Action Pants: Genital Panic

Action Pants: Genital Panic arose from a scandalous expanded cinema action: during an avant-garde film festival, VALIE EXPORT had stridden through a cinema hall’s rows of seats wearing a pair of crotchless pants. For this later photographic work, the basic idea was to reflect the voyeurism of the audience. It hence shows EXPORT once again wearing a revealing pair of pants but heightens the confrontation via a male-connoted pose and props: with her legs spread wide, a leather jacket, and a machine gun, the artist undermines feminine stereotypes. She then chose one shot that is particularly provocative due to its frontal perspective and the artist’s direct gaze into the camera, had it printed on posters, and fly-posted these in public locations. It is thus that EXPORT, in an actionistic as well as media-reflexive gesture, expands her audience from that of the closed cinema hall to encompass all potential viewers in the public realm.

I beat it

Valie EXPORT’s 1980 installation I beat it had its roots in one of her actions. This action adhered to a precise score:

Floating in a basin filled with a dark fluid is a life-sized photograph of the artist. Her arms and legs are immobilized by lead shackles. Beside the basin is a cannister, the original container of the fluid.

The barking of German shepherds, which emanates from three monitors, is followed by cries of "More! More!"—coming once from a woman and once from a man—indicating yet another intensification of suffering. The triangle formed by the monitors with the woman floating on its centerline alludes to trinity and nature but also to male ideology. The fact that the artist was immobilized during the original action in 1978 underscores the role of women “as dependent marionettes of the social machinery,” and the ambivalence between calm motionlessness and debasement does indeed remain intact in the installation. In EXPORT’s view, to be immobilized and debased is also to serve as the lubricant of a communication that should be frictionless.

VALIE EXPORT – SMART EXPORT Self-portrait

When she was 27, the artist—whose real name is Waltraud Höllinger (née Lehner)—decided to call herself VALIE EXPORT. Written in upper-case letters and protected by copyright, this brand name serves to liberate her from the last names of her father and of her former husband—an act with which she self-confidently positioned herself as a female artist in an art scene that was dominated by men. The self-representation VALIE EXPORT – SMART EXPORT, immortalized by the freelance amateur photographer Gertraud Wolfschwenger, playfully heightens this theme of self-assertion. With a smoldering cigarette in her mouth and standing in a male-connoted pose, EXPORT holds a Smart Export cigarette pack redesigned as her own brand into the camera—with her own nickname as the brand name and a photo of her face as the logo.

TAPP und TASTKINO

Valie EXPORT’s 1980 installation I beat it had its roots in one of her actions. This action adhered to a precise score:

Floating in a basin filled with a dark fluid is a life-sized photograph of the artist. Her arms and legs are immobilized by lead shackles. Beside the basin is a cannister, the original container of the fluid. 

The barking of German shepherds, which emanates from three monitors, is followed by cries of "More! More!"—coming once from a woman and once from a man—indicating yet another intensification of suffering. The triangle formed by the monitors with the woman floating on its centerline alludes to trinity and nature but also to male ideology. The fact that the artist was immobilized during the original action in 1978 underscores the role of women “as dependent marionettes of the social machinery,” and the ambivalence between calm motionlessness and debasement does indeed remain intact in the installation. In EXPORT’s view, to be immobilized and debased is also to serve as the lubricant of a communication that should be frictionless.

Trends are phenomena that tend to recur, be it in design, in fashion, in music, or in art. And in contemporary art, too, the shape of the circular disc is not at all that rare. This form initially spread from Florence, achieving broader prominence during the late 1400s as an expression of divine 8 harmony: every point on a circle relates its center, a fact that can likewise be understood as a return to the beginning.

Tondi are important especially in Renaissance painting, as part of which they played an increasingly large role between 1450 and 1510. The earliest such classic circular image is La grande Pietà ronde by the Netherlandish artist Johan Maelwael from ca. 1400. Around a century later, during the first decade of the 1500s, Michelangelo created his Doni Tondo—which was to go down in art history as one of his most famous works. Raphael, with his Madonna della Seggiola (also known as the Madonna della Sedia) of 1514, likewise created an important tondo.

The phenomenon of the circular image then disappeared entirely for the next 400 years. It was only during the 1960s, when American artists such as Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, and Jackson Pollock developed “shaped canvases” with which they sought to overcome the ever-same rectangular panel painting format, that the tondo once again began receiving attention. Today, tondi are experiencing a renewed comeback. Artists in Austria and abroad are now repeatedly choosing this round form, as one can see in numerous examples from the ALBERTINA Museum’s contemporary art holdings.

Rondinone

Beginning in the 1990s, Ugo Rondinone developed a group of works consisting of a multitude of circular paintings, of which this work is one. On a round canvas 270 centimeters in diameter, he used acrylic paint to create seven concentric circles of varying widths and colors. This round shape shines at the viewer as brightly as an illuminated advertisement, with the absence of a narrative or plot reinforcing the colors’ luminous clarity to a massive extent. Rondinone describes his works of this type prosaically as “large-format sprayed paintings of multicolored concentric circles.” The artist derives the title for each one from a number and the date of its creation, painstakingly written out as the day, month, and year.

Philip Taaffe

The spiral form of Philip Taaffe’s work Unit of Direction, which combines painting with elaborate printing processes, is the product of lengthy intellectual endeavor and an exhaustive search through the treasures of his large library. Alongside recalling the most varied forms of ornamentation ranging from the geometric floor mosaics of Ancient Rome and Hellenism to Islamic arabesques and Indian mandalas and on to the Japonisme of the period around 1900, Unit of Direction also features the natural forms of various snail and muscle species concealed behind the spiral’s inexorable pull.

Robert Schaberl

Robert Schaberl’s concentric abstractions, which he executes in various chromatic gradients and with surfaces ranging from matte to glossy, arise from the overlapping of up to 70 layers of paint on a horizontally rotating support. They trace their roots back to his early photographic experiments with everyday objects such as glasses and biomorphic circular shapes such as those of mushrooms, at first glance suggesting formal comparisons with works of concrete art as well as with the cryptic circular works of Hermann J. Painitz and the Targets by Jasper Johns. Schaberl's aesthetic of the round, 9 however, consists above all in sensory overwhelm, in a schooling of sensitivity, in an attempt to have light appear in its scintillating quality.