32) Kennedy, Randy. “Who Is Valie Export? Just Look, and Please Touch,” The New York Times. June 29, 2016.
33) Indiana, Gary. “Valie Export,” Bomb Magazine. Spring, 1982.
34) Vasseleu, Cathryn. "Resistances of Touch." Signs 40, no. 2 (2015): 299.
BY 开伦
Valie Export - TAP and TOUCH Cinema, 1968-71
The work of Schutz and Valdez was protested on the basis of identity labels that are out of their control, but this is not to claim that the identity of the artist should never matter, nor that the offense caused by identity always results in censorship. There are also many positive examples of works that depend on the identity of the artist to function, yet are offensive in a way that brings value to the message of the piece and the public that interacts with it. This principle intuitively, though not exclusively, applies to performance art, as the physical characteristics of the artist that determine identity are often used as the medium.
One of the most seminal examples is that of Valie Export's TAP and TOUCH Cinema. In the piece, Export donned a miniature curtained theater that concealed her naked torso. She then walked the streets of ten different cities, inviting strangers to reach their hands through the curtain and grope her in public. In accordance with Export’s stated intention of challenging the public to interact with a real person as opposed to the objectified versions of women typically seen in cinema at the time,32 the meaning and function of the piece are dependent on the fact that Export is a woman, and to that extent, so is the social violation. Inviting strangers to grope her breasts was certainly socially transgressive for the context in which it was made. However, it was the piece’s interaction with the public, and the ensuing reactions, that qualifies it as offensive. One newspaper, Export claims, even suggested she be burned as a witch for her performance, so severe was her moral corruption.33 It was reactions like these that brought public attention to the performance, and ultimately, to the issues the work contended with.
It is important to note that this attention was garnered despite feminists and art critics alike critiquing the piece for its conceptual limitations. As the feminist author Cathryn Vasseleau wrote for the academic journal, Signs34, if the goal of the work was to criticize objectification, this was not supported by the fact that “...there was no equivocal MEMORIES. She [Export] became a touchable object, not a watching subject touching back.” Though the piece suffered such criticism, it is still regarded as an iconic work of feminist art because of the discussion it generated about women's issues. It generated such discussion, in part, because of its capacity to offend the moral values of its audience. Even if the execution of TAP and TOUCH Cinema was flawed, the documentation of a woman allowing strangers to grope her on the street was outrageous enough at the time to get people to examine the implications of such a public violation.
Works like TAP and TOUCH Cinema and its ensuing controversy indicate another important insight in determining the value of offense. That is, even when a work fails to live up to the intention of its author, its capacity to offend correlates to its capacity to generate interest and discourse about the social values and norms that it infringes. Put simply, offense gets people’s attention, and, depending on the context, this can result in meaningful change. Attracting attention is not a justification for being offensive in itself, but offense has the capacity to draw attention to the social issues that merit scrutiny.
This, of course, must be weighed against the fact that offense can also render the viewer unreceptive to the message or intention of the artist, as observed in the previous examples. But in the case of TAP and TOUCH Cinema, it is hard to calculate the direct impact the work had on changing cultural values concerning objectification. But clearly, awareness of objectification has increased since the 1960’s. If Export’s performance contributed to that shift in social consciousness in some small way, it was arguably worth the offense.