New Austrian Film

Robert von Dassanowsky, Oliver C. Speck, Robert von Dassanowsky, Oliver C. Speck

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857452320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Out of a film culture originally starved of funds have emerged rich and eclectic works by film-makers that are now achieving the international recognition that they deserve: Barbara Albert, Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, and Stefan Ruzowitzky, to give four examples. This comprehensive critical anthology, by leading scholars of Austrian film, is intended to introduce and make accessible this much under-represented phenomenon. Although the book covers the full development of the Austrian new wave it focuses on the period that has brought it global attention: 1998 to the present. New Austrian Film is the only book currently available on this topic and will be an essential reference work for academics, students and filmmakers, interested in modern Austrian film.

Part I

Early Visions/Influential Sites

Chapter 1

“The Experiment Is Not Yet Finished”: VALIE EXPORT’s Avant-garde Film and Multimedia Art

Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger

Introduction

I have screamed with the voice that belongs to me.

I have bitten with the teeth that belong to me.

I have scratched with the nails that belong to me.

I have cried with the tears that belong to me.

I have seen with the eyes that belong to me.

I have thought with the thoughts that belong to me.

I have laughed with the laugh that belongs to me.

I have kissed with the mouth that belongs to me.

I have slept with the dreams that belong to me.

That is the life that belongs to me.

—”Images of Contact” (1998)

VALIE EXPORT is a well-known and internationally renowned Austrian experimental filmmaker and avant-garde artist.¹ During a career spanning forty years, she has produced a powerful oeuvre—provocative, uncompromising, and aesthetically refined. It is comprised of expanded cinema productions, body performances, body–material interactions, conceptual and digital photography, video environments and installations, laser installations, experimental and feature-length films and documentaries, as well as drawings, sculptures, and texts on contemporary art, art history, and feminism. When she entered the scene in the late 1960s, a radical shift in consciousness sparked by guilt feelings about the horrors of the Second World War had taken hold of the younger generation in both Western Europe and the United States. In the world of the arts, the revolutionary new concept of intermediality—crossing the boundaries between art and technology—as well as the body as “extended” medium had been embraced by the avant-garde.

EXPORT’s oeuvre reflects the sociopolitical challenges of her generation as well as the innovative aesthetic theories of her time. She employs her own body as a medium of gendered critique to provoke social change, particularly with regard to the prevailing conservative mind-set towards women. This marks her work as distinctly feminist. Until the 1980s, her work was largely misunderstood and misinterpreted by both the public and Austria’s art critics. For the most part, the Austrian media displayed a typically snobbish and downright hostile attitude. But even within Austria’s art scene, her work was eyed with suspicion.² In 1989, she lost in a bid for a professorship at Vienna’s esteemed University of Applied Arts. Between 1990 and 1994, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. From 1995 until 2005, she held the position of Professor of Multimedia and Performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. For her groundbreaking art, she has earned much appreciation and deep respect from far beyond Austria’s borders. At last, however, her international success has spawned recognition from within. In 2000, EXPORT became the tenth recipient of the prestigious Oskar Kokoschka Prize.³

Numerous studies and analyses have been made of EXPORT’s work, including a recent book by Szely (2007). Her work is discussed and presented not only in the context of multimedia art, into which it has been pigeonholed over the past decade, but in the context of film. In September 2007, EXPORT validated Szely‘s argument that she has always been a filmmaker.⁴ In this chapter I look at EXPORT’s explorations of the body, the image, language and the photographic apparatus, and of their interface and boundaries as well as their relation to space and time in our postmodern world. The emphasis—consonant with Szely’s analysis—lies on reading her oeuvre as a body of moving images.

In 1967, Waltraud Höllinger reinvented herself by adopting the pseudonym VALIE EXPORT, coupling femaleness with the concept of marketing. She got the idea from Smart EXPORT, a popular Austrian cigarette brand, and produced two photographs entitled “VALIE EXPORT – Smart EXPORT” as self-portraits. The word “VALIE” (sharing its sound with her nickname Wali, but implying “value”) is placed over the brand logo and her face is superimposed on the small circle in the center of the pack around which the text semper at ubique, immer und überall (“always and everywhere”) is printed. On the second image, EXPORT takes up a macho pose, chin up, disheveled hair, eyelids drawn, the cigarette lit between her lips. The stretched-out hand cockily offers a close-up look at the pack VALIE EXPORT. Since cigarettes impart market value and, of course, connote virility, her message reads: “I am a woman performing as a man; I proffer myself/my work as a commodity.”

