• I (Beat [It]) 1978, 12 photographs
  
• I (Beat [It]) video documentation of performance
  
• I (Beat [It]) 1980
  

Materials: 3 monitors, 3 videotapes, 8 shackles made of lead, leaden gloves, 1 photograph (lying on the floor), canister of lubrication oil, endless audiotape, automatic amplifier

Motto: Life is in our hands, even if we slip and move in it with difficulty. But if we do not beat against it, we will disappear.

In 1972, when I dealt intensively with the representation of psychic conditions, I wanted to go to bed with these lead bands as clothing and to sleep all night with them. A video camera was to observe me. I would be alone (with only a helper to replace the tapes). When I tried it, a terrible dread overcame me, a feeling of loneliness overtook me, helpless in this constrained condition. With this thought, panic seized me, and I had to have myself freed immediately from this physical limitation (and I couldn’t repeat it again). I thereby realized how I was hindered by social constraints within myself. My body showed me the reality.

At the same time, I also attempted to sleep with ice skates. This experiment led to peculiar chains of dreams, and the next morning, when I awakened, I experienced a liberated feeling.

I have since undertaken an entire series of such experiments going to sleep in the bed, for instance with mountain-climbing gear, with men's clothing, roller skates, paper masks, paper clothes, and so on.

The performance was carried out the first time in the Galerie Mike Steiner, in Berlin, in 1978. Repetition at the International Performance Festival, in Vienna, Osterreichischer Kunstverein, 1978.

—Text: VALIE EXPORT
(Return to top)

I (Beat [It])
1978, video documentation of performance, 4:02 min.

The three monitors form a triangle, on the screens of which one sees three dogs yelping at me. This triangle and the barking represent the constant inspection directed at us by fatherland, Mother Nature, and (masculine) ideology. The triangle of the monitors stands for an entire concatenation of trinities, beginning with the hallowed Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and ending with the profane configuration, man, sex, and moral. A photograph of a recumbent woman is situated in the middle of this triangle.

I move towards this image with spiraling steps, strewing lubrication oil all the while. My movements, however, are extreme since my extremities (legs and arms) are burdened. The eight movable joints of my legs and arms are bound by leaden manacles fastened with leather thongs in such a way as to obviate movement. My hands are encased in leaden gloves: only with effort do my hands continue to serve as a means of production. The freedom of movement of my arms and legs are greatly handicapped. They hang from my torso like functionless extensions of my body.

The oil is ambivalent: it smooths the waves of the sea, makes it congeal but causes one to lose one's footing on land. A calm and humbled state should reign. These are the gliding, lubricating methods used to satisfy society's desire for frictionless communication.

—Text: VALIE EXPORT
(Return to top)

I (Beat [It])
1980, 3 videos, 3 video monitors, 3 VCRs, shackles, photograph, lubricating oil in shallow rectangular pan

Life is in our hands even if we slip and move in it with difficulty. But if we never beat against it, we will disappear. A woman working at a machine, as an extension of it, moving to its rhythm like a puppet—is it still her body that is moving? Her body acts dependently; the machine’s weights hang on her. The body is working for the machine, not for itself.

Precisely by employing the body, this alienated use of the body reveals to what a small degree that body is ours. Rather it is treated like—and acts like—a stranger. But the selfless body expresses another selflessness: that of the woman in the societal machinery. She is allowed to function through her body only in relation to men, in relation to society.

Oil smoothes the troubled seas, but on land it causes slip-ups. The aim is to reassure and to humiliate. These are the lubricants society uses to bring about smooth communication, even at the price of letting countless perish.

When I stand, I can only move like a puppet. When I fall, I’m broken. When I sit, I cannot rest. When I lie down, I can only lie in pain. I am a building in which my self must remain immobile, where my thoughts, desires and needs can only shadow box.

At the center of the three petrified monitor-rocks where I was carried by the waves of lubricating oil, in the forest of the cold, in the forest of the trinity, the encounter with the cold photographic image is warmer than death.

—Text: VALIE EXPORT
(Return to top)