...Remote... Remote...

Austria

1973

12 Min

Color

Silent

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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The short film Remote, Remote by Valie Export opens up with a photograph of two infants standing up in a cot and holding each others hand. Their mouths are open and eyes are pleading. The photograph is then blown up poster size, which accentuates the graininess of the picture. Then appears several quick shots between the eyes of a sandy-haired woman, who is sitting on a chair near the photograph and the eyes of the smaller child in the photo. The woman holds in her hand a work knife and a bowl of milk is situated between her knees. We notice that her hands are worn and her nails are ragged from biting. She then takes the work knife and starts cutting away at her cuticles. During this process, we hear several sounds: the beating of a spoon against a pan, and the sound of a something hard, perhaps a zipper or button, panging against the wall of a spinning dryer. The woman continues to mutilate her hand, eventually cutting away the cuticle and digging into her fingers. The last shot is of her dipping her bloody mutilated hands into the bowl of milk.

Director

Valie Export

VALIE EXPORT (born May 17, 1940 in Linz as Waltraud Lehner) is an Austrian artist. Her artistic work includes video installations, body performances, expanded cinema, computer animations, photography, sculptures and publications covering contemporary arts.

Educated in a convent until the age of 14, EXPORT studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry in Vienna, and briefly worked in the film industry as a script girl, editor, and extra. She married and had two children, but later divorced her husband and returned to art school. In 1967, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT—written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo—shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes. With this gesture of self-determination, EXPORT emphatically asserted her identity within the Viennese art scene, which was then dominated by the taboo-breaking performance art of Viennese actionists such as Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Like her male contemporaries, she subjected her body to pain and danger in actions designed to confront the growing complacency and conformism of postwar Austrian culture. But her examination of the ways in which the power relations inherent in media representations inscribe women’s bodies and consciousness distinguishes EXPORT’s project as unequivocally feminist.

EXPORT’s early guerilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. Tapp- und Tast-Kino (“Tap and Touch Cinema”) was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. In this avowedly revolutionary work, EXPORT wore a tiny “movie theater” around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the “theater.” She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

In her 1969 performance Aktionshose:Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic), EXPORT entered a porn cinema in Munich with her hair in disarray, wearing crotchless pants, and carrying a machine gun. Striding up and down the rows of theatregoers, she brandished the weapon and challenged the male audience to engage with a “real woman” instead of with an images on a screen. Through these acts of artistic daring, EXPORT challenged the objectification of the female form by confronting voyeurs with a body that returned the gaze.

The contrast with what is usually called “cinema” is obvious, and is crucial to the message. In EXPORT’s performance, the female body is not packaged and sold by male directors and producers, but is controlled and offered freely by the woman herself, in defiance of social rules and state precepts. Also, the ordinary state-approved cinema is an essentially voyeuristic experience, whereas in EXPORT’s performance, the “audience” not only has a very direct, tactile contact with another person, but does so in the full view of EXPORT and bystanders.

EXPORT’s groundbreaking video piece, “Facing a Family” (1971) was one of the first instances of television intervention and broadcasting video art. The video, broadcast on the Austrian television program “Kontakte”, shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV while eating dinner. When other middle class families watched this program on TV, the television would be holding a mirror up to their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, spectator, and television.

Since 1995/1996 EXPORT has held a professorship for multimedia performance at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany. —Wikipedia

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sea-of-ether

27Mar12

It extremely important to note the background story of the photo behind her, which makes this piece even more thought-provoking and disturbing.

Slow-Immersion likes this

Slowart

20Mar11

ravaging experience for mighty hearts only, there was one single thing i couldn't get out of my mind while watching - the largescale granny photo which will appear 3 years later in the opening night, haunting and tormenting gena and representing the topic of middle age, depression / valie export exploits a largescale poster of agonizing kids

PolarisDiB

17Jan10

SSSS! Ouch! A woman cuts her cuticles to the point of bleeding in front of a blown-up photograph of two molested children. The area is sparse and you have no choice but to look at the mutilation, both internal and external, while a rhythmic beating keeps the time and draws you in. "Powerfully evocative" would be the term for this, as well as "not for the faint of heart."