EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT

The experimental “short circuit” between technical media and the body-as-medium carried out by VALIE EXPORT with various inventive tactics always takes place at the point where the artist goes in search of the ways in which media uphold the powerful structural connection between technology, ideology, and the practice of everyday life. In her Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations, 1973), EXPORT thus further amplifies the abstraction of the relation between the body and its environment with geometric figurations that give this body an additional “framing.” For the piece Body Sign Action (1970), EXPORT had a garter tattooed in two colors on her thigh. The tattoo in Body Sign Action, which takes the living body as an artist’s material, as a carrier of symbols, makes visible (and not only through its motif of the garter) the structural potential for violence that is coupled with the seductive power of the media. EXPORT calls the garter a “symbol of a past enslavement,” a “symbol of repressed sexuality,” and sees it as “a sign of belonging to a class which demands conditioned behavior.”
 
 

Other artworks

 
Body Sign Action - Export01 - VALIE EXPORT Export_003 - VALIE EXPORT Export_001 - VALIE EXPORT