Valie Export Breaks Barriers For The Next Generation

Valie Export, born in Austria In 1940. Export studied art, painting and design in Vienna. After her divorce with her husband she decided to return to school to continue her artistry and take it seriously. Her main interest was to display the female body so that it can be perceived differently by men. She is recognized as one of the first feminist artist, who challenges the representation of the female body. Throughout her long career she viewed the body as an artistic material. She even offered to include her own body for strangers to touch just to expose the ways in which femininity is constructed.


Title: Aktionhose: Genitalpanik
Aktionhose: Genitalpanik was a series of six posters that she displayed in Munich 1968. In this poster, Valie Export has an artist sit with mustang jeans in which her crotch was cut out. She then wore a leather jacket holding a machine gun. The artists genitals were in display where it confronted the women representation.

Valie export continued to break barriers with her art to change the male gaze on a female. At the time her art was coming out the perception of a women was very different to what she wanted it to be. She referred her work as media activism where she used her body in a feminist way. She performed an art street fair in 1968 entitled "Touch Cinema" which was a cinema not for looking but for touching. She knew that by doing this it would change how males would look at her. 



Title-Touch Cinema
Film festival in Vienna,1968. Export wore a styrofoam box with a hole cut out of the front with a curtain covering it. Export invited passersby to put their hands under the curtain and touch her naked breasts.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/export-valie/

https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32075/1/how-genital-stroking-became-an-act-of-feminist-rebellion

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/export-action-pants-genital-panic-p79233