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article culture calendar_today Friday, May 15, 2026

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

Valie Export, the pioneering Austrian feminist artist known for her provocative and confrontational performances from the 1960s onward, is the subject of a reflective essay by writer and academic Hettie Judah. The article revisits Export's radical works such as *Hyperbulia* (1973), where she crawled naked through electrified wires; *From the Portfolio of Doggedness* (1968), in which she led a man on a dog lead through Vienna; and *Action Pants: Genital Panic* (1969), where she walked through a cinema with exposed genitals. Judah draws on her own interviews with Export, who died in 2023, and discusses the artist's manifesto demanding that women use art to reshape consciousness and achieve liberation.

This article matters because it reasserts Export's enduring relevance as a theorist and practitioner of feminist art who challenged patriarchal structures in both life and work. By examining Export's personal journey—from a constrained girlhood in a convent to her transformation into a capital-letter-named artist—Judah highlights how Export's art remains a vital reference point for discussions about women's autonomy, bodily sovereignty, and the political power of performance. The piece also underscores the continued importance of feminist art history in understanding contemporary debates about gender and representation.