Valie Export, Feminist Art Pioneer, Dies at 85
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- Valie Export died in Vienna on Thursday at 85, three days before her 86th birthday, her foundation announced.
- Her most notorious work, Tapp und Tastkino (1968), involved strapping a miniature cinema to her bare chest and inviting shoppers in central Vienna to touch her breasts through a curtain, with Peter Weibel timing each interaction on a stopwatch.
- At the 1980 Venice Biennale, Export and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to fill the Austrian pavilion; Export's centrepiece "Geburtenbett" (Birth Bed) featured red neon streaming from a sculpted vulva and a TV broadcasting a Catholic mass.
- Her feature film The Practice of Love, about a reporter investigating peep shows in Hamburg's red-light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 1985 Berlin film festival.
- A judge revoked her custody rights for her daughter in 1970 after she was convicted on pornography charges for co-editing a book on Viennese Actionist art.
- Marina Abramović re-enacted Export's "Genital Panic" in 2005 at the Guggenheim as one of seven landmark performances of the 20th century in the show Seven Easy Pieces.
Why it matters: Export's career traces half a century of feminist art's push for institutional legitimacy — from criminal conviction over an art book in 1970 to occupying the Austrian pavilion at Venice a decade later, to having her work canonized in a 2005 Guggenheim retrospective. Her death closes the chapter on the European artists who made the body and the gaze their primary battleground.
