The action took place in 1968 in an art cinema in Munich, where filmmakers were showing their work. With the crotch cut out of her pants, EXPORT went through each row. Offering the film-viewing public visual contact with a real female body, EXPORT confronted the pornographic reduction of women to static representations, thereby posing a direct, political challenge to the abstract objectification of the female body as a fetish. She moved an aesthetic gesture beyond the representational context of the safe boundaries of art into an actual encounter with a public. In this action, EXPORT realized the capacity of a gesture “both to produce and to represent action . . . by stressing the moment and the process of its own production. “ By revealing the actual physical site of her sex, EXPORT repudiated the representational static sign and discharged an interventionist act.

—Kristine Stiles, catalog text

In the poster produced in 1969, EXPORT poses with a gun, further dramatizing the confrontational nature of this work.