VALIE EXPORT: A look at unexpected artistic diversity

VALIE EXPORT: A quiet star in the art world?

VALIE EXPORT is written in all caps, not least because her artist name is also a protected logo consisting entirely of capital letters. VALIE EXPORT is also increasingly making her mark in the world art rankings; around the year 2000, she was ranked around 100th, but in 2008/2009 she broke the 50th mark and has since been steadily climbing towards the top third of the world's most famous artists (with occasional dips, most recently in July 2016 when she slipped to 48th place).

That VALIE EXPORT would reach the very top of the world rankings (and remain there calmly, without the tabloid stands collapsing from being overloaded) was not even remotely foreseeable at the beginning of VALIE EXPORT's career, 50 years and at least as many scandals earlier… only the most creative and versatile provocateurs on the planet can achieve that. Get to know one of them.

VALIE EXPORT makes art for specialists

The works of VALIE EXPORT are sometimes known only to specialists:

Film enthusiasts with roots in the 1960s and their memories are familiar with “Expanded Cinema” , the touch-and-feel cinema with the world's smallest cinema and the curtain that rose exclusively for two hands in front of the artist's breasts, which was opened on the occasion of the 1st European Meeting of Independent Filmmakers in Munich in 1968… “TAPP und TASTKINO Expanded Cinema Aktion” , performance.

Film enthusiasts and middle-aged feminists are familiar with VALIE EXPORT's feature film "Die Praxis der Liebe" was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival

For all those proud young women of today who have “overcome feminism” (because they like to earn a fifth less than men in the exact same job, or because pride plus denial is enough to completely block out reality): Watch this urgently and think about why “the whole man-woman-power thing” hasn't risen to civilizational heights since then, but instead descended into 50 Shades of Grey…

Every admirer of “Viennese Actionism” and its sometimes crude actions places VALIE EXPORT in direct context with Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, or Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Although, apart from her membership in the Vienna Institute for Direct Art, founded in 1966 by Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, her contact with the “Viennese Actionists” was primarily through her then-partner, artist and media theorist Peter Weibel (who, after all, had given the Actionists their name).

Although she wanted to clearly distinguish their work from her own as an action and performance artist in terms of aesthetics, content, and form; although her work as a media artist and filmmaker already exceeded the limitations of the "Vienna Actionists".

Those familiar with the art world know VALIE EXPORT from documenta (Capitals meet Common…), No. 6 in 1977 and No. 12 in 2007. Or from the Venice Biennale, 1980 (EXPORT, together with Maria Lassnig, curated the Austrian Pavilion), 2007 and 2009 (EXPORT was co-commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion).

VALIE EXPORT is known to a wider audience, for example, from the double scissors in the Belvedere Palace Park in Vienna (installation “Die Doppelgängerin” , 2010, see the following illustration), the memorial for Nazi expellees at the Stadtsee lake in Allentsteig in Lower Austria, or as the designer of the Austrian Film Prize (see illustration below).

Those who have only seen individual pieces so far might gain from seeing the complete work, which offers a true wealth of completely different art from one mind and one hand…

VALIE EXPORT's consistent path to art

VALIE EXPORT was born Waltraud Lehner in Linz in 1940, while her father was fighting for his country and lost his life in the war. Her mother raised Waltraud and her two sisters alone alongside her work as a teacher, with support from the local convent school the sisters attended.

It is not recorded where little Waltraud got the inspiration to engage with art; in a city like Linz, however, a simple walk is enough.

She definitely wanted to “do something with art” and began training at the Linz School of Applied Arts from 1955 to 1958; during her training, she created her first painted works and photographic self-portraits “Metamorphoses of Identity”

At 18 years old (1958) she first married a Mr. Höllinger and became a mother to a daughter in the same year, but separated from her husband in 1960, went to Vienna and studied until 1964 at the Higher Federal Teaching and Research Institute for Textile Industry.

After graduating with a diploma in design, VALIE EXPORT entered the film industry , where she worked as a script girl, film editor, cutter, and extra in 1964 and 1965; her first screenplay was completed in 1966 : “OUT WITH OLD DOESN'T MAKE NEW – an attempt at meaninglessness. metaphorical image association, project” .

