Abstract

What is unpresentable in art? This paper considers VALIE EXPORT’s feminist exhibitionism in her 1968 performance artwork Genital Panic, which took place in a Munich cinema. EXPORT’s transgressive display of her genitals, which finds art-historical precedents in medieval sheela na gigs and Courbet’s Origin of the World, established a paradigm for a kind of feminist art collision that continues today, – for instance in Deborah de Robertis’ 2014 unauthorized performance at the Musée d’Orsay. EXPORT’s staged presentation and representation of blatant power and sexuality contradicts the lack postulated in Freud’s castration complex. At the same time, it raises the question of the unpresentable, a notion taken up by Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman, which explores concepts of representation and the unpresentable. The latter he defines as an expression of an “Idea of reason,”, an absolute. I reflect on how this concept applies to EXPORT’s marker for the use of the body in feminist art