could be understood as the baptismal certificate of Viennese Actionism. Weibel and EXPORT defined the Actionists broadly: not only the four central figures of Actionist performance (Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hermann Nitsch), but also the older concrete poets, collage artists, experimental cabaret performers of the Vienna Group (Wiener Gruppe), the organicist architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and the action painter Arnulf Rainer (Widrich, 2014, p. 54). EXPORT’s position in this constellation is therefore not peripheral but structurally vital: she both emerges from and critiques the Actionist milieu, transforming its language into something explicitly feminist, self-aware, and politically charged. And I also want to name here the work Bildkompendium (1970) by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT, a publication that, at least intuitively, feels important to us, even genuinely pivotal. A turning point both in the meaning of becoming a 316-page document of an already forming canon, and in the sense of demonstrating just how far an artist could go – and in EXPORT’s case, how much further she was willing to go. It is also a foundational moment because of the very real legal consequences that followed its publication. What interests us most in this book are the elements one might, for now, simply refer to as the «props», the material residue of Actionist practice: «The Actionists» practice involved the use of blood, excrement and other bodily fluids, self-mutilation, sex, orgiastic ritual, and the slaughter of animals – obvious challenges for any editor» (Widrich, 2014. p, 55). Widrich (2014) argues that, practically speaking, the Bildkompendium became a scandal because of the explicitly sexual photographs it contained. These images led to legal action against Weibel and EXPORT. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this scandal, the publication succeeded in establishing an authoritative historical framework for Actionism, granting it exactly the canon-forming status that its title announces. Turning back to the issue of the «slaughter of animals», it seems to me that I may have found, if not the original source of inspiration, then at least the conceptual atmosphere of the time – the current of ideas in which all of these practices were simmering. And within this climate, it was EXPORT who used animals in art in a way that feels especially revealing. In this semester paper, I will focus on the question of how animals appear in the artistic and performance practice of VALIE EXPORT. I will trace how animals enter VALIE EXPORT’s performances, not as victims, but as signs, metaphors, and ruptures. I will explore the presuppositions and predispositions that shaped certain artistic decisions, especially those dealing with representations of pain, suffering, and different forms of harm. Alongside this, I will address the feminist dimensions of EXPORT’s work and consider how her approach reframes the visual and symbolic economy of the abuse enacted upon bodies. It therefore seems both logical and necessary to look more closely at the historical context and examine. The use of animals, and their killing, was central to Viennese Actionism, especially in the work of Hermann Nitsch1, whose Orgien Mysterien Theater involved the ritualised disembowelment of lambs and bulls as part of a Dionysian-Christian fusion of sacrifice and spectacle. Otto Muehl likewise staged performances with animal carcasses, blood and raw meat, pushing the body, both human and non-human, into the territory of abjection and taboo. Even Brus, though less focused on animals, operated within an environment where the theatre of injured bodies, any bodies, was seen as a radical artistic method. This is not to say that EXPORT participated in the Actionists’ sacrificial system. She did not. But what I may have found is the conceptual circulation – the atmosphere of extremity, transgression and corporeal experimentation – in which these practices were the cultural pressure-field. And this is crucial: EXPORT was the only woman in this milieu, navigating and resisting a context where bodies (especially female bodies, but also animal bodies) were treated as sites of violation, rupture, and symbolic annihilation. And EXPORT’s relationship to the use of animals in art is less about imitation and more about critical proximity. She stood close enough to Actionism to feel its heat, but far enough to turn its violence outward into critique rather than reenactment. All of this is extremely interesting and makes a very clever point, and it is astonishing how EXPORT was able to take this theoretical undercurrent of the era – this entire male-oriented approach – and transform it into something far less patriarchal, far less driven by masculine fantasies of transgression. I found a striking formulation in a Master’s thesis that articulates the environment she was working in: «In a decade spanning from 1960 to 1971, four Viennese artists: Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler – executed a prolific number of live actions that caused tremendous public antipathy, authority intervention, imprisonment, and scandal. Their art had strong overtones of taboo-breaking, ritualised dramaturgy, and an array of transgressive performative experiments that aspired to self-liberation from the conventional confines imposed by society. It was conceived as a brutal reaction against the dominant ideology of Catholicism, right-wing social conservatism, bourgeois convention, and the sublimated postwar social climate of Austria. This thesis scrutinises the history of misconceptions associated with Actionism and focuses its analysis on the intentions of the artists and their engagement with avant-garde art at the time». «Daniele Roussel argues that to understand Actionism, you must look at Austrian psychology after WWII – not just art history» (Seserko-Ostrogonac, 2010, pp. 5,9).What becomes clear, especially when reading this, is just how radically EXPORT redirected and reconfigured this energy. The same cultural pressure cooker produced two very different trajectories: the Actionists’ violent and often hyper-masculine confrontations, and EXPORT’s fiercely intelligent feminist counter-movement, which used similar strategies of exposure and embodiment but refused the machismo that defined the original group. EXPORT rejects sacrificial logic because it depends on a passive victim, a violated living form, and a patriarchal drama of transgressive power. Her feminism transforms the same climate of violence into a critique of subjugation, replacing the sacrificed physical subject with an active, self- determining subject who confronts the viewer rather than submitting to them. Because EXPORT replaces sacrifice with relationality and interactivity.