In 1967, Waltraud Lehner Höllinger became VALIE EXPORT, in capital letters, as an artist's name, artistic concept, logo – and with the intention of being artistically active under her own name in the future, not the name of a deceased (national socialist) father, not the name of a long-gone husband.

VALIE stands for Waltraud and perhaps also for value (valid, value), EXPORT stands for exported ideas and exported thoughts and the path from the safe harbor (Ex Port) into the wide world of culture, which VALIE EXPORT is now sustainably and successfully tackling:

VALIE EXPORT: A welcome anti-star in the media world!

With cinema like “Expanded Cinema” , performances like “Cutting” (1968 and 1972, five parts, scissor cuts and pubic hair shaving end in fellatio) and works like “Body Sign Action” (1970, the body as canvas and a garter tattooed on the thigh), VALIE EXPORT has, in a short time, plowed through every finely cultivated petit-bourgeois garden of thought with the force of a bulldozer – urgently needed for new growth, but initially painful.

The Austrian citizens, so painfully shaken, resisted, together with and incited by a press that always gave credence to the loudest voice. Or rather, gives credence to this kind of "I-speak-for-the-majority press" is the long-existing form of the eternally sought-after perpetual motion machine.

A word machine instead of a technical machine, producing slander and hatred instead of energy, but that by definition, from the logic of how such press reports arise, at least completely without energy expenditure for the producing press:

Because diversity particularly frightens the simple-minded, there is always a great deal of outrage, especially from the simple-minded, against innovations or provocations intended to lead to innovations. Initially, a wide variety of considerations, reasons, and motives are typically cited for these innovations—interesting ideas and, in a functioning democratic state, the starting point for a multi-sided dialogue…

Until the “for-the-majority press” turns the common root cause of the outrage – usually motives from the primeval reptilian brain of man and thus the “greatest common stupidity” – into a (suitable for weeks) headline.

And thus creating a new social class at the level of the greatest shared stupidity, which sometimes exists until it threatens democracy and sometimes is short-lived, but at least causes a few of the cleverer minds that are actually urgently needed in the country to emigrate…

Collective stupidity and its precursor, ignorance, are dangerous enemies and become even more dangerous enemies when they are deliberately created, as just described, to reap quick profits.

VALIE EXPORT has suffered the full force of what can be unleashed in the wake of a press-driven mass outrage against suddenly unjustified innovators… slander and persecution, harassment and threats; the witch hunt even targeted her daughter's custody rights.

To the self-proclaimed conquerors of feminism: If you don't turn on your brains soon, such witch hunts against women with their own opinions could soon become commonplace again… Oh, right, doesn't concern you.

What's good prevails, VALIE EXPORT

But EXPORT simply continued making art through all this turmoil: feature films, performances, objects, actions, and installations.

The exhibitions began in 1966, and in 1992 the first retrospective, “VALIE EXPORT. Alive or Dead. Retrospective” , was held at the Landesgalerie Linz at the Upper Austrian State Museum; since 2001, the “Export Cube – The Transparent Space” on Vienna’s Lerchenfelder Gürtel, a piece of safe urban space for women who want to delight the citizens of Vienna with cultural activities.

In total, by the summer of 2016, the artist could look back on almost 40 solo exhibitions and over 500 group exhibitions in probably every place in the world where an art exhibition has ever taken place.

VALIE EXPORT has succeeded in delivering on its name: Valid art export from Austria , reaching even the most remote corners of the art world.

The exhibition history of the artist VALIE EXPORT is striking in that, compared to other artists at the top of the art world rankings, she has had significantly fewer exhibitions of her work. This has its reasons; it reflects, firstly, an age-old debate in art history about the extent to which photography (originally conceived as a technical means of depicting reality one-to-one) can even be considered art.

The average top artist paints, creates conceptual art, puts together installations, “carves pictures” in stone, wood, bronze; but he does not “simply” press the shutter release of a camera and then claim that the result is art.

No one who follows the art scene in the world would dispute this today – millions for a “genuine Gursky”, 400,000 for 80 new prints by Eggleston confirm this with hard facts.

photography has been knocking forcefully at the doors of art , but had to fight for entry into its hallowed halls for an astonishingly long time.

