Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labor.
By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond “innocence”. Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued post-war Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes post-war artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.
Publication date: November 27, 2026
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Translation and Style
Introduction: Artistic Labour of the Body
1 The Body-Politic
2 Vienna – A Primal Scene
3 Failures of Resistance
4 A Beneficiary Society, or, Continuities
5 The Contradictions between Action and Reality
6 Ambiguity of the Body
7 Dialectics of the Body
1 Exhibitionist
1 A Subhistory of Film
2 Touched by the Crowds
3 Aktionshose: Genitalpanik: Planned
4 Fetishes, Taboos and Entertainers
2 Escape into Illness
1 Material Thinking, Feminist Actionism
2 Pathologies: Kausalgie, Hyperbulie, Asemie
3 Escape into Illness
4 Action – Praxis
3 The Language of Wounds
1 Body Writing
2 Body Language
3 Wounds of Modernity
4 An Archive of Body Postures
5 Silence over the Body
4 Petrified Memory
1 Media Regimes
2 Subject, City and Image
3 Monologue
5 Against Innocence, or, on Fascism’s Use of Women
1 Obscenity Repetitions
2 The Family as Factory of Image and Ideology
3 A Transactional Unit
4 Gender and Fascism
5 The Dialectics of Language
6 Against Innocence
6 Working Through a Mountain of History
1 Four Scenes
2 Fear of Technology
3 What Hides in Language?
4 Heimat
5 Home World
Coda
Bibliography
Index