Export and Moire: Touch Cinemas

We look into the past … to see Tactile Cinema, Valie Export

In the years 1968–1971 Valie Export, an Austi-born artist born in Linz, appeared on the streets of 10 European cities with Touch Cinema, the Touch Cinema, ie a box worn on her naked breasts. She invited people, both men and women, to come closer to her, put their hands through the curtains of the box and touch her breasts, while the artist looked at her watch from time to time, focusing on completely detaching herself from all emotions and feelings. She later explained the act of exposing her breasts to the touch of foreign hands as “a woman’s first steps from object to subject.” Now it was the woman who was going to be in control – she decided about the place, the act and the time.

Female artists were the first to question female nudity from the point of view of gender. We already mentioned Carolee Schnimann in the Daily. Valie Export began addressing gender issues in her 1960s work, adopting a different kind of radicalism than her colleagues in the Viennese art scene, dominated by Viennese activists such as Günter Brus. and Hermann Nitsch, whose performances and happenings were destructive and bloody. Valie confronted random people in a more intimate – but no less intimidating – way, portraying the female body as an object of violence, sexual harassment and desire. Her performances about sexuality, power and oppression, played in the streets or in cinemas, caused discomfort, confusion and anger. Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema) develops the idea of “gaze”, a term in psychology and philosophy that relates, among other things, to the awareness of being an object.

Milo Moire and her “Mirror Box”

Recently, Milo Moiré, a Swiss artist and psychologist who has been involved in controversial public activities for years, has recently referred to the work Export. In 2014 during Art Basel in Switzerland she took a nude bus ride with the names of garments painted on the body, another time she painted a white sheet naked in front of an art museum in Cologne, Germany, taking paint … from eggs hidden in a vagina. In 2016 in London, Düsseldorf and Amsterdam, she invited passers-by to touch her breasts and put their fingers inside her vagina – and body parts like Valie Export’s were hidden in a large mirrored box with a hole in the center.

“I made some rules. When someone slips their fingers into my vagina, I say,” You have 30 seconds – you have to look into my eyes. We can only talk about feelings, if I like it, let me express it, I’m also interested in what you feel. ” . It was important to me that people were aware of what we were doing. So yeah, maybe some men were a little more insistent, some maybe put more fingers in my vagina than necessary, but there was never a point where I felt that it was getting nasty or that I was bending over. People who were a bit shy showed me real respect.

In London, the artist was arrested for 24 hours.