M48 VALIE EXPORT

Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972)

VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940) is a feminist artist who uses photography, film and video to raise questions about female objectification. Born in Austria, she shed her father’s and her husband’s names in 1967 for the alias VALIE EXPORT, which she emblazoned on a packet of cigarettes now held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Early in her career, she chose direct engagement with the general public over exhibiting in art institutions, her performances often featuring her own body in deliberately provocative ways in order to raise questions about society’s perception of women. Perhaps the most famous photograph of EXPORT is Action Pants: Genital Panic (Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969): the artist, dressed in crotchless trousers, holds a machine gun that she looks set to turn on the viewer.

‘Women’s Art: A Manifesto’ was written by EXPORT in March 1972. Like Rivolta Femminile’s manifesto (M45), it originated at a time when the women’s movement was confronting the fetishization of women’s bodies in both art and the sex industry. It was first published in the Austrian left-wing magazine Neues Forum in January 1973, and later distributed at an exhibition EXPORT curated in Vienna in 1976 called MAGNA Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität (MAGNA Feminism: Art and Creativity). In this forceful statement, EXPORT urges women to take control of their own image and use art as a creative means of expression to develop a new female consciousness.

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THE POSITION OF ART IN THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT IS THE POSITION OF WOMAN IN THE ARTS MOVEMENT. THE HISTORY OF WOMAN IS THE HISTORY OF MAN because man has defined the image of woman for both man and woman, men create and control the social and communication media such as science and art, word and image, fashion and architecture, social transportation and division of new media, and in accordance with these medial patterns they gave shape to woman. if reality is a social construction and men its engineers, we are dealing with a male reality. women have not yet come to themselves, because they have not had a chance to speak insofar as they had no access to the media. let women speak so that they can find themselves, this is what I ask for in order to achieve a self-defined image of ourselves and thus a different view of the social function of women. we women must participate in the construction of reality via the building stones of media-communication. this will not happen spontaneously or without resistance, therefore we must fight! if we shall carry through our goals such as social equal rights, self-determination, a new female consciousness, we must try to express them within the whole realm of life. this fight will bring about far reaching consequences and changes in the whole range of life not only for ourselves but for men, children, family, church … in short for the state. women must make use of all media as a means of social struggle and social progress in order to free culture of male values, in the same fashion she will do this in the arts knowing that men for thousands of years were able to express herein their ideas of eroticism, sex, beauty including their mythology of vigour, energy and austerity in sculpture, paintings, novels, films, drama, drawings etc., and thereby influencing our consciousness. it will be time. AND IT IS THE RIGHT TIME the consciousness of all of us, let our ideas flow into the social construction of reality to create a human reality. so far the arts have been created to a large extent solely by men. they dealt with the subjects of life, with the problems of emotional life adding only their own accounts, answers and solutions. now we must make our own assertions. we must destroy all these notions of love, faith, family, motherhood, companionship, which were not created by us and thus replace them with new ones in accordance with our sensibility, with our wishes. to change the arts that man forced upon us means to destroy the features of woman created by man, the new values that we add to the arts will bring about new values for women in the course of the civilizing process. the arts can be of importance to the women’s liberation insofar as we derive significance – our significance – from it: this spark can ignite the process of our self-determination, the question, what women can give to the arts and what the arts can give to the women, can be answered as follows: the transference of the specific situation of woman to the artistic context sets up signs and signals which provide new artistic expressions and messages on one hand, and change retrospectively the situation of women on the other. the arts can be understood as a medium for our self-definition adding new values to the arts. these values, transmitted via the cultural sign-process, will alter reality towards an accommodation of female needs.

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN WILL BE THE HISTORY OF WOMAN.