VALIE EXPORT: Retrospective at C/O Berlin Reviewed in Art Monthly
Art Monthly no. 474, March 2024
VALIE EXPORT: Retrospective
C/O Berlin, 27 January to 22 May
Who was VALIE EXPORT? The name – a spoof on a cigarette brand – sounds like something to do with international travel (VALIE = Valise?) when that was still considered glamorous, as much as the name from which it was changed in 1966 – Waltraud Höllinger – and sounds lumpenly local to the Austria (Linz) EXPORT came from. It is characteristic that this antinomy seems simplistic, only to open onto messy complexity: she was Höllinger née Lehner, so EXPORT was her third name. She had it copyrighted, capitals and all. I ask who she ‘was’ because, although this exhibition is titled ‘Retrospective’ and she is still alive, it consists almost exclusively of art that she made in a 15-year period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, most of it between 1967 and 1972. Does this imply that she assumed and inhabited her persona as an end-limited performance? That this issue is not raised anywhere in the presentation appears as curatorial timidity
or negligence.
At the outset, her name brand-stamps 12 silkscreens of the same image, that repeat, Warhol-style, in a spectrum of snazzy tints. She is pictured on a bench, pointing a small machine gun to one side, her jeans cut open at the crotch to reveal her nakedness. Freudians would no doubt see a compensatory exchange between phallicism and castration, but that would play into her hands by insisting on finding maleness in its absence, even from behind the camera: it’s a 1969 self-portrait. Perhaps I am falling into the same trap in seeing her wild thatch of hair as recalling the grotesque wigs in which Andy Warhol resembled an old woman. At least the association reverses the gender ruse at the last. Like Warhol’s self-portraits, EXPORT’s seem to be pitching an identity clear-cut enough to carry a poster, only for the image not to add up to one. What is she presenting herself as here: an urban bandit, deranged derelict, sex worker, victim of abuse, otherworldly angel set on avenging that abuse? Try pinning her down as a feminist activist and she assumes the studi-ous androgyny of conceptualism. See her as an anar-chist, with her sights set on postmodern capitalist culture, and she has slipped into a garter belt to insist that she is only out to seduce. Her flagrancy, like Warhol’s, is a decoy.
