Valie Export, the renowned Austrian performance artist and film-maker who challenged patriarchal norms with provocative and often shocking works, has died at the age of 85. Her foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export passed away in Vienna earlier that day, just three days before her 86th birthday.
A Visionary Feminist Artist
Described as 'one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century' by her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac, Export is best known for low-budget performances that scandalised Austria and Germany in the late 1960s. These works have since been recognised as milestones in feminist art for exposing the objectification of the female body.
Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), 1968
In her most notorious performance, Export strapped a model theatre stage to her chest and invited shoppers in Vienna's city centre to touch her bare breasts through a tiny curtain. Her artist colleague Peter Weibel rallied passersby with a megaphone and timed each 'action' with a stopwatch. This piece inverted the male gaze and critiqued the commodification of women's bodies.
Venice Biennale, 1980
At the 1980 Venice Biennale, Export presented Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), a centrepiece that showed an outsized female abdomen with crooked legs on a mattress. Red neon strip lights streamed from her vulva, and a TV transmitted a Catholic mass where the head would be, critiquing the intersection of religion and patriarchy.
Early Life and Career
Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Export boarded at a convent school but left at 14 to study at the School of Arts and Crafts. She married and had a child before turning 20, but soon divorced and placed her daughter into temporary care to study in Vienna. 'I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother,' she told The Guardian in 2019.
In 1967, she adopted the alias Valie Export—the first name from a childhood nickname, the surname from a cigarette brand called Smart Export—to avoid being identified by her father's or ex-husband's names.
Legal Battles and Recognition
In 1970, Export was sentenced on pornography charges over her co-editorship of a book on Viennese Actionist art, leading to a temporary loss of custody rights for her daughter. Despite these challenges, she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968 and participated in major international exhibitions, including documenta in 1977 and 2007, and the 1980 Venice Biennale, where she and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to fill the Austrian pavilion.
Film and Academia
Her feature film The Practice of Love (1985), about a reporter investigating peep shows in Hamburg's red light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival. From 1995 to 2005, she was a professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In 2015, Linz opened a Valie Export centre for media and performance art in a former tobacco factory.
Legacy
Export's work reached a new generation in 2005 when Marina Abramović re-enacted Genital Panic as part of her Seven Easy Pieces at New York's Guggenheim museum. Ropac stated, 'Her passing marks the loss of a singular perspective in contemporary art, one that influenced artists across generations. Her pioneering work continues to be of such great urgency.'
