Not brutal, just aggressive VALIE EXPORT in conversation with Gabriel Proedl

Interview: Gabriel Proedl

All her life she has fought: for attention and against machos. Now, at 83, artist VALIE EXPORT looks back. A conversation about the allure of the dangerous, her fascination with poisonous snakes and the Kalashnikovs in her studio.

A shop in a Viennese side street, at ground level, and the windows covered with frosted glass film, as is usual for doctors' and lawyers' offices. Pale light from office lights on the ceiling, cold stainless steel handle on the entrance door. VALIE EXPORT sits in her desk chair, her orange hair a little shaggy. She has been going by this name since 1967, after the Austrian cigarette brand. Written in capitals to attract attention, she says, in a line of male artists her name alone should scream: "I'm here, disturbing your peace."

With her radical, aggressive art, she shaped the feminist struggle for decades and is - it is fair to say - one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Her public performances are almost iconographic: when she led the artist Peter Weibel through the city as a dog or pushed her way through a narrow porn cinema with her jeans cut out at the crotch.