Valie Export treated the female body as both seduction and opposition. Beginning in the late 1960s, she created performance works that used her own sexual anatomy as a confrontational tool. In “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1968), she moved through a movie theater wearing crotchless trousers so her vulva was visible at audience eye level. A related 1969 photograph shows her with a direct gaze and a machine gun while pubic hair is prominently displayed. In “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968–71), she presented bare breasts in a curtained box and invited passersby to touch her for a brief, timed interval. Her work forced viewers to engage while questioning the meaning and ethics of observing women’s bodies.
"In “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1968), she walked around a movie theatre in crotchless trousers, her naked vulva at the audience's eye level. (A photograph by the same title, from 1969, shows her wearing the pants, her gaze trained straight on the camera and a machine gun cradled in her arms; a profusion of pubic hair sprouts from between her spread legs as a kind of dare.)"
"In “Tap and Touch Cinema” (1968-71), Export took to the streets of Vienna and other European cities with her bare breasts encased in a curtained-off box, inviting passersby to reach in and have a squeeze, for a brief, strictly measured span of time. Attracting and menacing her viewers in equal measure, she compelled them to engage with her body while also challenging this very engagement."
"What does it mean to observe women's bodies, Export asked, whether for edification, or pleasure, or titillation? Might there be something aggressive or wrong about this act of observation, and might we expect the woman being observed to then take this aggression and wrongness and flip it, metabolize it, make it into something altogether new-perhaps, even, into art?"
"Valie Export, who died last week, at the age of eighty-five, saw the female body as a site of both seduction and opposition. Starting in the late nineteen-sixties, in her performance-art pieces, Export wielded her own sexual appendages like weapons-keenly and audaciously."
Read at The New Yorker
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