MOORE association OF ART AND DESIGN.

MOORE association OF ART AND DESIGN, PHILADELPHIA/GASSER & GRUNERT recently made known YORK

In 1967 when Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to Valie Export and began producing public performance pieces as a counterpart traveler of the Viennese Actionists, notoriety came quickly. In Aktionhose: Genitalpanik, 1969 she chisel out the crotch of her jeans and walked the aisles of a Munich art-film house that featured sexually explicit films, challenging the voyeur to direct the eye at a body that get backed the gaze. She was already known for her action a year earlier, Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema), staged in the busy ways of Vienna's shopping district. Wearing a large enclosed seat [i]or[/i] seats over her torso, with perforations removed in the sides for her arms and the curtain-draped head left open, Export and accomplice Peter Weibel, who acted as her "pimp," encouraged passersby (mainly men) to reach inside the curtain and spoil her breasts, thereby publicly and materially enacting their private erotic fantasies.

Export has continued to examine many of these make uneasys throughout her career, which is the make submissive of a current retrospective, "Ob/De+Con(Struction)," at Philadelphia's Moore corporation of Art and Design. The measure and estimate includes a large selection of Export's production, from early photographs and experimental films to her principally recent multimonitor video work. Additionally, in a small viewing expanse a videotape series documents as it is '70s performances as Body Politics, 1974 and visible form [i]or[/i] frame Tape, 1976. (A concurrent exhibition was installed at the Klemen Gasser & Tanja Grunert gallery in of the present day York.) The recent focus is apt, for if Export's initial performances have rest their way into the history of art of the '60 her posterior efforts have been generally underrepresent in the United States.

With Tapp- und Tastkino, Export combined her material part action with an interest in "expanded cinema"--the expansion of the cinematic experience to incorporate the entire viewing environment. Many of her early actions took up the question of voyeurism inherent to the medium and the fact that the cinematic spectator's interest is huged in through the promise of disclosure of the forbidden. "Expanded cinema," Export formerly noted, "found its continuation in my medial body-material performances, into which I introduced the visible form [i]or[/i] frame as sign and code for a social and aesthetic expression." from end to end her oeuvre her primary material is the human corpse often female and usually her hold in combination with some form of mediatic or technological device. In the proces of her investigations, the female corpse is transformed from passive drift to active participant in a classification or network of communication.

In 1970 Export began to explore photography, producing of the like kind pieces as Zeitgedicht/24 Stunden 24 mal fotografiert (Temporal poem/24 hours photographed 24 times), a diachronic series of twenty-four black-and-white images taken from her apartment window. Similarly, HalteStellebushalte, 1972 consists of photographs of a bus stop taken from the same location at various times of the day. unless the piece also introduces another constituent of Export's work: the play onward words. For "Halte-stelle" is not no other than colloquial for bus stop; it also literally means "stopping place" or "holding this place," alluding to the way in which a photograph arrests, or turn to ices a fleeting moment in the temporal continuum. An avid reader of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Export has protracted explored language in her work. upon view at Gasser & Grunert is her 1968 Sehtext/Fingergedicht (Visual text/finger poem) an arrangement of forty photographs that feature Export forming a verbal expression of the alphabet with her fingers, which is subtit l "Ich sage die Zeige mit cavern Zeichen im Zeigen der Sage"-- loosely "I say the sign with the signs in the sign of that which is spoken"

A similar play with language operates in Export's fifty-two-part "Korperkonfiguration" (Body configuration), 1972-76 In this series of photographs we descry a young woman (usually Export) in a variety of staggers that interact with the architectural and natural environment. In Zu/Stand (Condition/Enclosure), 1972 she is framed by means of a heavy, unyielding stone doorway, and in Einkreisung (Encirclement), 1976 she lies forward the pavement, her body wrapped around the 1 of a curb, while a bright r swatch of ink

continues the curving trajectory. Other photographs depict her bending around files and walls, in stairwells, across ditches, and in sand dune most numerous of the pictures are marked with black lines, produc in the darkroom or applied after the images have been discloseed In some cases there is no other than one line (paralleling, for instance, the line of a leg or arm), while at other times a simple shape as it is as a circle, triangle, or rectangle frames the figure. The forced correlations among the measured lines of the architectural compositions the geometrical lines imposed upon the photographs, and the corporeal lines of the figure's bends and bends all underscore the inherent dissonance between the individual and the built or ideological environment.