VALIE EXPORT in Apollo The women who channelled violence into art
By Hettie Judah
[...] In the same year that Akerman made Saute ma ville, Valie Export stood on a street in Vienna with her partner Peter Weibel and invited passers-by to reach into a box strapped to her front and feel her breasts. A film made of Tap and Touch Cinema – as Export and Weibel called their performance or happening – shows a rowdy crowd gathering around the artists. It is hard not to fear for Export’s safety. In the event, most are cowed by her gaze once they have their hands in the box. Export would go on to create performances that submitted her body to various kinds of pain or hazard. Documentation included in a retrospective just ended at C/O Berlin showed her creeping naked between electrified wires, pouring hot wax over her feet and hands, and inviting the public to slice into a rounded loaf of bread tied to her belly.
Export was a wild proto punk who, in 1967, had shed her patrilineal surname and renamed herself after a cigarette brand. She saw little prospect for herself in Catholic Vienna (even the creative avant-garde was quite the boy’s club). In her manifesto of 1972, she called on women to ‘destroy all these notions of love, faith, family, motherhood, companionship which were not created by us and replace them with new ones in accordance with our sensibility, with our wishes’.
Seeing so many of her early works together, and watching her triumph over pain again and again, Export’s boldness and bravery seem remarkable. The cumulative effect of all those straps, hot wax and electric shocks also starts to feel a little kinky. This feeling is compounded by another public performance from 1968, From the Portfolio of Dogness during which Export led Weibel through the streets on all fours attached to a dog lead. It is a feminist statement, one designed, as per Snow, to fuck with those watching, but the dynamic is also unapologetically S&M. Bound in with all this pain is pleasure.
Like Export, Akerman deployed violence as a mode of expression. The performance of harm testified to her strength of feeling and desire for a degree of control over her circumstances. After the explosions of Saute ma ville, her voice appears, girlish and breezy, reciting the credits. Not dead after all, though the shadow remains.
