Until the age of 14, Waltraud Lehner was educated in a Vienna convent. As she grew up, she became immersed in the film industry, got married and became a mother. It wasn’t until 1967 when she adopted the pseudonym VALIE EXPORT, both an artistic identity and a personal brand, one that simultaneously rejected the command of the men in her life and challenged the Nazi ideology of her parents’ generation. Her last name was, in part, a tribute to a brand of cigarettes.
“I did not want to have the name of my father [Lehner] any longer, nor that of my former husband Hollinger,” EXPORT explained in a BOMB interview, “My idea was to export from my ‘outside’ and also export, from that port. The cigarette package was from a design and style that I could use, but it was not the inspiration.”
EXPORT’s work in video, performance, photography, sculpture, and computer animation, often critiqued the way commercial film and the mainstream media objectified the female body. “In order to achieve a self-defined image of ourselves and thus a different view of the social function of women, we women must participate in the construction of reality via the building blocks of media-communication,” she said. “This will not happen spontaneously or without resistance, therefore we must fight!”
For the piece featured above, 1968’s “Tapp und Tastkino [Tap and Touch Cinema],” EXPORT crafted a wearable theatrical stage and wore it on the street. She then invited passersby to stick their hands inside the stage and feel, without looking, her breasts. The piece examined the underlying relationship between violence and eroticism, seeing and feeling, private and public. I found this linked with my final piece, but instead of letting hands get into my box, I will be ‘safe’ from the violence highlighted in this piece.
saratrouble 