The installation The Power of Language (concept and curation by Prof. Barbara Wally) exhibits the works of three internationally acclaimed Austrian artists: renowned multimedia artist Valie Export (1940, Linz), Nobel Laureate in Literature Elfriede Jelinek (1946, Mürzzuschlag), and avant-garde composer Olga Neuwirth (1968, Graz). The choice to bring these three artists under one roof is no coincidence. They hold each other's work in high regard and have therefore collaborated on a number of projects. For instance, Jelinek wrote the essay "To Cut a Slice off the Space" ("Sich vom Raum eine Spalte abschneiden," 1997) for Valie Export's video installations and Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway (2003). The composer adapted two Jelinek texts, Bodily Changes (Körperliche Veränderungen) and The Forest (Der Wald), for her music which premiered at the 1991 Vienna Festival. What is exceptional, however, is the fact that the installation The Power of Language examines, for the first time, the point of intersection in content and form between EXPORT's visual art, Jelinek's literature, and Neuwirth's music.   VALIE EXPORT worked in the late 1960s with what is known as expanded cinema. In the 1970s, she concentrated on video and 16mm film. Since the late 1980s, multimedia art and laser installations are an important part of her repertoire. EXPORT's artistic approach has been directed towards the exploration of new possibilities and the limits of artistic expression for issues of social and gender-specific codification and the effect of power structures. In the late 1960s, she came onto the scene as a "second generation" of Vienna Actionism with her provocative performance Tap and Touch Cinema (Tapp und Tast Kino, 1968). Other major early works include the co-production with actor Peter Weibel From the Portfolio of Doggedness (Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit, 1968) and a series of black-and-white photographs and drawings entitled Body Configurations (Körperkonfigurationen, 1972-76). EXPORT also produced three feature-length films: Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner, 1976), HumanWomen (Menschenfrauen, 1979), and Practice of Love (Praxis der Liebe, 1984). In 1987, she participated in the Seven Women - Seven Sins project by Maxi Cohen and produced the short film "Lust." From 1991 to 1995, she taught at the Berlin University for Fine Arts. For the past decade, she has been a professor at the University for Media Art in Cologne and has regularly taught at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg. In 1998, EXPORT released the CD-ROM Images of Contact (Bilder der Berührungen, 1998). It provides access to the full range of her work in expanded cinema, video, film, photography, performance, and installation marked by her feminist approach against discrimination and ignorance. EXPORT received the prestigious Oskar Kokoschka Award in March 2000.   Like EXPORT 's multimedia art, Jelinek's writings epitomize creative resistance, both politically and aesthetically. Her oeuvre includes novels, plays, poetry, polemical essays, as well as numerous collaborations with artists in music, dance, film, and video art. Jelinek has received numerous awards, and in 2004 was recognized as one of the most significant literary voices of our time when she became the tenth women writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her texts are characterized by her critical relationship to language, which she understands as a reflection of phallogocentric (the privileging of the masculine, the phallus, in understanding meaning or social relations), authoritarian structures. Jelinek's relentless social and cultural iconoclasm is located within the violent and corrupt language of our post-modern world. Her texts reveal "with extraordinary linguistic zeal" the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power" (Nobel Committee).   Despite the fact that both Export and Jelinek have received the highest accolades from the art world, their critically engaged work was grossly misunderstood and misrepresented by the media for decades. Both artists endured the most vicious hostilities directed against the person and against their art. In 1989, Jelinek remarked in an interview: "There is a kind of collective malice and contempt, with which the work of a man, even if unsuccessful, is not showered" (May 1989). Referring to VALIE EXPORT's feuilleton reception, Hildegard Fraueneder wrote in the catalogue text for the Essl exhibition (2004): "Even though the artist herself always explained clearly the conceptual connections of self-violation and the questioning of reality, the cultural inscriptions in the body, the reactions were restricted and focused on the more provocative aspect of self-violation. Mostly, the references to ethnology, psychology, and social history were overlooked."   