This video is all that remains of Cutting, a corporal action where the artist acts on the skin and on a movie screen, and which is part of the Expanded Movies series that VALIE EXPORT produced from 1965 onwards. By Expanded Cinema, VALIE EXPORT means: “The extension of the traditional film category into the street or on stage, breaking the commercial, conventional chain of film production. […] Expanded Cinema is a collage, extended in time and over various spatial layers in different media, in order to break away from the bi-dimensionality of the surface. […] In the 1960s, Expanded Cinema began a deconstruction of the dominant reality, making new forms of communication accessible and manifesting new ways of communicating.” [1] The title echoes the cinematographic practice of montage as much as it does the use of a sharp instrument such as a cutter or knife – objects which play an undeniably symbolic role in VALIE EXPORT's work. The opening section is presented as a documentary and shows a large sheet of paper on which a shot of the façade of a building is projected.

VALIE EXPORT is behind this sheet of paper and bit by bit cuts out each window. At the same time, she cuts out letters that form the words “The content of the writing is the speech”. The presenter then announces: “Homage to Marshall McLuhan.” The light from the screen projects the letters onto the wall behind. In tribute to Bazooka Joe, a renowned comedian, she takes a pair of scissors and cuts Peter Weibel's t-shirt [2]. She then shaves his hairy chest and cuts his pubic hairs. The penultimate section – a mute film not visible in the video – honours Greta Garbo, an actress known for her sexual ambiguity and her silence. The final section is seen as a public action and shows the artist performing fellatio. Traces of this part exist in the accompanying text and in photos, but no longer in the video. In regards to this expanded movie, VALIE EXPORT says: “Presentation, product, production, reality form a unity in expanded cinema. In the intermedial action, Cutting, I did not cut the celluloid, but the body-screen illuminated by the lamp of the projector. The sound of cutting, of breathing, and of the projector without film was the soundtrack.” [3]

Lou Svahn

[1] Valie Export, Erweitertes Kino als Erweiterte Wirklichkeit, Vienna, conference text, undated (1970s), Valie Export archives.

[2] Peter Weibel was born in 1944 in Odessa. After having studied in Paris and Vienna, he became part of the Viennese Actionists. He has been present in all aspects of art – as an artist, performer, research director, scientific editor, and museum director (ZKM Center for Art and Media since 1999).

[3] Quoted by Roswitha Mueller, VALIE EXPORT. Fragments of the Imagination, Bloomington Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 219