EXPORT’s aesthetic and theoretical principles were informed by several avant-garde movements, such as the work that emerged from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Fluxus, which is known for its political engagement and anti-authoritarian stance in the wake of the conservative politics that culminated in America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.⁵ The idea of “intermedia” (coined by Fluxus member Dick Higgins in 1965) spurred EXPORT’s imagination. The pioneering radical feminist work of American women artists—for example, Carolee Schneemann’s studies of visual traditions, taboos, and the body in relation to society—were equally important to EXPORT. She was also familiar with the avant-garde scene in postwar Austria, knew the writings by the Wiener Gruppe and was acquainted with the Viennese Actionists, whose happenings and performances she frequently attended. Yet, she never worked directly with them. Even though she shared their aim of breaking social, sexual, and cultural taboos and their preference for the human body as the principal material for their work, she radically repudiated the violation and destruction of the woman’s body that was an essential part of the artistic expression of the Actionists. In contrast, EXPORT took a decisive stand against the status quo of the sexual politics of the time, which tolerated the objectification of women and hindered women from becoming active in their own right. Her feminist stance is rooted in American and European second-wave feminism, and in the political rebellion that culminated in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the student movement in West Germany. Furthermore, what set her work decidedly apart from that of the Viennese Actionists was her revolutionary application of media technology—film, photography, video, and, since the 1990s, digital technology. Already in her earliest work, EXPORT utilized a range of media (action/performance, photography, film, and video).

To gain a fuller understanding of her radical work and its significant impact on the younger generation of artists and filmmakers, it is crucial to take these international currents in the arts and their theoretical underpinnings into consideration. The following components can be identified in her work: “Attention to materials and objects, random selection, spontaneous actions, the elimination of binding categories and formal boundaries between various media, as well as between art and life, and an antiauthoritarian stance on sociopolitical and cultural questions that includes a critical view of the cultural apparatus” (Mueller 1994: xvi).

Expanded Reality: Expanded Cinema and Feminist Actionism

When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness.

—Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (1970)

After the Second World War, artists in Austria were largely isolated from the avant-garde art scene that evolved in the United States and Western Europe. Therefore the idea of film as a means of personal expression and sociopolitical critique was not rooted in the tradition of auteur cinema but was instead related to the avant-garde movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its radicalism in painting, literature, music, architecture, and philosophy. In the 1960s, film “happenings” combining projection with performance were in vogue.⁶ These were often spontaneous and relatively inexpensive to stage. Moreover, Gene Youngblood proclaimed that expanding cinema was necessary for the formation of a new social and artistic consciousness: “Expanded cinema ... like life is a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes” (Youngblood 1970: 54). Accordingly, EXPORT explains, “expanded cinema” was understood to mean not only “the expansion of the optic phenomenon but also the deconstruction of the dominant reality and the language that it construes” (EXPORT 1997: 61). The expansive art concept led experimental filmmakers to explore and investigate the effects of media communication on individual cognitive processes, on human language, perception and thought, and on the social environment. Her photo essay “Zur Mythologie der zivilisatorischen Prozesse/On the Mythology of Civilizing Processes” (EXPORT 1972) investigates the communicative function of symbols (signifiers) and signs (signification), and the interpretative and consumer behavior of society. Throughout her career, these concerns have remained central to her intellectual explorations as demonstrated in her artistic production (see EXPORT 2003b).