Media reception improved for the "next generation" artist, avant-garde composer Olga Neuwirth, because the inexhaustible production of innovative works by Export and Jelinek helped tear down many barriers - especially for younger women writers and artists. The very young Neuwirth began to make her mark in the music world about fifteen years ago. In the late 1980s, she studied composition at the University for Music and Applied Art in Vienna as well as at the Conservatory of Music and the Art College, both in San Francisco. In 1999, she celebrated the premiere of her first music theater work Bählamms Fest during the Vienna Festival and was awarded the Ernst Krenek Prize for her work. Her composition Clinamen/Nodus, written for Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra, premiered in March 2000 and was part of the orchestra's repertoire on its world tour. In 2000, Neuwirth was composer-in-residence at the Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders in Antwerp and held the same position at the Luzerne Festival two years later. Her music theater piece Lost Highway (named after David Lynch's film by the same title and the libretto written by Jelinek and Neuwirth) was performed at the steirischer herbst festival in 2003.   Olga Neuwirth's compositions contain a bewildering wealth of sound patterns that leaves the listener groping for points of orientation. Sandwiched between the older generation that chased ideologies and the younger one that is cynically market-oriented and feels at home in cyberspace, Neuwirth writes music full of eeriness and irony as a means of combating the numbness and incapacity for communication of modern life. "Her music is an escape from speechlessness at the irrationality of human existence, and yet, at the same time, exposes this irrationality through music" (Stefan Drees, 1998). Moreover, the compositions reveal her strong influence by film. She makes use of quick cuts, rapid sequences of contrasts, superimpositions, and montages.   Neuwirth's music - similar to EXPORT's multimedia art and Jelinek's writings - seeks to be understood as a form of survival and a permanent resistance to the absurdities of society's clichés and their oppressive powers in our Western world. Another important point of intersection for the artistic endeavors of the three artists is transforming existing images and sounds by creating patterns of association that chain the conscious to the unconscious both in the act of art creation and in the reception process of the observer. This means that the less recognizable the images and sounds are, the more susceptible become their audio and visual qualities to the observer's associations.   In fact, "the actual act lies outside the visible action," declared VALIE EXPORT in her 1973 essay on feminism and the arts. In her 2002 installation entitled The Power of Language - which provided the inspiration and the title for the 2005 exhibition and which is on display in the ACF - six monitors multiply the close-up shot of the human glottis in action combined with a male voice-over. The effect of abstraction through the close-up of the larynx and the multiplication of the image add an evocative dimension to the medical coolness of the representation. Other installations show Jelinek texts, written and as audio presentations, and Neuwirth's music.   The exhibition of EXPORT's, Jelinek's and Neuwirth's works at ACF highlights the synergies of text, language, sound, and image and creates synaesthesias that are stunning sensory encounters. Synaesthesia (interactivity between the senses) has been an underlying basic principle in the aesthetic experience of the arts, from classical Greek theatre (deus ex machina) to baroque opera, from Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk to the birth of film. It also played an important role in Dadaist and Surrealist art, Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty, and in the more recent action-kunst with its performances and happenings. Since the blending and performative crossovers of Fluxus (art movement in the 1960s), electronic and digital installations that combine visual elements with sound and movement have opened up new and exciting possibilities for expression and interpretation.   The exceptional spatial structure of ACF that provided the inspiration for the thematic concept of the exhibition allows the installations to be set up on three floors connected by a staircase. Hence, the visitor can see only one of the three installations at any given time. However, many acoustic and visual elements penetrate the spatial boundaries and establish interesting connections between the individual pieces or create new references to them. Thus, the visitor experiences surprising sensory encounters of The Power of Language, either synchronously or successively as he/she wanders through the exhibit.   printer version tell a friend contact Author By Margarethe Lamb-Faffelberger, Associate Professor of German, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Lafayette College, and the Director of the Max Kade Center for German Studies. Professor Lamb-Faffelberger is also General Editor, Austrian Culture Series - Peter Lang Publishing.   Photo From left: Elfriede Jelinek, Olga Neuwirth, VALIE EXPORT. August 2, 2005 at Cafe Sperl, Vienna. Photo by Elisabeth Woerndl.