VALIE EXPORT & KETTY LA ROCCA BODY SIGN

Curated by Andrea Maurer and Alberto Salvadori in collaboration with Studio VALIE EXPORT and the KETTY LA ROCCA Estate

Thaddaeus Ropac Milan presents as its second exhibition an unprecedented dialogue between VALIE EXPORT and KETTY LA ROCCA, two of the most visionary feminist conceptual artists to emerge in Europe during the 1960s. Both artists used their bodies as tools to challenge language’s patriarchal function and expose the dichotomy between its role in public and private space. They recognised that in order to convey their ideas an expanded field of action was required and moved beyond the constraints of a single medium. Photography, video, sculpture and performance were treated by both artists as fluid and permeable. 

In the 1960s, our attempts to cultivate a direct and uncontrolled language in art were based upon the idea that the dominant language was a form of manipulation. The plan was to circumvent these forms of social control. [...] This was the strength of the female body: to be able to express directly and without mediation. 
— VALIE EXPORT 

Although the artists never met and developed their practices in different contexts – EXPORT in Vienna and LA ROCCA in Florence – their works reveal striking parallels that testify to a shared sense of urgency: the need to rearticulate female identity and ‘to develop other forms of language outside of the system dominated by men’, as EXPORT says of the period. Similarly, LA ROCCA observed: ‘Women have no time for declarations: they have too much to do, and moreover they would then have to use language that is not their own, language that is both alien and hostile to them.’

Hands play a central role in both EXPORT and LA ROCCA’s work, as the primary perceptual organ that allows us to apprehend and interact with the world around us, and as a means to convey meaning beyond words. In LA ROCCA’s video work Appendice per una supplica (1972), female and male hands perform a sequence of movements, exploring the unmediated potential of ‘the gesture as opposed to the word, the gesture as a universal language’, as she says. Meanwhile, in her iconic TAPP und TASTKINO (TOUCHCINEMA, 1968), EXPORT invited audiences to touch her breasts through a box, transforming her naked torso into a haptic cinema screen, and the spectator into an active participant. It ‘explored the body as material for film in an entirely new way,’ she says. ‘By replacing the screen with skin, for example, you made cinema into much more than just a visual experience. It became a physical experience for the entire body.’ TAPP und TASTKINO ironically and provocatively rendered ‘graspable’ what the voyeuristic male gaze seeks to ‘feel’ in the visual mass medium.

This emphasis on the tactile – the immediacy of felt sensation and bodily experience – countered Conceptual art’s dematerialisation of the art object. By asserting the embodied perspective of the female artist in this context, both EXPORT and LA ROCCA expanded the very framework of Conceptual art, declaring the body itself as an accomplice of the conceptual. 

Both artists performed rebellious interventions within the urban landscape to question its infrastructures. In LA ROCCA’s early experiments with the Florentine avant-garde group, Gruppo 70, she used public space as a site for linguistic play, distributing her poetry in the streets or slipping her collages into magazines to reach unsuspecting audiences. Engagement (1967) was created for the action Approdo, during which LA ROCCA and members of Gruppo 70 installed modified traffic signs along the A1 motorway towards Florence. These linguistic puzzles diverted the authority of signage while drawing on the newly introduced alphanumeric license plate systems in Italy, exposing the tension between personal expression and the shared – often imposed – codes of communication. In EXPORT’s Body Configurations (1972–82), the artist contorts her body to fit spaces within Vienna’s urban and natural environments – niches, edges, curbs and corners – at times posing like a pointing or measuring device. Through these interventions, EXPORT examines how identity is shaped by the tangible structures of the city – an effect that is accentuated by black and red outlines. She describes these works as a ‘visible externalisation of inner states through the configuration of the body with its surroundings.’ 

This semiotic experimentation is further evident in LA ROCCA’s letter and punctuation mark sculptures created in 1970, which she described as ‘alphabetic presences’. In her sculpture, J with dot (three dimensions) (1970), a human-sized, black PVC ‘J’ – a letter that is absent from her native Italian alphabet – denotes the French Je, or ‘I’. In the subsequent photograph Con attenzione (1971), LA ROCCA takes this linguistic character to bed, creating a scene of both identification and estrangement between language and self. Locking eye contact with the viewer from beneath the sheets, LA ROCCA makes a wry commentary on the shortcomings of language as a means of communication.  

In BODY SIGN B (1970) – the photo series that lends the exhibition its title – EXPORT also engages with the visual language of sexuality. The artist is depicted hoisting her dress and defiantly meeting the viewer’s gaze as she reveals a tattoo of a garter on her thigh. By engaging the social semiotics of tattooing, the artist enacts a radical and ironic reversal of the objectification of the female body by the male gaze. 

While EXPORT explores the female body as both literally and culturally inscribed in this action, La rocca considers language’s origination from within the body with her Craniologie series (1973). X-ray images of a skull are double-exposed with photographs of her hands – one with an outstretched index finger, the other clenched into a fist – and overlaid with the handwritten words ‘you, you, you.’ Integrating the external and internal, mind and body, and word and image, LA ROCCA exposes the insufficiencies of each medium in isolation, and simultaneously cultivates her own proto-feminist visual language. As LA ROCCA explains: ‘The mystifying dimension of language has thus made the face of man, corroded it and for this reason I superimpose the gesture of the hand in all its expressiveness and communicative simplicity inside the skull, where the brain has given birth to the entirety of human thought and human language.’

In their practices, EXPORT and LA ROCCA negotiate language as a tool of the patriarchy. Working with and against this reality, they collude with language as sign, material and system, co-opt it for their own purposes, and circumvent its usage in conventional social contexts. Their visual experiments expand beyond the confines of the page: by inserting their bodies into the realm of language and vice-versa, they reveal the absurdity, and in turn the artistic and societal possibilities, of combining these systems of communication.