Valie Export’s “Invisible Adversaries,” her 1977 experimental sci-fi mystery, will receive a rare screenings at the Museum of Modern Art on February 28 and March 7 as part of the massive Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema series, running through April 20. The film will be joined by shorter works by Kurt Kren and Hans Scheug, chosen by Export, who will be present for an introduction on February 28.
A simple plot synopsis says almost nothing about a film this complex, but one will be attempted here: Anna (Susanne Widl), a photographer, descends into paranoia as her relationship with a sexist artist (Peter Weibel) crumbles and she comes to believe the Hyksos, an alien society, are invading people’s bodies and minds. Employing a variety of techniques, from traditional narrative scenes to video montages and still photography, the work uses the struggle in the film to hazily mirror a larger feminist struggle among female artists.
By the time Export made “Invisible Adversaries,” she was already well known within international art circles for her confrontational and often violent work in performance and photography. One of her most infamous performances, “Tapp und Tast Kino” (“Tap and Touch Cinema”) (performed in various European cities from 1968 through 1971), included Export wearing a model of a movie theater over her bare chest and roaming the streets of Vienna, inviting random strangers to reach inside the cinema’s doors and touch her breasts. Her body performances were in line with what American artists such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden were doing during the same period.
Despite “Invisible Adversaries” confounding nature — Export is concerned with a true deconstruction of dominant narratives, which renders the film oblique at times — it reads, under all the layers, as a deeply personal work. The script was co-written with the artist Peter Weibel, a frequent collaborator and former partner, and in interviews Export has said that situations from their relationship were used in the film, but has stressed that its not a film directly about their relationship.
While the openness of the film, narratively and aesthetically, is greatly admired, it is just as well known for the firestorm it set off in the Austrian press upon its release. “I had to live through all kinds of attacks, even death threats,” Export said in an interview with the critic Scott MacDonald. “I have boxes full of menacing letters and cassette tapes from the time.”
Tabloids attacked the film as pornographic, questioned its funding, which came from the Austrian Ministry of Art and Education, and pressed for the resignation of the state secretary for education and culture, who they held responsible for letting the film see the light of day. Export and Weibel would be called a “Terrorist Pair” in the press, which cemented the film’s status as something that must be seen. “Invisible Adversaries” ended up running for 13 consecutive weeks in Viennese cinemas.
Export has become a canonical contemporary artist, a huge influence on artists who used various mediums — most notably film and video — to challenge notions of the body, and “Invisible Adversaries” will remain her defining work. In a 1980 review in the Soho News, the critic Amy Taubin’s analysis of the film is still persuasive more than 30 years later: “It makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing — in life and in art.” There’s not much more you can ask of a work of art.
