Valie Export
Camden Arts Centre, 10 September – 31 October 2004
The work of Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT has become
a celebrated point of reference in the history of feminist art practice,
though her profile in the UK
is less than established. Late 60s pioneer of a vital, often confrontational
art that took as it’s subject the politicisation of the female body,
EXPORT’s art has nevertheless
been somewhat eclipsed by the not-so-different feminist achievements
of artists such as Carolee Schneeman, by accident of the barriers of language and the
vagaries of Anglo-American art history.
What is fascinating about Camden Art Centre’s rich
monographic exhibition is however how EXPORT’s
explicitly feminist strategies were, early on, but one part of a voracious
engagement with a multitude of still-fresh avant-garde developments.
Such memorable, high-impact works such as the 1968 street ‘action’ TAPP und TASTKINO - where EXPORT wore an enclosure that allowed the
public to feel her breasts without however seeing them - are but one
aspect of an extraordinary diversity of tendencies that were to emerge
in the late 60s. From structuralist film and
photography, to expanded cinema, to aspects of land art, to interactive
performance and video, EXPORT’s work from the 60s and 70s bears witness to a magpie,
speculative engagement with, and assimilation of, the most advanced
artistic inquires of the period.
Such categories today tend to be seen as discrete art
historical lineages, but EXPORT’s work sets
itself apart by how it synthesises these strands into a coherent and
sustained investigation into the stress points between cultural and
essentialist conceptions of male and female subjectivity, and the translation
of the experience of gender inequality as a social form into the subjective
expressions of body and biography. When one remembers that the monologue
of Schneeman’s much-cited performance
Interior Scroll (in which the artist, naked, read from a roll of paper
drawn from her vagina) rails against the supposedly masculine rationalism
of a (male), structuralist film-maker, one
starts to recognise the subtlety and intelligence of EXPORT’s
appropriation of multiple artistic resources.
EXPORT’s understanding of
experience is anyway broader than a narrowly literal feminist iconography,
moving from the fictionalisation of biographic experience in her child-fantasy
drawings of 1971, through to meditations on the politics of the built
environment in photographic actions such as the Figurations of 1972. The feminine maybe the foundation of her work,
but it is a springboard into its wider contexts and conditions. In the
80s EXPORT moved for a time into narrative film, and the show deserves
praise if only for presenting the extraordinary 1986 short A Perfect Couple or Indecency Sheds its Skin, a surrealistic tale
of glossy, corrupt bodies, in which casino femmes
fatales casually sell their attributes to the attentions of logo-adorned
body builders, politicians and other male drones. EXPORT’s
art is at its most rewarding when her formal imagination is brought
to bear on the complex process whereby the individual subject is confronted
with its cultural, social and material surrogates.