With Her, It’s All a Matter of Perspective

In a 1972 collage titled “Train,” Austrian artist Valie Export pasted together nine black-and-white photographs into a horizontal strip almost 77 inches wide. The railroad subject is romantic, while her picture is anything but.

The image of a stationary train was made by standing near its middle, pivoting from one side to the other and shooting a sequence of photographs. The nine pictures were then lined up in order like, well, the cars in a train. Visually, though, the collage appears bizarrely warped.

That’s because the middle car was photographed close up while the two ends of the train were photographed from a distance. The train seems to bow out in the center and recede at each end. Linear pictorial perspective, which is often described by the analogy of train tracks that appear to converge on the distant horizon, seems dramatically reversed.

In fact, “reversing perspective” might be one concise way to characterize Export’s agenda as an artist over the course of her 30-year career. Her work was last seen in Los Angeles in 1998, as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s sprawling and memorable show, “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979.” Now, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, an absorbing survey of Export’s Conceptual photographs, performance documents, film installations and video works, organized by director Elsa Longhauser, gives a fuller accounting.

Perspective, or the capacity to see things in their true relation to one another, is an issue with formal, social and political dimensions. It has gotten a dramatic new challenge in the modern world, too, thanks to the development of still, movie and video cameras and the rise of mass media. Export, a pioneer feminist media artist, has worked since 1968 toward puzzling it out.

She hasn’t been shy about it, either. Start with her invented name, which she spells entirely in capital letters, as if VALIE EXPORT were a cross between a billboard advertisement and a blaring shout. “Valie” evolved as a nickname for Waltraud (she was born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, in 1940). Export is a brand of cheap cigarettes in Austria.

In a 1968 self-portrait photograph, reproduced on the exhibition catalog’s cover, she thrusts a homemade pack of Valie Export cigarettes into your face. The package is complete with a pouty, Mona Lisa-style picture of the artist on the label--like Marcel Duchamp in drag on a perfume bottle--while her own flesh-and-blood face is slightly out of focus and partially obscured in the background.

This blunt, doubled self-portrait is not a simplistic rant against the transformation of individual identity into a mass-produced commodity through the grinding machinery of a capitalist economy. Instead, Export acknowledges her inevitable complicity with the world, does what she can to reinvent herself with the modern means of production and, in the process, throws an aggressive spotlight onto the enterprise.

That she does it using cheap cigarettes mixes sharp insight with wry wit. Tobacco, after all, was at the center of the international drug trade that helped to launch the modern world. It was the first large-scale export from America, and it turned the Old World into a land of happy addicts. It started with fashion-conscious 18th century aristocrats, who took their snuff from jewel-encrusted gold boxes (drug paraphernalia today enshrined in art museums), and worked its way over 200 years into the mass world of Gauloise and Export brands.

A third early work in the exhibition mixes fashion, mass media and sexuality in startling ways. A wall plastered with 60 screen-printed posters turns the artist into an unlikely supermodel. She depicts herself seated on a scruffy urban bus bench, dressed in a shiny vinyl shirt and jeans. Her hair is teased into a wild mane, a machine gun is held across her lap. She looks something like a cross between Verushka and Ulrike Meinhof.

What glamorous act of fashion terrorism gets committed? Export has ripped out the crotch of her pants. She sits with legs apart, unabashedly exposing herself.

“Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1969) replaces the objectified sexual allure common in the advertising industry with the unique and subjective reality of an individual woman. (Indeed, in a related performance piece, Export wore the crotchless pants into an X-rated movie house, much to the surprised consternation of the male patrons who had come into the darkness in search of objectified fantasy.) The title’s use of the phrase “Action Pants” is also a slyly funny reference to the Viennese Actionists--Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwartzkogler--the theatrical group of male artists who used their bodies as surfaces for highly ritualized, often bloody performances. Export responded to the manly splashing of blood and simulated gore in their art with fashion-conscious ads for “Genital Panic.”

Another way in which Export’s art attempts to reverse our common perspective is cinematic. An Export film is less a sequence of images projected onto a screen than it is an occupied three-dimensional space activated by pictures moving through time. “Adjunct Dislocation” (1973), for example, uses multiple projectors to run a film loop showing the artist with 8mm cameras harnessed to her body, front and back, as well as loops of what those two cameras filmed.

In a big image we see her march back and forth in a rural field, lie down on the pavement in a city street, do push-ups on the ground and undertake other simple activities. In two smaller images we also see what the harnessed cameras saw.

Or, better, we see projections of what her body “saw,” front and back, as it moved through the world. Those smaller pictures don’t necessarily correspond with the big one that shows the artist at work (they might show passing sky and fields while she’s walking sideways through an urban plaza). But the dislocations of time and space created by mediated imagery are very much the point.

Export also links camera work to painting, using the older tradition as a springboard for understanding the newer one. One of the more remarkable works in the exhibition, and also one of the simplest, operates in this manner. “The Gaze” (1972) is a sequence of three color photographs of the same view of urban rooftops seen through an open window. Artistically the subject is as familiar as a Matisse. Export gives it a surprising little twist.

The views in each picture might be identical, but the focal plane is different. At the left, the rooftops outdoors are seen in sharp focus, while the foreground window and ledge are blurred. In the center, the focus is reversed: The window and ledge are clear, but the rooftops aren’t. At the right, both the outdoors and the indoors are softly blurred.

Export’s “The Gaze” lies somewhere between Michael Snow’s famous 1967 film, “Wavelength,” and the exquisitely smudged photographs of Uta Barth today. Reading from left to right, the sequence of still pictures is like a cinematic zoom in reverse. Your perception slides from outdoors to indoors, and then to a contemplative place somewhere inside your own head--the daydreamy place where the world goes fuzzy while you’re lost in your thoughts.

Usually, the abstractedness inherent in camera images is only elusively grasped when we look at them. In this remarkable work, by contrast, it is powerfully embodied in your own physical act of perception.

The exhibition, titled “Valie Export: Ob/De+Con(Struction),” illuminates the myriad ways in which her art tries to simultaneously obstruct and deconstruct media imagery. Slightly smaller than at its debut last year at the gallery at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, the show focuses mainly on the exploratory years of the 1970s, and secondarily on the 1980s. A strong 1998 video installation, “The Un-ending, Un-ique Melody of Chords,” is one of a few recent works.

Twenty-five identical television sets, tipped on their sides and placed on “pedestals” made from metal work tables, display the same crisply framed picture. In slow-motion close-up, the sharp, glistening needle of an industrial sewing machine rises and falls, repeatedly piercing its target. This painful and hypnotic vision of repetitive labor is no dainty Vermeer or Chardin rhapsodizing over a lovely young seamstress. Instead, as the chugging soundtrack reverberates, it’s part erotic machine, part violating weapon and part stupefying narcotic.

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* “Valie Export: Ob/De+Con(Struction),” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through May 6. Closed Mondays.