A bit of a struggle at the entrance is common: Even artists like Picasso and some of his early contemporaries, who were far ahead of their time with their avant-garde ideas, failed for a long time before the jury of the most important art event of their time – the Salon de Paris, founded by King Louis XIV.

The regular art exhibition initiated in 1667, which was still the center of the “traditional” French art scene in the 19th century, continued until 1884 when the “Société des Artistes Indépendants” (Association of Independent Artists) was founded and presented a counter-proposal with the “Salon des Indépendants”.

The artistic aspirations of photography were also formulated as early as the second half of the 19th century: "Pictorial Photography" aimed to symbolically depict not only reality, but also emotional states or fundamental values.

In “early art photography”, photographic means are explicitly used to express content-related or formal concerns.

For a long time, without any chance, the majority of artists who were then usually active as “visual artists in the narrower sense” (conceptual art, installation, performance etc. were only just “germinating”) – and the majority of art critics anyway – denied any artistic quality to the “photographs” created by camera.

It was only at the end of the last century that “art” (which was not really doing well at the time due to the upheavals and drastic losses of Jewish artistic personalities caused by the Second World War) included “photography” in its ranks; not without repercussions, as VALIE EXPORT exhibition figures show.

However, the number of solo exhibitions – 38 solo shows for an artist who has been in the business for half a century and is among the 50 most famous artists in the world – shows the typical female tendency towards zero to a truly frightening extent.

Male colleagues with similarly long careers were able to present their work exclusively an average of 20 times as often; male colleagues with the still somewhat neglected topics of "photography and media art" achieve an average of five times the number of solo exhibitions; and even the "double mistake" (woman AND photographer/media artist) were able to present themselves in their own exhibitions at least three times as often in the USA.

For a woman in the German-speaking art world, this double mistake is a death sentence; apart from VALIE EXPORT, Rosemarie Trockel was one other woman from the German-speaking world who managed to reach the top 100 ranks of the world's best art list.

However, since women are only represented in fractions at the absolute highest levels of art (15%, some traditional companies stubbornly clinging to neoliberalism have a better percentage of women), this is not really surprising.

Only today's young women, with their feminism having been overcome, would be completely taken aback, but they are unlikely to be interested in art, except perhaps on their fingernails.

Representatives of democratic states and employees of non-governmental organizations such as foundations, etc. – let's just say, all people who work (also) for something other than maximum profit – usually have fewer problems with the performance of women than publicly traded companies that are still organized at the level of hunter-gatherer societies.

VALIE EXPORT has therefore received numerous awards

• 1969 Film Art Promotion Prize of the City of Vienna
• 1974 State Scholarship for Literature from the Mayor of Vienna
• 1977 Special Mention for “Outstanding” at the 21st London International Film Festival
• In 1977, the feature film “Invisible Opponents” was selected by the jury for the Austrian State Prize for Film, but the responsible minister refused approval.
• 1978 Special Jury Prize XXI Mostra Internazionale del Film d'Autore, San Remo
• 1985 International Jury Prize of the 31st West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen
• 1985 Premio Especiale del Jurado, 27th International Festival of Documentary and Short Film, Bilbao, Spain
• 1985 Special Prize at the 8th Tyneside Film Festival, Newcastle, Great Britain
• 1988 Festival Prize at the 7th Annual Daniel Wadsworth Memorial Video Festival, Hartfort
• 1988 Festival Prize at the San Francisco International Video Festival
• 1990 City of Vienna Prize for Fine Arts
• 1991 Culture Prize of the State of Upper Austria for Art and Science, Film and Video
• 1992 Award for computer graphics at Ars Electronica, Linz
• 1993 Austrian Award for Video and Media Art
• 1995 6th International Drawing Triennal Prize, Wroclaw
• 1995 Sculpture Prize of the EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna
• 1997 Gabriele Münter Prize '97 of the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth
• 1998 1st CD-ROM Prize of the Videonale Bonn
• 1998 Gustav Klimt Prize of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna
• 1998 Austrian Award for Artistic Photography, Vienna
• 2000 Alfred Kubin Prize of the State of Upper Austria
• 2000 Oskar Kokoschka Prize Austria, State Prize of the Austrian Federal Government
• 2002 Art Recognition Prize of the City of Linz
• 2003 Golden Badge of Honor for Services to the City of Vienna
• 2004 International Prize for Art and Culture of the Cultural Fund of the City of Salzburg
• 2005 Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
• 2005 Election as a member of the Austrian Curia for Science and Art
• 2009 Honorary doctorate from the University of Art and Design Linz
• 2010 Grand Golden Decoration of Honour of the City of Linz for Services to the Republic of Austria
• 2011 Vienna Women's Prize (together with Ina Wagner)
• 2014 Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Awards for the Arts (together with Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, Gustav Metzger)
• 2015 Grand Golden Badge of Honor of the City of Linz for services to culture
• 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Women

