From men on dog leads to public breast-fondling, Valie Export’s art demanded a total feminist revolution

The performance artist was a brilliantly subversive pioneer whose work exposed the predicament of women living in a world that was not made for us Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85 Punk, intellectual, feminist, theorist, brave as hell, vulnerable, funny, Valie Export was a hero to many women. Since the 1960s, she was driven by a fierce conviction that art and media would play an essential role in women’s liberation: that women must picture their own reality in the name of social progress. In Women’s Art: A Manifesto (1972), she wrote that women must “use art as a means of expression, so as to influence the consciousness of all of us”. What she demanded was revolution. I keep returning to her work. Can’t stay away. I have written about her in relation to violence in women’s art. Her work was heavy with explicit threat and pain, and she made evident the violence of forcing women’s bodies to inhabit structures that were not designed for them. For the 1973 performance Hyperbuliashe crept naked through a corridor of electrified wires, exposing herself voluntarily to shocks. She allowed me to use her 1976 photocollage The Birth Madonna for th