Figuring Austria’s Repressed Violence: Artistic Labour of the Body in the Work of Elfriede Jelinek and VALIE EXPORT Rose-Anne Sophia Gush Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies The University of Leeds August 2018 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Rose-Anne Sophia Gush to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. iii Acknowledgments I am grateful to the University of Leeds for awarding me the 110 Anniversary Scholarship. This allowed me the financial freedom to undertake this research, without which it would not have been possible. I am sincerely grateful to Dr Gail Day and Dr Diane Morgan for their patience, encouragement and sharp insight. I would also like to thank Professor Griselda Pollock, Professor John Mowitt for their conversations; my Leeds colleagues Fiona Allen, Luisa Corna, and Gill Park, Tom Hastings and Sophie Jones with whom I organised the conference in 2017 Speak, body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life, a related collaboration. I would like to thank those at the Generali Foundation archive, which I managed to visit in 2015 before its two-year closure; the Women in German Network which awarded me the Zantop Travel Award, making possible the time that I spent in Vienna in 2016. The stretching out of this time in Vienna, to my mind grounded this thesis. In connection, I would like to thank the Elfriede Jelinek Forschungszentrum for advice, events and conversations, and the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz_ Forschungszentrum für Medien- und Performancekunst, which finally opened in 2017 after much anticipation; special thanks to Dagmar Schink. I was able to present parts of this research at a number of conferences: Historical Materialism Annual Conference in London always provided rich discussions. The Adorno and Politics conference in Istanbul also provided this kind of space. The panel at the College Art Association Annual Conference, organised by Dr Jaleh Mansoor and Dr Vanessa Parent provided new perspectives. I am grateful to have received a Leeds for Life Conference Award which aided my trip to New York City. I would like to thank the Feminist Reading Group in London (2012-2015) for providing a politically committed space for long lasting friendship, solidarity, co-learning and self- education. I am deeply indebted to my dearest friends and comrades from London: Larne Abse Gogarty, Tom Allen, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Svenja Bromberg, Sophie Carapetian, Christina Chalmers, Sam Dolbear, Danny Hayward, Lizzie Homersham, Demetra Kotouza, Hannah Proctor, Betty Schulz, Linda Stupart, Maija Timonen, Amy Tobin, Sebastian Truskolaski, Marina Vishmidt and Josefine Wikström. In Vienna I am grateful to Jules Gleeson, Sólveig Gudmundsdóttir and Johanna Guggenberger. I thank Mahdi Rahimi for his persistent inspiration and support. Finally, thanks to John Gush for his ongoing encouragement. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Scott. iv Abstract Figuring Austria’s Repressed Violence, Artistic Labour of the Body in the Work of Elfriede Jelinek and VALIE EXPORT operates on three levels. It functions as a historical and political project, wherein the work of EXPORT and Jelinek is read in the context of the formation and unprocessed historical memory of the Second Republic of Austria. It analyses how, in these works, the body is figured in relation to theories found in Theodor Adorno and Sigmund Freud and it also contributes original research to interpretations of EXPORT and Jelinek. More precisely, this thesis attempts to theorise a concept of artistic labour which includes the categories of the body, instinct, sublimation, repression and history. It brings the question of gender and the body into relation with Theodor Adorno’s concept of artistic labour in Aesthetic Theory (1970), where an artwork is understood as the congelation of useless social labour. It shows that on the one hand, the analysis of the body in this art is undertaken as a critique of women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual-object. On the other, this art reflects on and works against the reduction of the human-body to material, in both the economic-process and in relation to the past. It enquires into the meaning of artistic use of the body, within language, image and action, under racial-patriarchal-capitalism in postwar art. Moreover, it articulates the necessity of a feminism beyond ‘innocence’ and pure Otherness. The approach that I take attempts to move dialectically between critical interpretation, historical analysis and speculation. The works in question carry forward a historical response and proximity to the legacy of Nazism and its latent and pronounced continuity within the founding of the postwar nation state: The Second Republic of Austria. ‘Figuring Austria’s Repressed Violence’ is structured into five chapters which work through the following categories: identity, and the body as material; the limit of the body, expressed in relation to repression and shame and the Leib-Körper distinction; the concept of thinking-praxis in Feminist Actionism; the role of ‘woman’ and the uses of gender by fascism; the gendered dialectic of the sub-history of film and the ‘subterranean history of the body’ and lastly, on the concepts of history, fate and abstraction in relation to the politics of Heimat and nativism. