Tapp und Tastkino = Tapp und Tastfilm (S)

In TAP and TOUCH CINEMA—the 1968 performance documented in this short video—EXPORT entered a crowded Munich square wearing a specially constructed box over her nude torso. She stood silently while fellow artist Peter Weibel used a megaphone to invite passersby to reach inside the box for thirty seconds at a time. This iconic feminist action is a work of “expanded cinema,” a set of ideas and practices developed by artists and theorists in the 1960s and ’70s to test the conventions that had defined the medium of film, opening it up to performance and other interventions. In confronting people with the physical presence of her body, as opposed to the idealized representations of women prevalent in film, television, and print, TAP and TOUCH CINEMA was—in the artist’s words—the “first immediate women’s film.”