Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85

Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and film-maker who inverted the male gaze in ways that were provocative, shocking and often outrageously fun, has died aged 85. The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export died in Vienna earlier the same day, three days before her 86th birthday. She is best known for low-budget performances that scandalised Austria and Germany in the late 1960s, but have since been recognised as milestones in feminist art for exposing the objectification of the female body. Most notorious was 1968’s Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), for which Export strapped a model theatre stage to her chest and invited shoppers in Vienna’s city centre to touch her bare breasts through a tiny curtain. Her artist colleague Peter Weibel rallied passersby through a megaphone, and timed each “action” with a stopwatch. Valie Export, born Waltraud Lehner in 1940, came up with her alias when she was 27 years old. Photograph: Leonhard Föger/Reuters The zeal with which she laid bare patriarchal power structures was also on display in the centrepiece of her 1980 show at the Venice Biennale. Entitled Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), it showed an outsized female abdomen with crooked legs on a mattress, red neon strip lights streaming from her vulva, and a TV transmitting a Catholic mass where the head would be. …