Valie Export, Pioneering Feminist Performance Artist, Dies at 85

Valie Export, the Austrian avant-garde artist known for radical body politics performances, died on Thursday in Vienna, three days before her 86th birthday. Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz in 1940, she renamed herself Valie Export in 1967, adopting the name from a cigarette brand as a feminist act. Her 1968 piece Tap and Touch Cinema invited passersby to touch her bare chest through a curtained box, inverting cinematic consumption. Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) featured her entering a Munich cinema in crotchless trousers, confronting audiences with a real female body. Her Body Configurations series (1972–1982) used her body as a measuring device against architecture. MoMA described her as forging a new feminist language. Marina Abramović restaged Action Pants at the Guggenheim in 2005, and Eva and Franco Mattes reenacted Tap and Touch Cinema in Second Life. Her archive was acquired by the city of Linz in 2015 and held at Lentos Kunstmuseum.