From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Google Wikipedia Wiktionary Wiki Commons Wikisource Wordpress YouTube Shop Featured: The Trylon and Perisphere, two modernistic structures at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 Photo: Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline (Samuel H. Gottscho)

Valie Export's Tapp- und Tast-Kino ("Touch Cinema") [1] [2], a piece of performance "body art", was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. Valie Export built a tiny "movie theater" around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the "theater". She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her. The context of "Touch Cinema" was the bra burning feminism professed by New York Radical Women and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.