Iris ter Schiphorst
Around 1972 – Pierre Boulez, Mauricio Kagel and Valie Export
Das Privileg, zu zerstören oder: die Dekonstruktion als Geste der Macht
In 1972, Pierre Boulez publicly declared his intention to blow up opera; at around the same time, Mauricio Kagel, with a highly lucrative commission in his pocket, attempted to deconstruct it at the Hamburg State Opera, while Valie Export was reviled by the arts pages for wanting to fight for a physical and conceptual space for women in art.
Her struggle culminated in 1975 in the groundbreaking exhibition MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity, which she curated at the Vienna Gallery next to St. Stephen's. The show was the first of its kind in Europe to provide a comprehensive overview of female sensibility and imagination and to radically question the male gaze in the art world.
Pierre Boulez and Mauricio Kagel acted from a position of secure power. When Boulez called for opera houses to be "blown up," it was the gesture of a 'rightful heir' who had grown tired of his parents' dusty castle. Kagel, on the other hand, dismantled the "state theatre" into its absurd individual parts, but only because he already had the keys to the theatre in his pocket. For this male avant-garde, destruction was an aesthetic game, a kind of "luxury vandalism" that brought them great international recognition, while female composers, musicians and artists were completely excluded from this game – they simply had no access to these institutions of high culture. And the arts pages had little interest in their art.
But it was not only about the right of their art to exist, but also about self-determination over their bodies! (See initiatives such as Alice Schwarzer's campaign "We have had abortions!" (1971) and the slogan "My body belongs to me"...
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This is precisely what marks the privilege of destruction: Boulez and Kagel possessed the authority to interpret and the keys to the ivory tower, which is why they could afford to symbolically tear it down. They enjoyed institutional protection while railing against the institution.
For artists like Valie Export, the situation was fundamentally different:
- The struggle for presence: While male artists proclaimed "anti-art" or "anti-opera," female artists first had to prove that they were even subjects of art production. Their attack did not come from the chair of the chief conductor, but through the occupation of public space (e.g., Export's Tapp- und Tastkino).
- Exclusion through structure: In the 1970s, professorships, juries and artistic directorships were almost exclusively held by men. An "attack from within" was impossible for women because there was no "within" for them.
- Strategic difference: The male avant-garde wanted to smash the format (the opera, the score). Feminist art, on the other hand, first had to make the structure (exclusion, the male gaze) visible before it could change it.
This contrast shows that deconstruction was also a gesture of power in this case; making things visible was an act of resistance.