In 1968, at age twenty-eight, Austrian artist Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, in all uppercase letters, to announce her new identity on the Viennese art scene. Eager to counter the Vienna Actionists—Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Herman Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—she chose EXPORT, the name of a popular cigarette brand, as her last name.
One could argue that Seven Easy Pieces in Marina Abramovic’s psychic scrapbook: photographs of meditating monks in Thailand; turn-of-the-century photos of a female medium producing ectoplasm; documentation of some of Abramovic’s own work; and canonical images of performances by every artist she reprises in Pieces (and a few she doesn’t, such as Chris Burden, who denied her request to perform his 1974 Trans-Fixed)
In the midst of Valie Export’s 1969 Action Pants: Genital Panic, in which Abramovic stood or sat wielding a machine gun, those present were held captive by a nearly hour-long, wordless exchange between the artist and a young man who attempted to vault onto the stage. Though the man was escorted away, Abramovic later speculated that he wasn’t aggressive but simply wanted to determine how best to participate in the piece.
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