Following World War II, a mood of near-despair brought process and performance to the forefront of the artworld. Art as contemplative object now seemed irrelevant: the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the guilt associated with these disasters sparked a monumental shift in consciousness. In the United States, action painting heralded the transition from two-dimensional representation to an art that, in the succeeding fifty years, would embrace almost every medium and every form. Europe and Asia saw similar shifts. By the early 1960s, artists had begun to use their bodies as an extended medium creating actions that would shock the public into confronting the inescapable realities of sex, aggression, greed, and destruction.

Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, in 1940, EXPORT graduated from Vienna’s Technical School for Textile Industry in 1964 with a degree in textile design. In 1966, determined to create a new identity, she changed her name in what catalog essayist Robert Fleck calls an aesthetic, social, and political act. Her early performative art demanded the involvement of the audience on a visceral level. Unlike her contemporaries, the Viennese actionists, her work was distinctly feminist in nature—intended to provoke social change and to overturn prevailing attitudes toward women. She used her body as a medium—as a challenge to erotic hypocrisy, as a way of perceiving and codifying information and countering the horrifying political realities of the past. Later she developed a more personal conceptual vocabulary, which, along with the use of technical media, has characterized her oeuvre ever since.

The Austrian artist’s work has been shown in European exhibitions including the Venice Biennali of 1978 and 1980 and Documenta 6 (1977), but this is the first major American exhibition to examine the work of a taboo-breaking body artists who is also a leading innovator using modern technology in the visual arts. Through a powerful oeuvre that is simultaneously aggressive and aesthetically refined, she has paved the way for many young artists today. Continuing to challenge assumptions and push boundaries, using the latest technology to create space-time discontinuities and convergences, she calls for a new image of “Menschenfrauen” (womankind).

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