LOCATION AND DISLOCATION The Media Performances of VALIE EXPORT Mechtild Widrich VALIE EXPORT: Time and Countertime, a retrospective at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Vienna and Linz, Austria, October 16, 2010–January 30, 2011; Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy, February 19–May 1, 2011. ow can an artist who became The retrospective stretches across pub- famous for one or two radical lic space, opening simultaneously in performances in the 1960s two geographically distinct venues: the Hframe an oeuvre of more than forty other part of the show was in the Len- years that ranges from live actions to tos Kunstmuseum in Linz, a city two films, media installations, and ultimately hours’ drive west of Vienna, where the monuments? Riding on the subway in artist was born in 1940. In Linz, the urban Vienna, we pass a construction poster differs, evoking related but subtler site that gives way to the back side of a issues. Printed in black and yellow, we residential house: on its grey wall, we see see EXPORT in the mid-70s, jumping the blown-up photograph of a standing through the air in a nightgown, mobi- woman with a machine gun, a triangle lizing her own body in space—but not cut out of her pants around the crotch. without an awareness of the cultural and It is the defining image of Austrian artist erotic implications of making a public VALIE EXPORT, the image that stands appearance in a costume representing the for her infamous action Genital Panic, epitome of bourgeois privacy. EXPORT which Marina Abramović recently recon- has, all this time, been exploring the structed at the Guggenheim Museum. constitution of subjects in public and The choice of this image as poster for private space. The ongoing nature of this her retrospective at the Austrian Gallery investigation allows the spectator to see Belvedere, Time and Countertime (Zeit EXPORT’s whole oeuvre, with its sharp und Gegenzeit) asks us to see EXPORT turns from performance to photography as aggressive feminist performer, disrupt- to film to digitally modified imagery, as ing male hegemony in the most public an intellectually consistent undertaking. ways possible. © 2011 Mechtild Widrich PAJ 99 (2011), pp. 53–59. 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00055 by guest on 02 October 2021 The two simultaneous investigations of early European proponents of “expanded the self in relation to physical and social cinema,” which meant not only avant- space set the stage for a re-evaluation of garde subject matter and production the “classic” confrontational EXPORT, techniques, but also the mixture of even though the aim of the exhibition live action and film (e.g., a film screen is to reconsider her whole oeuvre, get- showing a moving spot, which should be ting away from the myth of the feminist struck with a ping-pong ball), film taken warrior. Both exhibitions were curated with cameras attached to the body, or by Angelika Nollert, since 2007 the film as a metaphor for the presentation ambitious new director of the New of the body itself. (EXPORT’s famous Museum Nuremberg. There was a real Touch Cinema is mentioned in the press effort to avoid Actionist clichés: for the release, but not shown. In this action, garden of the Belvedere, a new sculpture EXPORT’s breasts could be held, for of two giant pairs of scissors (entitled a short time, by spectators entering a Doppelgängerin, the female version of Styrofoam “theatre” worn on her chest.) the double) has been cast in aluminum; This “filmic” activity may be interpreted in Needle (1996/97, reconstructed for as a paradoxical search for unmediated Linz 2010), three giant metal bolts push media, as the invention of interactive through a child’s dress. The machine media, and ultimately, as an effort to gun of Genital Panic also returns, now socially activate the audiences of modern standing for real conflict: Kalashnikov, media. produced for a Moscow exhibition in 2007, consists of 109 Russian Kalash- Media as an idea and as concrete practice nikov rifles piled in a tower that faintly is perhaps the most important subject in recalls Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to EXPORT’s oeuvre. The body, predomi- the Third International, resting in a nantly her own, is both part of the mech- metal tub filled with waste oil. anism and the subject matter broadcast by this media. In Adjunct Dislocations I Two videos, consisting of found foot- (1973), EXPORT mounted two cam- age downloaded from the Internet, eras, one on her chest and another on show executions in China and war her back, and walked from an apartment scenes in Iraq. The work is a respect- in the center of Vienna to the suburbs. able conversation piece in the style of All the while, another camera filmed recent political