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A Perfect Pair

Valie Export

1987 00:14:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

A Perfect Pair posits the idea that individual consumers are walking billboards for the products they use; product slogans and brand names peeking out from every crevice and cranny of the actors’ bodies. Export demonstrates how the body of the consumer, especially that of the female consumer, is co-opted by commercialism. In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects, as a body builder seduces a prostitute at a bar saying, “Your eyes are the most beautiful blue ad-space. Your cheek could promote a Mercedes. Your neck could be a slogan for styled technology.” Export’s work is centered around the evolving role of women in a culture where images increasingly displace material reality. A Perfect Pair wonderfully illustrates the inescapability of advertising’s “regime of signs", the signifying network of personal and product values that is effectively encoded on the space of women’s bodies.

About Valie Export

Austrian-born Valie Export is an artist, independent filmmaker, and theoretician who has created works in a variety of media, including documentary and narrative film, video, performance, photography, installation, sculpture, and drawing. Regarded as one of Europe’s most influential feminist filmmakers, and a central figure in the Austrian conceptual and avant-garde film movements since the 1960s, Export is renowned for her early risqué guerrilla performances.