The artist VALIE EXPORT, born Waltraud Lehner in 1940, changed her name in 1967 to this all-capitalized moniker as a feminist rejection of male patronymics. Around this time, EXPORT began to explore intersections among technology, visual media, and gender politics in her work. Making use of the archives of the recently-opened VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, this project will investigate relationships between EXPORT’s practice and the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. The artist’s engagement with these areas of study will inform an exploration of how new media such as television reshaped art and the economies of attention in which it is imbricated. EXPORT’s art responded to and participated in this changing media landscape during decades when cultural critics explored psychological etiologies of the political disasters of the twentieth century. The ways her art did so promise insights into both our recent past and our present moment.

Nathan Stobaugh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. His research focuses on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on art produced in Europe after the Second World War across media ranging from painting to video and performance. Before coming to Princeton, Nathan Stobaugh received a master’s degree in the History of Art at Williams College after earning his B.A. in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. Nathan Stobaugh has also worked in the curatorial department of the Saint Louis Art Museum, where he collaborated on a survey of German art since the 1960s. In the spring of 2018, he led a team of students who curated the exhibition Hanne Darboven’s Address—Place and Time, sited at the Princeton University Art Museum and other locations on Princeton’s campus, which was accompanied by a series of readings, lectures, and performances on the show’s opening day.