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 - Perspectives on the Body 1.1: Pain and Pleasure 10 1.1.1: Discourses 15 1.1.2: Art and the Body 18 1.2: Austria 21 1.2.1: Moments of Resistance 23 1.2.2: Continuities 25 1.2.3: Waldheim and the Palimpsest of 1989 30 1.3: The Body as Material 34 1.3.1: Ambiguity of the Body 41 1.3.2: Dialectics of the Body 47 1.3.3: Conclusion: The Body as Transfigured Nature 49 Chapter 2 - The Limit of the Body 2.1: Bearing Repression 52 2.1.1: Material Thinking 53 2.1.2: Hyperbulie 60 2.1.3: Between Victim and Accomplice 63 2.2: Praxis 65 2.2.1: Subject and History 71 2.3: A retired Niobe 73 2.3.1: Writing the Body 74 2.3.2: The Perception of Leib and Körper 82 2.3.3: Perversions 85 2.3.4: Conclusion: The Social Expression of the Body 89 Chapter 3 - The Uses of Woman 3.1: Labour of Sexuality 91 3.1.1: Pornography’s debates 95 3.1.2: Creation, Procreation; Production, Reproduction 100 3.2: The Holy Family 105 3.2.1: Psychoanalysis: between Communism and Fascism 108 3.2.2: Transactions 114 3.3: Gender and Fascism 117 3.3.1: Subtraction and Destruction 127 3.3.2: The Dialectics of Language 130 3.2.3: Conclusion: Against Innocence 132 vi Chapter 4 - Life Becomes a Film: Deformation, Media and the Body 4.1.0: Cinema: Expanded and Reduced 135 4.1.1: Cinema takes to the streets 138 4.1.2: Fetish against Fetish 145 4.1.3: Production and Reproduction 147 4.2: Expanded History Film 151 4.2.1: Trümmerfrau of Film 159 4.2.2: The History of Women 162 4.3: Silence over the Body 169 4.3.1: The Self-Mutilating Dialectics of Totality 174 4.3.2: Conclusion: The Modern Song 177 Chapter 5 - A Mountain of Fate 5.1: Totenauberg 180 5.1.1: A Work in Four Parts 186 5.1.2: What Hides in Language? 193 5.2: Fate in Elfriede Jelinek 205 5.2.1: Real Life 208 5.2.2: Against Fate 210 5.2.3: Fate’s Abstraction 212 5.3: Conclusion: Sending Up 215 Conclusion 217 Bibliography 224 Illustrations 243 vii List of Illustrations Plate 0.1. VALIE EXPORT, Tapp und Tastkino, 14 November 1968, Munich, street-film, action. Plate 0.1a. Documentation from VALIE EXPORT, Tapp und Tastkino, 14 November, 1968, street film, action, Munich, as presented in Wien Bildkompendium: Wiener Aktionismus und Film (Vienna Image Compendium: Viennese Actionism and Film), eds. by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT (Frankfurt: kohlkunstverlag, 1970). Plate 0.1b. VALIE EXPORT, ‘Tapp und Tastkino, Research Sketch’, Sammlung Generali Foundation. Plate 0.2. Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Oswald Wiener, Peter Weibel, Franz Kaltenbeck, Laurids, Kunst und Revolution, 7 June 1968, University of Vienna, as published in Wien Bildkompendium: Wiener Aktionismus und Film (1970). Plate 0.2a. Kunst und Revolution poster and invitation text. Text by Oswald Wiener. The Action was organised by the SÖS (Austrian Socialist Student Society). Plate 0.2b. Documentation of the media reaction to Kunst und Revolution, as presented in Wien Bildkompendium. Plate 0.3. The front-cover of the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition: MAGNA, Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität, 7 March - 5 April 1975, Galerie nächst St. Stephan. The exhibition was organised by VALIE EXPORT. The pamphlet was published by Galerie nächst St. Stephan and edited by VALIE EXPORT. Plate 0.3a. Exhibition view of MAGNA, Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität at Galerie nächst St. Stephan. Plate 0.3b. Pages from the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition: MAGNA, Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität. The pages show the work of VALIE EXPORT (above); and Birgit Jürgenssen and Maria Lassnig (below). Plate 0.4. The cover image of the catalogue of essays and images: Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn (Art with its own Sense), 1985, edited by Silvia Eiblmayr, VALIE EXPORT and Monika Prischl-Maier (above); exhibition view of Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn, which took place in the Museum for Modern Art and the Museum of the twentieth-century 28 March - 12 May 1985.