About the Work
VALIE EXPORT took these photos from her window on a grey Vienna day: one shot every sixty minutes over a twenty-four-hour period. Four blocks of six photos, with a serial view of a building disappearing into the distance, were assembled to create the 'Time Poem'. The next day, VALIE EXPORT would reinvigorate the street with her presence - the street being the actual playground on which she would "export" her body and her challenging ideas. Artists, especially proponents of Viennese Actionism, wanted to know how passers-by would react to body performances. This prompted VALIE EXPORT to offer herself physically by strapping a "tap-and-touch cinema" in front of her breasts and allowing anyone who wished to touch them to do so, be it bashfully, aggressively, tentatively or eagerly. She also took her friend Peter Weibel for a walk on a dog's lead, and on Heldenplatz, she pressed her body against various architectural details. Her interactions are now regarded as conceptual photographs fit for a museum.
