Scripting Space: Affective Topographies in VALIE EXPORT, Elfriede Jelinek, and Ulrich Seidl

Abstract

This dissertation explores the use of performance spaces and space design for audience engagement in Austrian performance art, theater, and film since the 1960s. Bringing together the works of VALIE EXPORT, Elfriede Jelinek, and Ulrich Seidl, I foreground the central importance of space for understanding the work of these artists. I argue that the interrogation and manipulation of the space of performance in the works of these artists is a means of showing the ideological functions of the urban, domestic, and media spaces we frequent daily. All three, EXPORT, Jelinek, and Seidl, are interested in the notion of appropriately gendered habits, what I call gendered scripts, which they find reflected in and enforced by the architectures and media spaces that surround us. Through analyses of performances and photographs by VALIE EXPORT, theater texts by Elfriede Jelinek and their productions, and films by Ulrich Seidl, I show how these artists experiment with the use of performance space to activate their audience and affectively communicate their critique of public and private spaces in a media-saturated world.