art, addressing dwindling EXPORT moving through her environ- global resources and the globalization of ment as a body armed with recording conflict. Yet through all this, references machines. The footage from the three to EXPORT’s past gleam like beacons cameras was displayed simultaneously: of possibility: what is shown is not only the exterior view of EXPORT on the left, political powerlessness but the power the back and front view from EXPORT’s of the artist as political agent, as expert camera mounted one above the other on manipulator of images. the right. The effect approaches cinéma vérité but with carefully staged climaxes. In the late 1960s, EXPORT and Peter In a key scene, EXPORT encounters the Weibel (her sometime-collaborator, who statue of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor is not mentioned in the show) were from 1897 to 1910 and a notorious 54 PAJ 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00055 by guest on 02 October 2021 anti-Semitic demagogue. She circles the in space—“my” body but also any and statue, presenting it with her backside. every body, including the bodies of By delegating this part of the perfor- mechanical objects like cameras and mance to her mass-media apparatus (the monitors—is at the center of EXPORT’s back camera confronts the statue, which contribution to performance art, and she cannot see), EXPORT distances explains her approach to it through herself from a naïve action-based view “expanded cinema” and other new of performance as revolutionary, while media. That all perception is embodied pointing to ways in which technology is a lesson EXPORT may have learned can be politically mobilized. from phenomenology: not only that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, fashionable in This work was on display in Linz; a 1970s Vienna, but also the late work of later work called Adjunct Dislocations III Edmund Husserl, and its application to (dated 1978/96/2010) was shown in sociology and ethics by Alfred Schütz Vienna, consisting of rotating cameras (The Meaningful Construction of the mounted on the ceiling of a room, Social World [Der sinnhafte Aufbau der capturing three walls painted with thick sozialen Welt], published in Vienna in black vertical, horizontal, and diagonal 1932 and reprinted in 1960). stripes reminiscent of the serial concep- tualism of Daniel Buren. Two rows of EXPORT’s early film and video-based four monitors were stacked atop one works, while recognizably a part of another in front of each wall. Here, it conceptual art, are thrilling in their takes a moment to realize that we are rigor and messy immediacy, and more looking at a closed circuit installation compelling than the recent 32-part that captures the spectator, who has DVD installation Glottis (2007), which entered the room through the missing shows the result of a medical camera fourth wall: we see ourselves looking lowered into EXPORT’s throat while at the work for a moment, until the she speaks a text. The laryngoscope films camera has passed by. The work at once the movement of the vocal folds (part destabilizes and sharpens vision, while of the glottis), which modify the sounds placing it resolutely in space: the stacked produced by the vocal cords—EXPORT monitors, like the combined film rolls of is filming a natural medium. While the Adjunct Dislocations I, insist that seeing images are arresting, the effect of the is not a disembodied activity, but always reading and the decision to wrap the an act performed by bodies in space. monitors around the female baroque In the absence of EXPORT’s body, we fountain sculpture in the center of this become performers of the piece, but we room of the Belvedere make the work are also quite aware that the installation overbearing: the female voice, with the itself, with its sculptural bulk and pre- aid of film reminiscent of 1990s abject programmed rotating cameras, is the art (particularly the circular video principal performer. screens of Mona Hatoum) takes on the male aesthetic tradition with its silent These challenging meditations on per- female nudes. The search for a counter- ception, the phenomenology of every- tradition of 1970s feminist discourse day life, and experience of the body is mediated here with the tools of an WIDRICH / Location and Dislocation 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00055 by guest on 02 October 2021 Poster of VALIE EXPORT’s exhibition Time and Countertime in public space in Vienna, January 2011. Photo: Courtesy Mechtild Widrich. 56 PAJ 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00055 by guest on 02 October 2021 Top: VALIE EXPORT, Kalashnikov, 2007. Bottom: The Endless/Similar Melody of Cords, 1998. Installations at Museion, Bolzano, Italy, 2011. Photos: Othmar Seehauser.