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Valie Export. Media Anagrams

(German original: "Mediale Anagramme")

edited by Neue Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kunst,
Berlin, Germany, 2003. 224 pp, illus. ISBN: 3926796

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann,
Institute of Media Research,
Braunschweig School of Art,
Germany.


spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de

Valie Export is one of the founders of contemporary media art in Europe. Over the decades her multimedia work develops performance and feature film, film live action, experiments with camera and Expanded Cinema, installation and video, photography and recently digital photography. In the sixties she was the only woman among the Vienna Group of action artists. Moreover, as a woman artist under the influence of at the time emerging feminist thinking she was using her own body and overtly showing female sexuality in order to provoke moral standards and public order, gender discrimination and dominant patriarchal discourse. Early performances and films put an emphasis on painful, overtly sexual, and self-reflexive experiences of the female body. The artist underlines body awareness in site specific photography where she places herself in the city landscape as if wrapping around buildings and steps. Export in photography, film, and performance shows not only the masturbating woman, but also the encounter of her naked body with an electric fence where the blessings shall reflect the status of woman as artist in repressive post-war Austrian society. This stance in accordance with the Vienna Group needs to be seen as personal response to the society that is hardly digesting its Nazi past. Exports overriding concern is with dismantling media representations through making visible and audible the construction of realities that shape our perception of the work, thereby sometimes testing the physical experience of her own body to the limits.

Export understands media art as social criticism and she deliberately uses different media languages in order to explore and express borderlands of mediated and real realities. Her ongoing concern as media artist lies in the reflection of zones and in-between spaces of media, arts and society, places where media merge with each other and identities multiply. As part of this strategy and in an act of cutting off the pre-defined identity that was attached to her through bearing the name of her father, the artist purposely has chosen the name Valie Export like a brand name and a tag. When the artist in a photography self portrait of 1970 holds a cigarette packet bearing the logo "Valie Export", she demonstrates identity of her own as a media program to scrutinize the conflict between self and media, between the tools and the cultural conditions of representation. Export who exposes her new identity as a brand name in capital letter by the same token is selling a 'product' and multiplying her 'self' through a cultural process of transfer and transformation of becoming someone else.

In 2003 the Academy of Arts in Berlin shows major works of Valie Export that compiles earlier conceptual pieces, experiments with film and photography, performances, expanded cinema and video installation of all periods of production. The work presented in the exhibition and additional text materials by Valie Export are documented in the catalog "Media Anagrams" together with a series of theoretical articles that reflect on different aspects of Export's media interventions from the late sixties up till today. The analytical articles in the catalog build up a theoretical frame that corresponds with Export's own theoretical writings, especially where the artist explains the diversity of her approach saying that the medium itself is not the message, that is a medium is no longer 'one' single message. In a well-known essay (not included in the catalog) Export defines the body in terms of "the real and the double". Export here explicitly states her conceptional principle that enunciation always involve the double, the other. The borders between different realities are shifting. Logically, multiplicity of media, fragmentation of media language and reflection on media representation are strategies in Export's that shall make the viewer aware and sensible of the different levels of media, representation, and physicality of the body. The critique of representation that Export throughout her work strongly deploys is in most articles taken up regarding the expression of Export's principles in using different media and in presenting the work in different environments, such as gallery, public space and cinema screening.

Roswitha Mueller in discussing Export's concept of body relates to feminist discourses where the split of reality and self is analyzed as typical experience of women in our societies. An experience that starts from childhood and is reproduced and countered in Export's actions of cutting where she literally performs to cut off from everything seen as necessary prerequisite to find and define her own identity. Cutting heavily involves injury and pain of the body and is carried out by Export in the realm of body art. As Mueller states, the artists' idea of expanded body refers to postmodern theories of circulation of signs and also to the notion of constructedness through power relations and historical connotations, a notion that takes up Foucaultian thinking. Through pain, as Export is convinced to demonstrate, the strangeness of the female body in our society becomes strikingly apparent so that much of her early performance work (where she bleeds and is hit through electric wires) needs to be understood as a process of self-awareness turning into self-determination. This is highlighted when in "Body Sign Action" of 1970 Export is lifting her dress and showing off the tattoo of a suspender right upon her upper thigh.

Ideas of "expanded" body overlap with concepts of expanded media, in particular cinema actions that Export is performing mostly together with Peter Weibel in the late sixties and early seventies in the streets of Vienna. Marlene Streeruwitz in her article on the Austrian context draws on the famous street actions where for example Valie Export is 'walking' Peter Weibel on all fours with a log leash next to her. Export also is known as film-maker of experimental feature length films, most prominently "Invisible Adversaries" (1976), where she understands film practice as analytical discourse of gender relations and explorations into space (articles by Marc Siegel and Gertrud Koch). The interest in space, urban structure and city architecture in Export's work has primarily developed in her photographic approaches where she similar to her films uses superimposition in order to visualize the 'split in reality'. As Silvia Eiblmayr underlines in her article about body configurations it is Export's concern to make visible the split in reality between a given context and the constraints of subjectivity. Again, the use of media as tool to differentiate between the media context and its representational system is carried out by Export through dislocations, superimpositions and sharp cuts. It is this series of devices that taken together express both, the real and the double. When Export in photographs of the seventies and eighties is wrapping her body around street corners, staircases and columns or when she inserts a geometrical form into landscape pictures or even points with her finger into the picture field, Export always intervenes into the representational mode of media images.

The collection of essays in the catalog and its selection of a wide range of illustrations documenting the phases of development and the diversity of media encounters over the past decades provide a solid overview and insight into the aesthetic principles of one of the most interesting contemporary media artists. As Sigrid Schade in her essay states, Export has always worked with new media at the time (video, and later digital photography) in ways that explore and thematize the media themselves. On the whole the conceptual approach of Export's is a critical encounter with a narrow understanding of media arts. Hers is intervention, an approach that is emphasized, explained and analyzed in the comprehensive essays of the well illustrated book "media anagrams".

 

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