33 impressive prizes , awarded by people who understand something about art, compared to a very reserved presence as an individual artist… anyone who wants to speculate with art should probably take a closer look at the female artists.

VALIE EXPORT today, right now, at this moment

VALIE EXPORT is currently being exhibited more frequently than ever before; from just under a dozen exhibitions each in the 1970s and 1980s to over three dozen in the 1990s, she has already had over 400 exhibitions , of which the following are currently running:

• Until September 4, 2016: “The Artist and His Self. The Abstracted Self-Portrait in Photography from 1960 to 2000”, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
• until 04.09.2016: “Body & Soul”, Essl Museum – Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg
• to September 11, 2016: “1957-1975”, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville
• to September 18, 2016: “Invisible Adversaries: Marieluise Hessel Collection”, Hessel Museum of Art & Center for Curatorial Studies Galleries at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
• to September 25, 2016: “Punk – Its Traces In Contemporary Art”, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
• to October 2nd, 2016: “Medicine in Art”, Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków
• until 09.10.2016: “Poetry of Change”, Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg
• until November 6, 2016: “Solo Walks – A Gallery of Walking”, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur

On the artist's website, ValieExport.at , you can find out everything about the VALIE EXPORT Center , an international research center for media and performance art, which will also manage VALIE EXPORT Archive

The site is already very well set up; you can browse through an incredible 222 works of art, each with an image and its own page of explanations, e.g. a press report about the artwork.

In these public collections you can view works by VALIE EXPORT live:

• Austria : Customs Office Bad Radkersburg, Neue Galerie Graz, Essl Museum of Contemporary Art Klosterneuburg, Landesgalerie at the Upper Austrian State Museum + Lentos Art Museum Linz, Galerie Fotohof + Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, Bank Austria Kunstforum + Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna
• France : FRAC des Pays de la Loire Carquefou
• Germany : Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf
• Italy : Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano, Studio Stefania Miscetti Rome
• Spain : Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, ​​ARCO Collection Madrid, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo Sevilla
• Switzerland : Mamco musée d'art moderne et contemporain Geneva, Fotomuseum Winterthur
• USA : MOCA Grand Avenue Los Angeles CA, Museum of Modern Art New York City NY
• United Kingdom : Tate Britain London

VALIE EXPORT's legacy to the future

VALIE EXPORT held a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, School of Fine Arts, from 1989 to 1992, taught as a professor in the Department of Visual Communication at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1991 to 1995, and was a professor of multimedia performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 1995/1996 to 2005. Therefore, many students have encountered her work and will continue to develop it.

Other creative minds won't have to look far for inspiration in VALIE EXPORT's diverse body of work. Within a oeuvre brimming with ideas, bearing the hallmarks of a brilliant research spirit and an unbridled passion for thought that yields meticulously calculated and intellectually and logically sound results, there are several treasures to be discovered – one way to do so is via the artist's website, mentioned above.

The most important legacy concerns every person: VALIE EXPORT's work is a currently valid call to every citizen to become a troublemaker, revolutionary and provocateur again in the face of monstrous developments, to prove that the efforts of the democracy fighters who lived before us do not have a rather short half-life.

It is a call to all people to take extremely careful care of their democracies, because otherwise there is a great risk that contemporary history could repeat itself without us having learned the slightest thing from it.