VALIE EXPORT
HOMOMETER (1973)
©️ VALIE EXPORT / Bildrecht, Vienna 2024
With huge loaves of bread attached to her legs, the artist drags herself through the sand, emerges from the sea, and walks back into it after a while, leaving the impression that she may have committed suicide. In HOMOMETER (part of Identitätstransfer 1–3 [Identity Transfer 1–3], a series of self-staged performances), VALIE EXPORT provocatively rethinks bread—traditionally a symbol of motherhood, birth, and resurrection—as a heavy and oppressive burden, carried predominantly by women.
As a pioneering feminist artist, EXPORT exposed and attacked the violent dimension of the highly praised traditional domestic order. Her chief inspiration for this performance was Du pain et du bled (On Bread and the Hinterland, 1774), an essay by the prolific and mysterious writer Simon N. H. Linguet (1736–1794), guillotined during the French Revolution for discrediting the nutrition of the people. Linguet saw bread as a “slow poison” and source of addiction, and held it responsible for all human vices, including slavery and despotism.
VALIE EXPORT (1940, Linz, Austria) is an artist working in the realm of conceptual media, performance, and film and part of the Austrian feminist avant-garde. Her work has been shown internationally at numerous biennials and solo exhibitions and is held by major collections, such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, MoMA, New York; and MOCA, Los Angeles. In 2022, she received the Grand Decoration of Honor in Silver with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria. EXPORT lives in Vienna.
Courtesy of VALIE EXPORT
Five black-and-white photographs, 29.6 × 39.6 cm each
Courtesy of VALIE EXPORT