EXPORT launched her first expanded cinema projects in 1967, several of them in collaboration with Peter Weibel.⁷ Abstract Film No.1 was her first expanded cinema art piece. It demonstrates the model of producing a film without using celluloid. Auf+Ab+An+Zu/Up+down+on+off from 1968 is a film-action piece in which the spectator turns into an emancipated actor who supplements the movie since the projection and the montage take place simultaneously. Expanded cinema expressions include the street as stage where space and time are contiguous with everyday life and consumerism. In the late 1960s, it was assumed that “real life” was happening in the urban public space where anti-war protests, student revolts, and demonstrations for equal rights for women took place. The inner-city space, or “underground,” evoked opportunities for a new kind of reception of EXPORT’s provocative and aggressive street performances such as Tapp- und Tastkino/Touch Cinema. Here, EXPORT wears a styrofoam box like a megasized T-shirt over her torso. The box constitutes the cinema; the two slits in the front simulate the entrance doors to the auditorium; and her bare breasts simulate the screen. The spectator’s hands are invited to enter and “view” (touch) the “film” (breasts) for exactly twelve seconds. The performance is photographed. These images are legendary. The hands of the man are stuck inside the box, seemingly cut off at the elbows. He looks at the face above the box, perhaps hoping to discern her pleasure but her face is flat, mask-like. She is surrounded by a crowd of spectators, yet there is nothing to see. The “screen” is invisible. The action happens inside, out of sight: camera obscura.

For EXPORT, the expanded cinema concept also means the deconstruction of the voyeuristic scope of film. Her strategies of expansion are aimed at the desexualization of both object and subject and, therefore, exclude pleasure in the meaning of the Lacanian concept of jouissance. In 1969, she shows her sex head-on. In Munich’s Stadtkino, she walked up and down the aisles sporting a rifle and wearing pants with a triangular opening in the crotch that exposed her genitalia.⁸ The viewers, experiencing no pleasure in seeing the erotic in such a way, are shocked and turn their gaze away. This occurs, as the art historian Régis Michel explains, because the performance forces the spectator into a situation in which they do not watch the spectacle as “voyeur”, and the sex (of the artist) itself gazes at the spectator and thus annuls their power to observe (Chukhrov 2007). EXPORT also conceived the poster Aktionshose – Genitalpanik/Action Pants – Genital Panic as a reproducible piece of art, which bridges the gap between high art and popular culture, when the public space was already satiated with images fueling the consumerist boom of the economic miracle and the capitalist marketing of the perfect or ideal female body.⁹ Moreover, discussions about theories of high culture versus mass culture, the increasing power of the culture industry, and the growing influence of technology on society and culture—by Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School, for example—were well under way.

The human body as the site for inscriptions of social codes is central to all of EXPORT’s work: “The center of my artistic work is comprised of the human body as medium for information, as bearer of signs, of meaning and communication. I deal with the depiction of mental conditions, with the sensation of the body when it loses its identity” (EXPORT, in Burnham 1982: 34). A persuasive case in point is the 1968 street performance Von der Mappe der Hündigkeit/From the Portfolio of Doggedness when EXPORT—walking her leashed “dog” (Peter Weibel) that follows her meekly on all fours through the inner city of Vienna—explores the question: “What changes when man behaves like an animal even though man is not animal?” (Lebovici 2003: 146). Despite the fact that gender is not central to the concept of the performance, it nevertheless demonstrates a strong opposition to the misogynist worldview of the Viennese Actionists. “VALIE EXPORT owes a lot to the Actionists. But the patriarchal status of the passive feminine is everything that she challenges. Not in words. In deeds. She is the artist, and it is her body, which she displays. The body of the woman: counter-power of the patriarchate,” asserts Régis Michel (2003: 27). Indeed, for EXPORT the body is “the screen on which society arranges its daily slapstick and forces wo/man to be its actor” (EXPORT, in Hofmann and Hollein 1980: 88). The female body is the scene of the action. It is motor and repository. It is dispatcher, conductor, and receiver of feelings and forces, sensations and energies. It is the battleground of life, illness, and death. It is the place where the self realizes its boundaries and defines where and how it will encounter the world outside. “The body of a woman is in reality selfless, [it is] not her own ... [She is permitted] to function through her body only in relationship to the man, in relation to society,” explains EXPORT (ibid.: 95).

Body Sign Action from 1970 demonstrates the meaning of her assertion. The woman’s skin functions as a screen (Hautleinwand) (EXPORT 1997: 54). The photograph lens zooms in on the left upper thigh that displays a garter. Yet the garter is not real; it is a tattoo, an indelible mark on the artist’s own body. Tattoos manifest the linkage between society and ritual. Therefore, the tattoo of the garter (sexual fetish and concurrently, a genuine piece of woman’s clothing at a time when women had few personal rights and no public voice) carries the meaning of reconstructed female history. In 1971, EXPORT uses her body in Eros/ion as a transmitte...