Systemic erasure of feminist avant-garde: How Valie Export’s work exposed patriarchal art structures
Original framing: “Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85” — The Guardian - World
Export’s work must be situated within a century-long feminist avant-garde that includes figures like Hannah Höch (Dada), Meret Oppenheim (Surrealism), and Carolee Schneemann (Fluxus), all of whom used the body to critique patriarchal structures. The 1960s Austrian art scene was particularly hostile to feminist interventions, with institutions like the Vienna Secession systematically excluding women artists. Her ‘Tapp und Tastkino’ (1968) directly responded to the exclusion of women from the male-dominated ‘action art’ movement of the era.
Valie Export’s death is not merely the passing of an individual artist but a moment to interrogate the systemic erasure of feminist avant-garde practices within the art world.
Her work exposed the patriarchal structures of mid-20th century European art, yet mainstream narratives frame her as a lone genius, obscuring the collective struggles of women artists, queer creators, and artists of color who expanded her ideas. The Guardian’s obituary, like much Western media coverage, serves the interests of institutional art history by co-opting radical critique into a marketable legacy, while ignoring the historical parallels between Export’s tactics and those of indigenous, decolonial, and Global South feminist artists. Her ‘Tapp und Tastkino’ (1968) was a trickster’s gambit—a playful yet deliberate inversion of the male gaze that forced audiences to confront their own complicity in patriarchal visual culture. To honor her legacy, the art world must dismantle the very structures she fought against: gatekeeping institutions, Eurocentric canons, and the myth of individual genius, replacing them with collective, decolonial, and feminist futures.