Guy Lochhead, 02/09/10
Iconic Austrian performance artist best known for ‘Tapp- und Tast-Kino’, in which she wore a small theatre around her naked upper body and invited people to touch her, and ‘Aktionshose:Genitalpanik’, in which she confronted an art cinema in crotchless pants, telling them to engage with a ‘real woman’. She now teaches multimedia performance in Cologne. There is a myth (that I initially took as fact in the MTL zine) that Aktionshose:Genitalpanik took place in a porn cinema, with EXPORT brandishing a machine gun, as she did on the poster. She says this never happened. If it had happened, it would kind of make more sense to me… Still, either way, I hate this stuff. It’s so limited in its effect. It must feel amazing for the artist, but the limitation of its audience and the perpetuation of the ‘angry woman’ stereotype negates any real power the pieces might have had, and instead succeeds in further distancing art from the public, and women artists from women. Plus, ‘multimedia performance’ is a nonsensical thing to teach exclusively.