Criss-Crossing (Verkreuzung), from the series "Body Configurations" (1972-83)

In her series Body Configurations, created between 1972 and 1982, Valie Export interacted physically with urban and natural settings in poses that echoed the surrounding landscape. By using her body as a marker or measuring device, Export suggested its potential as geometric sculpture. Often she stamped the photographs or marked them with ink to accentuate the approximate relationship between human and geometric shapes. Both a stamp and ink markings are present here. The ink is somewhat ragged at the edges, as if to signal “expressionistic” individual intervention in the mechanical image. The stamp, by contrast, depersonalizes; it is of a piece with Export’s adopted last name, casting the postwar art world as a marketplace of exportable commodities. Could or should the human figure, or the female figure, take such a marketplace for granted?