From men on dog leads to public breast-fondling, Valie Export’s art demanded a total feminist revolution

By Hettie Judah

Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny, Valie Export was a hero to many women. Since the 1960s, she was driven by a fierce conviction that art and media would play an essential role in women’s liberation: that women must picture their own reality in the name of social progress. In Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972), she wrote that women must “use art as a means of expression, so as to influence the consciousness of all of us”. What she demanded was revolution.

I keep returning to her work. Can’t stay away. I have written about her in relation to violence in women’s art. Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain, and she made evident the violence of forcing women’s bodies to inhabit structures that were not designed for them. For the 1973 performance Hyperbuliashe crept naked through a corridor of electrified wires, exposing herself voluntarily to shocks.

She allowed me to use her 1976 photocollage The Birth Madonna for the cover of my book Acts of Creation. Showing a woman positioned like a Renaissance Madonna seated on a drying machine from which spews a bloody towel, it still provokes shock. I wrote about the twin pressures Export had experienced as a mother: from the Catholic church on the one side, and the new consumer society on the other.

More recently I have written about sexuality and power, and the 1968 performance From the Portfolio of Doggedness, during which she led Peter Weibel crawling through the streets of Vienna by a dog lead. Weibel was dressed in a business suit, a disturbing echo of the commuters milling around him. Export is deadpan, though you can spot a barely concealed smile. As I discovered in 2019, when I interviewed her for The Guardian, she certainly had a sense of fun.