One of the most iconic images of Austrian oppositional culture in the moment of 1968 is a photograph of the artist VALIE EXPORT performing a public action entitled Tapp- und Tastkino (“Tap- and Touch-Cinema”). EXPORT wears a cardboard box over her upper body; a man reaches through the front of the box, apparently touching her breasts. It is a difficult image to read in that the viewer is confronted with a number of details that do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. Instead, she finds herself asking questions that are not so easily answered: What sorts of pleasure, power, and intimacy are activated by this deeply strange encounter? Who is the bystander watching this event, and how should we understand her or his expression, her or his role, or her or his relationship to the viewer? And what relation do any of these ambiguous questions have to the concrete, historically contingent particularities of film, art, politics, or the public sphere? It speaks to the complexity of EXPORT’s piece that none of these questions can be readily resolved, even when one is familiar with its concept (the box was meant to represent a kind of tactile cinema in which the artist’s body served as the “film”; by reaching through a set of curtains on the front of the box, interested members of the public could “view” the film by handling her exposed breasts).

In the decades since the Tastkino was performed, it has come to be celebrated as a foundational work of feminist art, a status that lends credence to EXPORT’s subsequent assertion that the work was intended to be “the first women’s film.”This acclaim derives in part from the impact that EXPORT’s actions from that period have exerted on subsequent generations of artists. Re-performances of Tastkino and the related project Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969) have been staged in numerous cities, as well as at the Guggenheim Museum and in the virtual community Second Life. “Invisible Adversaries,” a recent exhibition at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art inspired by EXPORT’s eponymous 1976 film, featured work by numerous widely acclaimed, critical, contemporary artists, including Hito Steyerl, Emily Jacir, Nikki S. Lee, and Lorna Simpson.Historians of postmodern and contemporary art have been virtually unanimous in celebrating the Tastkino as a prescient anticipation of important developments in such fields as body art, performance, and media art.