VALIE EXPORT: Embodied Review at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House
By Georgia Lassner
Taking place inside a century-old house built of concrete wedges, the exhibition “VALIE EXPORT: Embodied” was installed with such a light, effervescent touch that at moments you could squint and miss it. The centerpiece of the show was a group of six oversize gelatin silver prints laid on chipboard from EXPORT’s series “Body Configurations,” 1972–76. The placement of the prints—not hanging from walls but attached to rafter-like stands—lent the exhibition an emergent feeling, a welcomed porousness between where EXPORT’s body stopped and the house began. These architectural near-contortions, in which she rests her body in intimate proximity to banal outdoor spaces (body as cornice, body as curb) also served as a backdrop for In Their Own Image, a daylong performance program organized by Chloë Flores that transformed the Schindler House, a modernist construction turned gallery, into a party house. Over three deliberate hours, artists Zachary Drucker, Sierra Fujita, Emily Lucid, Lara Salmon, Andrea Soto, and Dorian Wood offered a breadth of performance practices that reveled in pain, pleasure, soaring acoustics, rope play, and masks.
Part theater, part circus act, part lap dance, Fujita’s HANNYA (all performances 2024) featured a Noh mask affixed to the back of her head that stared blankly at the audience. Freaky and disarming, the performance was a bit horror movie and a tad S&M party. At one moment Fujita erupted into a fit of oscillating smiles and grimaces; in the next, she disrobed, revealing a painfully tight shibari-like rope suit, and began flipping and jumping, hair whipping, pieces of wet grass flying all around. Even with the yoga and circus moves thrown in, HANNYA remained focused, energetic, and harsh, rupturing the stoic modernism of the setting through explosive acts of vulnerability, rage, and desire. In the 130-minute Carry us, nourish them (prayer), Wood let out a sound so smooth and soothing, it had to be a lullaby. Clad in a gauzy pink maxi dress and big, jangly, spiky hoop earrings, Wood used song to dissolve the concrete and canvas. The lyrics of the lush melody consisted of the names of the laborers who built this enduring edifice, a call of acknowledgment that was clear and strong, yet gentle. The beginning of their refrain, “Oh foundation, over ground stolen from Gabrielino/Tongva peoples,” restored the real meaning of land acknowledgment—not something perfunctory or rhetorical, but soulful, healing, tragic.
For sURGE, performed throughout the event, Salmon lay with her back to the cold concrete floor, legs up against the wall. Her complexion was corpse-like, drained of blood, and her sheer slip revealed nipples, bruises, body hair. Electrodes, strung to her thighs from a nearby transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) unit, delivered pulses to her body. The presence of pain was alarming, yet somehow unknowable. A printed text near the TENS unit gave instructions to “please help manage my pain,” and visitors were invited to twist knobs on the machinery, yet they received no palpable reaction from Salmon. The idea of inflicting pain to relieve it may have been lost to the pose itself, which reeked of discomfort. Meanwhile, on the soft, grassy stage of the guest garden, Lucid gracefully draped herself in the lap of a monster for Minotaur, a reimagining of the myth of Heracles with Lucid as a version of the story’s hero who embraces the Minotaur instead of destroying it. As Lucid stroked the beast’s thick white horns and leaned into a full-tongue kiss, the depth of intimacy between them could only be described as enviable.
If you followed the pinwheel floor plan all the way around, you ended up at the north-facing window of what once was Rudolph Schindler’s studio, now partially obscured by a monitor that played EXPORT’s Adjunct Dislocations, 1973, a silent black-and-white film composed of three concurrent vignettes that run simultaneously: a 16-mm frame to the left and two stacked Super 8 frames to the right. The larger frame tracks EXPORT’s actions: doing push-ups, running in a field, jumping backward off a chair. She wears an apparatus for holding two cameras: one pointing out from her chest and one from her back. Adjunct Dislocations allows us to watch EXPORT and the film captured by her body cameras simultaneously. There is a Janus effect, but an even more complex triangulation of embodied perception: I look out of myself, I look in toward myself, I am watched, but my subjectivity is my own. To be indelibly recorded as a body in space—not as ornament, but as subject—was the core of both “Embodied” and In Their Own Image, as each added more lenses to capture ever more angles, a welcome permutation for this concrete bastion of modernism.
