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Lot Essay
It should come as no surprise that Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) has become Valie Exports signature work. A volatile mix of Fluxus happening, Situationist subversion, Viennese actionism, media critique, sexual politics and anarcho-terrorism, the work continues to influence and elicit debate. A defiant gesture born of the turbulence of 1968, it teeters between ideological inspiration and hopeless nihilism. Problematic from every angle - is it an act of female empowerment or feminine hysteria? - Exports anti-spectacle is, at heart, a paradoxical affirmation of the self via a masochistic (and militant) fragmentation and exposure.
(C. LaBelle, VALIE EXPORT, frieze, Issue 60, June-August 2001).
As one of the most important pioneers of conceptual media art, performance and film, VALIE EXPORT has developed a body of work over the last four decades that explores the female posture from a feminist perspective and continues to influence and elicit debate. Born Waltraud Hollinger (ne Lehner), the artist shed the confines of patriarchal identity by changing her name to VALIE EXPORT, simultaneously transforming herself into a conduit for the manifestation of the female form in culture and as a brand. An exhibitor at the Venice Biennale 1980 and 2001 and documenta in Kassel in 1977 and 2007, a substantial body of her work has recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Action Pants: Genital Panic, is arguably VALIE EXPORT's most famous performance. The most iconic work from the artist's oeuvre, the present photograph memorialises her original radical performance of 1969. With her hair wildly teased and wearing crotchless trousers, VALIE EXPORT marched into an art film house in Munich and challenged the patrons to look at a real woman, rather than the images they enjoyed on screen. Carrying the gun pointed at the heads of people in the row behind, the artist moved slowly from row to row, until the patrons silently got up and left the theatre. 'Wearing the Action Pants I walked through the rows of seats,' VALIE EXPORT explained, 'then switched the cinema spotlight onto the screen and announced to the audience that what they would normally view on the screen, they could now view in reality My intention was to bring reality into the cinema's reality, into the cinematographic reality of the film theater. Reality often disappears in the cinema. Film and cinema always narrate realities without knowing or showing reality,' (VALIE EXPORT quoted in, Y. Dziewior 'Interview', VALIE EXPORT: archiv, exh. cat., Bregenz, 2012, p. 79).
While the exploration of the limitations of the film medium are tested in VALIE EXPORT's performance through the juxtaposition of the image projected on the movie screen and that of real human skin, the present image interrogates the feminist and sociological dimensions inherent in bodily gestures and the male gaze or voyeurism. These concepts are part of the artist's 'expanded cinema' concept, where she looks to conflate the reality presented on the cinematic screen with that of the cinematographic reality of the theater itself. This theory was first developed by VALIE EXPORT in 1968 and an example especially prescient to Action Pants: Genital Panic is that of Touch and Tap Cinema where the artist stood on the street with a box around her torso and invited male passers-by to place their hands through curtains hung across the front of the box and feel her bare breasts. Checking the spectator's gaze with her own, VALIE EXPORT undermines the predominant notion in the art historical canon of the dominant male gaze countered by that of the passive female. Elaborating on the ideas investigated during this performance, VALIE EXPORT intended for Action Pants: Genital Panic, 'to further reinforce the sexual element of the self-portrait with the addition of a machinegun which I held in various positions, so as to appropriate the concept of dominance, a concept of power and in doing so invert traditional roles. Generally it's the man who is assigned power, the possession of which he also defends. The way I staged myself was completely under my own control, my gaze, my pose with the machine gun and above all the use of a frontal shot. Frontal, on the front line,' (VALIE EXPORT quoted in, Y. Dziewior 'Interview', VALIE EXPORT: archiv, exh. cat., Bregenz, 2012, p. 79).
(C. LaBelle, VALIE EXPORT, frieze, Issue 60, June-August 2001).
As one of the most important pioneers of conceptual media art, performance and film, VALIE EXPORT has developed a body of work over the last four decades that explores the female posture from a feminist perspective and continues to influence and elicit debate. Born Waltraud Hollinger (ne Lehner), the artist shed the confines of patriarchal identity by changing her name to VALIE EXPORT, simultaneously transforming herself into a conduit for the manifestation of the female form in culture and as a brand. An exhibitor at the Venice Biennale 1980 and 2001 and documenta in Kassel in 1977 and 2007, a substantial body of her work has recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Action Pants: Genital Panic, is arguably VALIE EXPORT's most famous performance. The most iconic work from the artist's oeuvre, the present photograph memorialises her original radical performance of 1969. With her hair wildly teased and wearing crotchless trousers, VALIE EXPORT marched into an art film house in Munich and challenged the patrons to look at a real woman, rather than the images they enjoyed on screen. Carrying the gun pointed at the heads of people in the row behind, the artist moved slowly from row to row, until the patrons silently got up and left the theatre. 'Wearing the Action Pants I walked through the rows of seats,' VALIE EXPORT explained, 'then switched the cinema spotlight onto the screen and announced to the audience that what they would normally view on the screen, they could now view in reality My intention was to bring reality into the cinema's reality, into the cinematographic reality of the film theater. Reality often disappears in the cinema. Film and cinema always narrate realities without knowing or showing reality,' (VALIE EXPORT quoted in, Y. Dziewior 'Interview', VALIE EXPORT: archiv, exh. cat., Bregenz, 2012, p. 79).
While the exploration of the limitations of the film medium are tested in VALIE EXPORT's performance through the juxtaposition of the image projected on the movie screen and that of real human skin, the present image interrogates the feminist and sociological dimensions inherent in bodily gestures and the male gaze or voyeurism. These concepts are part of the artist's 'expanded cinema' concept, where she looks to conflate the reality presented on the cinematic screen with that of the cinematographic reality of the theater itself. This theory was first developed by VALIE EXPORT in 1968 and an example especially prescient to Action Pants: Genital Panic is that of Touch and Tap Cinema where the artist stood on the street with a box around her torso and invited male passers-by to place their hands through curtains hung across the front of the box and feel her bare breasts. Checking the spectator's gaze with her own, VALIE EXPORT undermines the predominant notion in the art historical canon of the dominant male gaze countered by that of the passive female. Elaborating on the ideas investigated during this performance, VALIE EXPORT intended for Action Pants: Genital Panic, 'to further reinforce the sexual element of the self-portrait with the addition of a machinegun which I held in various positions, so as to appropriate the concept of dominance, a concept of power and in doing so invert traditional roles. Generally it's the man who is assigned power, the possession of which he also defends. The way I staged myself was completely under my own control, my gaze, my pose with the machine gun and above all the use of a frontal shot. Frontal, on the front line,' (VALIE EXPORT quoted in, Y. Dziewior 'Interview', VALIE EXPORT: archiv, exh. cat., Bregenz, 2012, p. 79).