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The Galleries at Moore
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1974, video documentation of performance, 2:22 min. Communication between the sexes is predetermined by society. The politics of behavior between men and women can be demonstrated in the movements of a body. The escalator with one moving up and one moving down shows the existing system of communication in 5 phrases. A man and a woman are connected by a rope which is put around their waists. Phase 1 and 2: against each other
—Text: VALIE EXPORT
1977, video documentation of performance, 17:43 min. Delta, a drama in the continuum of destruction through the intersexual relationship of a couple from shoulder and hand symbolism used as historical body language, the history of a woman in the world of the man is forced open.
—Text: VALIE EXPORT 1973, video documentation of performance, 6:39 min. The narrow passage or dangerous passage is a common motif in both funerary and initiation mythologies. I step inside and move through a corridor of electrically charged wires, constantly experiencing painful shocks and sinking to the floor. But I accept the challenge and, in a somewhat pathological increase in willpower, I press my head against the wires again and again. Society is a closed, structured space, which regulates all human energy through painful barriers. Only through an effort of will to overcome the pain [which is at the core of society] is one able to achieve a state of free expression [free-flowing energy].
—Text: VALIE EXPORT 1976, video documentation of performance, 2:51 min. In this street action, I hang a loaf of bread in front of my belly so passers-by can cut off pieces. I see this street action as a continuation of my investigation “On the Mythology of Civilizing Processes” (1971), particularly on the interpretation of symbols—bread as a symbol for motherhood and grain as a symbol for seed. The bread gives my form the appearance of a pregnant woman. This is a psychological experiment with symbols and behavior.
—Text: VALIE EXPORT
1976, feature film on video, color, 16mm, 112 min. When mannerist gestures of an identity are deviating and crumbling. When a person seeks to evade compulsive structures and detrimental forms of communication. When female body language rejects role behavior when recognizing the message. When sheets of lead fear forces one to glide down the glass walls of phone booths with one's skin. When the difference between onlooker and what is being looked on dissolves. When what is depicted in the mirror reveals a mask, which she has already left. When observing oneself is like looking at someone unknown. When there is a deep desire for ultimate identification. When sentences are spoken, depleted of general meaning. When all lights are switched off and behind one a dark abyss opens up, never to return again. When, in weeping, the lost self cannot separate. When children become enemies. When communication, the vehicle of hate, is opposed by a reaction of vulnerability. When dreams and sleep, the storage bed of unconscious thought, become the site of battle and rupture. Then we see the real image in the rupture—the drama of human self-realization. While searching for home, the hangman's rope slips around one's neck.
—Text: VALIE EXPORT 1980, video of feature film, 16mm, color and black & white, 100 min. The film shows the psychological and social conditions under which women live in society. Traditional forms of life are crumbling and women are looking for new models of action. “ . . . In between the pan shot, the story begins with a horrible repertory of experimental wounds: abortion, sexual torture, problems finding a job, raising children, past traumata which have put women in a state of dazed receptivity. This is shown in video images, ugly memories turned on and off like a TV set . . .”
—Gary Indiana, East Village Eye, New York, 1982
1984, video of feature film, 35mm, color, sound, 90 min. VALIE EXPORT’s third feature film is an anti-romance in which the main protagonist is torn between two relationships and gradually discovers that both are impossible. Not because subjective events of “love” are lacking but because the objective, social matrix in which two lovers act, is corrupt, immoral and deadly. In this film the male world and its power structures do away with the possibility of love behind sexuality, i.e., the objectification of love. The Practice of Love shows Judith, a journalist, putting together the traces of a crime story—the mysterious death in a subway station near St. Stephan’s cathedral in Vienna—in which first one of her lovers and then also the other are implicated. Her study is a metaphor for social fixed points surrounding and penetrating all so-called personal relationships in today’s society. It seems fitting that the angle of the film often moves from Judith’s angle to the omniscient angle also including hers, since in today's society everyone at some point is under surveillance. Important pieces of evidence are gained, for instance, from videotapes filmed by cameras in a subway station. Everywhere in the world of this film, pictures are documented, observed, transferred in comprehensive data systems—a passive documentaton of life’s entirety, everywhere.
—Text: Gary Indiana
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