VALIE EXPORT 

Tattoo II, 1972–1996

In his text "Leap Into the Void: Performance and the Object", Paul Schimmel insists on the "awareness of the act and of the existence" in artistic circles in Europe, the USA and Japan in the wake of World War II, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. "The possibility of global annihilation made human beings more aware than ever before of the frailty of creation, subjected as it was to forces of destruction of an unprecedented magnitude". For these and other reasons, it is true that the presence of action art in the 1960s and 1970s constituted a before and after in the formalisation of the body as a motif for analysis, experimentation and exhibition. The political and societal contexts were optimal for art to be able to break free definitively of academies and markets, spurred by conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the student unrest of 1968 and uneasy coexistence on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Perhaps precisely due to that global threat of annihilation, the body in art is shown with marks, cuts and accidents that make it a living surface on which to record time.

At a very young age, Waltraud Lehner (Linz, Austria, 1940) left behind her life as a married woman and mother to study art. Renouncing her father’s and husband's surnames, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT just before her first conceptual piece, completed in 1967. A pack of cigarettes of the brand SMART EXPORT includes a photograph of her face in the centre, and, in Latin and German, the words "Semper et ubique, Immer und Uberall" (always and ubiquitous), substituting the word SMART with VALIE. This gesture launched an artistic name that works as a logo (always written in capitals and designed to resemble a stamp) and a career that reclaims the female body as a driver of change, a space for experimentation and resistance and a reagent of the conservative and complacent mindsets of society in the 1960s. Between 1968 and 1969, she performed two actions that would be the most important in her career and the most frequently exhibited of her works. They were influenced by feminised although clearly distinct Viennese Actionists. In Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968), the artist carries a box that, in the form of a portable theatre, covers her bare breasts. Peter Weibel, her collaborator, announced the action with a megaphone, inviting random pedestrians to reach into the box, thus generating an intimate relationship with the artist. The contact lasted five seconds, which the artist herself timed. Genitalpanik is an action in which the artist wears a dark-coloured shirt and a pair of jeans with the crotch area missing, leaving her genitalia exposed. Carrying a machine gun, the artist entered a cinema and walked past the aisles of seats, provoking a reaction from the public. A series of photographs and the jeans have been recorded as an action of great political content in which the artist’s sexualised body acts as a weapon.

Tattoo II is a photograph deriving from Body Sign Action, completed in 1970. In the preceding action, the artist tattoos her left thigh, which reveals the clip that connects her garter and stockings. There are several photographs of this same action and of the resulting tattoo. In this one, the artist lifts the hem of her dress to show her upper thigh, revealing to the viewer the tattoo that relates to the boots she is wearing with high heels and laces. The photograph is a reflection on feminine symbols that usually derive from patriarchal and chauvinistic stereotypes that suggest that a woman’s body is an object that must be decorated with clothing that arouses or draws the masculine gaze. In another reading, the tattoo on this object makes the artist the owner of her body and suggests the possibility of whether she will decide to reveal it. The passing of time makes this action and the resulting tattoo a record of a body that evolves and changes; that ages and will disappear.

References

Autoportraits photographiques (1898–1981), Éditions Herscher / Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1981.

Féminimasculin: Le sexe de l’art, Gallimard / Electa / Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995.

Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, MOCA, Los Angeles, 1998.

Á. de los Ángeles, 50 Obras maestras 1950-2000, IVAM, València, 2020, p.106.