Filmstill from “En Perfektes Paar (A Perfect Pair)”. A film by Valie Export, Austria, 1986, Color, 16mm
In tongue-in-cheek fashion, A Perfect Pair celebrates the modern-day co-mingling of fetish objects. Valie’s aproach to lust translates in modern terms to a music video about sex and consumerism. In one satiric scene a bodybuilder, who uses his body like a billboard to sell products, tries to advise a woman to do the same, 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.












