Valie Export, Austrian Performance Artist Known for Provocative Feminist Works, Dies at 85

Valie Export died in Vienna on Thursday at the age of 85, three days before her 86th birthday. The artist’s own foundation announced the death on Thursday evening. Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Export came up with her alias in 1967 when she was 27 years old.

Her first name was taken from her childhood nickname and her surname was inspired by a brand of cigarettes called Smart Export. Export left school at 14 to study at Linz’s School of Arts and Crafts. She married and had a child before she turned 20, but divorced and placed her daughter into temporary care with an older sister to study in Vienna.

“I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother,” she told the Guardian in 2019. Export co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968. She was sentenced on pornography charges in 1970 over her co-editorship of a book on Viennese Actionist art, after which a judge temporarily withdrew custody rights for her daughter.

Her low-budget performances in the late 1960s, including the notorious 1968 work Tapp und Tastkino in which she invited passersby in Vienna’s city centre to touch her bare breasts through a curtain while colleague Peter Weibel timed each action, scandalised Austria and Germany.

Those works are now recognised as milestones in feminist art for exposing the objectification of the female body. Export participated in documenta in Kassel in 1977 and again in 2007.

She and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to fill the Austrian pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where the centrepiece of her show was Geburtenbett, an outsized female abdomen installation with red neon strip lights streaming from the vulva and a TV transmitting a Catholic mass.

“Valie was one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century,” her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac said in a statement. “Her passing marks the loss of a singular perspective in contemporary art, one that influenced artists across generations.

Export was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne from 1995 to 2005. In 2015, Linz opened a Valie Export centre for media and performance art in a former tobacco factory. Her work reached a new generation in 2005 when Marina Abramović re-enacted Genital Panic as one of the seven key performances of the 20th century for her show Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim museum in New York City.

The Guardian reported that Export has been described as one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century.