Valie Export, Avant-Garde Icon And Feminist Trailblazer, Dies At 85

(MENAFN- USA Art News) VALIE EXPORT, the Austrian artist who recast the female body as a site of confrontation, has died at 85

VALIE EXPORT, born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, died yesterday at age 85, according to her gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac. The gallery did not list a cause of death or survivors. Export, who changed her name in 1967, became one of the most influential figures in performance art and Expanded Cinema, building a practice that fused film, action, and feminist critique with unusual force.

Her work emerged from the political and cultural turbulence of postwar Austria, but it quickly moved beyond any single national context. In 1968, she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative and staged Aktionhose Genitalpanik in a Munich cinema, wearing crotchless pants as she walked past seated viewers. The piece made the female body impossible to keep at a safe remove, collapsing the distance between screen, spectator, and lived reality.

That same year, Export began TAPP und TASTKINO, also known as TOUCH and TAP Cinema, which she performed from 1968 to 1971 in 10 European cities, including London and Amsterdam. Wearing a curtained box over her bare chest, she invited viewers to touch her breasts for no longer than 33 seconds. The work turned spectatorship into a physical and ethical test, exposing the habits of looking that her art sought to interrupt.

Export carried that inquiry into film. Facing the Family, commissioned by the Austrian Broadcast Corporation, aired in 1971 and showed a middle-class family at dinner, staring into the same television culture that was watching them. Invisible Adversaries, released in 1977, became her first feature-length film. In 1980, Export and Maria Lassnig became the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale, a milestone that underscored how thoroughly women had been excluded from the country's official art history.

Her later work continued to expand the terms of performance and installation. In 2002, she launched a series using real-time footage inside the speaker's throat, extending her long interest in the body as both medium and message. Across decades, Export remained committed to art that did not merely depict power, but made its structures visible in real time.

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