Valie Export was one of the most daring and subversive figures in contemporary feminist art. A performance artist, theorist, intellectual, and staunch feminist, she used her body, image, and media to challenge the way society viewed and controlled women.
Since the 1960s, Export believed that art and the media had a fundamental role to play in women's liberation. In her 1972 manifesto, "Women's Art: A Manifesto," she wrote that women should use art as a means of expression to influence social consciousness. What she sought was not mere representation, but revolution.
Her work was charged with pain, threat, and implied violence. Export made visible the violence that arises when a woman's body is forced to live within social, cultural, and political structures that were not created for her.
In her 1973 performance “Hyperbulia,” she crawled naked through a corridor of electrified wires, voluntarily exposing her body to electric shocks. It was a harsh act, both physical and symbolic, that spoke to the limitation, control, and pain imposed on the female body.
Another powerful work was the 1976 photo collage “The Birth Madonna.” In it, a woman is depicted as a Renaissance Madonna, sitting on a clothesline from which a bloody towel emerges. The image remains shocking because it juxtaposes religious iconography with the reality of the body, birth, domestic labor, and modern consumerism.
In the 1968 performance “From the Portfolio of Doggedness,” Export walked through the streets of Vienna holding Peter Weibel on a leash while he crawled on the ground in a business suit. The spectacle was provocative and ironic, a reversal of power roles in public space.
Export spoke with great clarity about the ideas behind her work. She connected her art to personal experience and the conservative reality of post-war Austria. Marriage, the Catholic Church, and the traditional atmosphere of Vienna at that time directly influenced her early works.
Her father died during the war, and she was sent to a monastery with her two sisters, while her mother worked as a teacher. From childhood, she experienced restriction and lack of control over her life. At the age of 18, she married, thinking that marriage would bring her independence. But she soon realized that this was also another form of restriction.
Within a year she became a mother, but the role of a married woman and mother did not match the life she wanted. She filed for divorce, temporarily left her daughter in the care of her sister, and moved to Vienna to study.
Through the limited roles that society offered women, such as wife, mother, obedient consumer, or prejudiced divorced woman, Export realized that she lived in a world that was not built for her needs. A woman's body was seen as available for sexual pleasure, for childbirth, for raising children, and for caring for others.
In 1967, at the age of 27, she gave up her married name, Waltraud Höllinger, and chose the name VALIE EXPORT. The name, inspired by a cigarette brand and written in capital letters, was a clear rejection of patriarchal structures. She would not be known by either her father's or her ex-husband's name.
Her art aimed to break down the boundaries that kept women confined: in cinema, in galleries, and in society. In 1969’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic,” she walked the aisles of an arthouse cinema in Munich with her private parts exposed at the level of the spectators’ faces. Later, in Vienna, she put up posters showing herself with her pants open at the private parts and holding a gun.
In her 1968 “Tap and Touch Cinema,” she created a box-shaped “cinema” placed on her chest. Passersby were invited to reach into the darkness and touch her breasts, while she looked directly at them. The performance subverted the traditional relationship between gaze, desire, and power, positioning the woman not as a passive object, but as the author and controller of the situation.
Valie Export's death leaves a huge void in the history of feminist art. She survived decades when women's art was often marginalized or ignored, but her work remains a powerful testament to resistance, anger, and radical imagination.
Her 1972 manifesto concluded with the idea that documenting and honoring the women who came before is essential for the future. Today, this also applies to Export herself: her story is part of the history of women and their struggle to redefine the body, art, and freedom. /GazetaExpress/
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