“That celluloid angel you just saw?” Robert Ryan’s projectionist character in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952) says. “They oughta cut her up a little bit. She’d look more interesting.” Few artmakers have gone so far to literalize this desire than the Austrian filmmaker and performance artist VALIE EXPORT. EXPORT had a fascination with the women of Surrealism: Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn in particular, who she saw as using the female form to “disappear, to be transparent, or to be decoded,” as she told Andrea Juno in an issue of RE/Search. “Women have long preserved and sealed off their damaged identity under the emblem of pain’s deformations,” EXPORT wrote in her 1972 manifesto on “Feminist Actionism.” She proposed a visual language that embeds the cracks, tears, fissure, and pains of the female body within it. In EXPORT’s case, more often than not, she applied those cuts—both filmic and blood-letting—to herself.
In transforming her person into the political, EXPORT set the stage for scores of succeeding women artists, from Karen Finlay to Miranda July. Her recent passing leaves behind a body of work that includes both her two more outwardly surrealist feature films, Invisible Adversaries (1976) and The Practice of Love (1984), and a host of unrelenting, brazen shorts and performance documentation designed to curdle the gaze upon the onscreen woman.
In 1968, EXPORT strapped a box to her naked chest with two holes in it and brought her camera to a street fair, setting the stage for Touch Cinema, one of her first works of what she termed “expanded cinema.” “The state doesn't allow pornography, but you can feel free to experience the “Touch Cinema”—but only for 13 seconds,” EXPORT explained. “However, when you do this, you will be seen and watched by everyone." I’ve recently been told, but could find no evidence, that modern TikTokers have begun to unwittingly remake this experiment.
Man & Woman & Animal (1973), the notoriously discomforting ....Remote.....Remote..... (1973), and Syntagma (1984) all showcase women disassembled and itemized, their own frames fractured by that of the film. Syntagma is a dizzying array of reflections and projections that dissociate hands, feet, and heads via analogue screens (this process is referred to as “escamontage” in Genevieve Yue’s excellent book on feminism and film materiality Girl Head). ...Remote.....Remote..... turns cutting and bleeding into a highly symbolic ritual of subversion under an unflinching gaze, and in Man & Woman & Animal a patient camera observes a naked woman, her head lopped off by the top of the frame, finding pleasure in the shower. Taken as a whole, EXPORT’s short work creates a feminine panopticon: women surrounded by lenses and projected onto screens, refusing to give the audience comfort or pleasure in their image. “The man can see you naked,” EXPORT said in RE/Search, describing a performance where she rolled her bare body over shattered glass, “yet he cannot see you the way he wants to see a naked female body.”
“Valie Export Shorts Program” screens tonight, October 8, at Metrograph as part of the series “Valie Export: Tap, Touch, Burn.”
