Valie Export quotes

  • I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happened when you leave behind the voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But that's what was so interesting for me to discover: People don't want to see reality. It's a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it's projected onto a screen, it's acceptable, but it's different when it's there in front of you in a public space.
    -- Valie Export

    #Simple #Reality #People

  • Whenever we think of the body as a vessel for artistic ideas, we somehow always focus on the surface of the body. But the truth is that there is no surface of the body independent of its interior. It's obvious that the outside of the body is always connected to the inside, to thought processes and to an internal anatomy.
    -- Valie Export

    #Independent #Thinking #Focus

  • The female body has always been a construction. Even feminist art of the 1970s fashioned a body in accordance with its own ideas, and in this regard it was a form of manipulation too. Subsequently, we've had to engage with a lot of things that we used to disavow as manipulation. We can't just dismiss everything as manipulations anymore, since the alternatives are constructions, too. From our perspective, from this corner of the planet, we have to admit that it's all constructed. There is absolutely no nature. Nature is one of the biggest constructions.
    -- Valie Export

    #Art #Perspective #Feminist

  • Much of the art of the 1960s, from body art to video and direct performance, was concerned with similar issues. And then there was media art, which made it possible to express things directly, without having to rely on the written word, which was manipulated by men.
    -- Valie Export

    #Art #Men #1960s

  • My interest in time emerged out of an engagement with the media that I was working with. Film and performance are temporal media. They rely on time. When I'm carrying out a performance, it matters, for example, how long I hold one particular gesture or posture. Seriality is very important too. Performance can be used to dilate time or to repeat time. And video, in turn, has its own time.
    -- Valie Export

    #Long #Important #Film

  • One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, and loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, and people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea, and work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, and play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, and the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice, and people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.

  • Made with Pencils is grounded in the creativity of a few, propelled by the financial support of many, and most importantly, it's empowering generations to come. A simple idea, a heartfelt desire, and a world of possibility. A pencil, a promise, and a dream.

  • In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever. The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit. And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet; we're so easily distracted, but the world is still designed to destroy you. It just happens quicker and faster now.

  • The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

  • The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.

  • I'd like to set things straight, a few more people should be pulling their weight.

  • My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

  • The science of anti-Semitism finally comes to explain this phenomenon, enlightening further the consciousness of people, fully satisfying their instinct and its violent eruptions thus legitimized by revealing their cause - the parasitism of the Jews. Thus it gives us the formula of the scientific solution for the problem of Judaism, which in order to realize we have only to apply.

  • The bells they sound on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.

  • Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.