Valie Export Was Ahead of Her Time and as Subtle as She Was Provocative

One chilly but sparkling afternoon this past January, I made a pilgrimage. The destination was a somewhat unlikely site for work by one of the most iconoclastic (in every sense of that term) feminist artists of the last century: a Roman Catholic church. The Pöstlingberg basilica gleams atop the steep hill of the same name, looking out upon a wide vista of the Danube flowing through Linz—where VALIE EXPORT, born Waltraud Lehner in Nazi-era Austria, spent her formative years. I was