Art as a Four-Letter Word

If you missed “the body” as a favorite theme of so-called transgressive avant-garde artists between, say, 1985 and 2000 then your mind must have been on better things. But don’t despair: P.S.1 has mounted a recap of everything you were lucky to miss.“Into Me / Out of Me” is a sprawling, 132-artist survey of work devoted to everything or anything that can go into or out of any of the entries or exits of the human body (often the artist’s own). Organized by the P.S.1’s chief curator, Klaus Biesenbach (who is also a curator of film and media at the museum of Modern Art, of which P.S.1 is an affiliate), the show offers blood, sweat, toil, and tears. For once, the four-letter words that spring to a critic’s mind aren’t crude put-downs but literal descriptions.The Viennese Actionists are Mr. Biesenbach’s starting point.These were the Wagnerian performance artists of the 1960s — Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Otmar Bauer, Rudolph Schwarzkogler — who would dismember sacrificial animals and fling their entrails about, or lacerate themselves or each other. “By cutting the body, dousing it with blood and excrement, and arranging it in compositions suggesting surgery, the Actionists treated these primal fears in the most unabashed manner,” a wall text explains.Few of the artists in this show match the Actionists’ trippy, hippy primitivism. More usual is the hospital aesthetic that comes across in Damien Hirst’s “Each Day as It Comes” (2005), a vitrine filled neatly with pharmaceuticals. A natural for the show, of course, is Matthew Barney, who has both an installation and an excerpt from “Cremaster 3” (2002), in which Freemasons in the top of the Chrysler Building perform elaborate surgery to induce glandular excretions from a strapped-in Mr. Barney. Fusing Actionism and Mr. Hirst, Mr. Barney’s work contains both weird, gooey biology and hard-edged, heraldic minimalism.Much of the installation is anatomical: One room deals with the bowel, another the bladder, another the uterus, and so on.There are also rooms dedicated to each substance the body expels.Semen, for instance, is represented by documentation of Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance “Seedbed,” in which the artist masturbated under the raised floorboards of a gallery, his panting voice amplified for the visitor. Alongside it hangs a tasteful, blow-up photograph by Andres Serrano of the trajectory of an ejaculation. Urine is represented by Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation” (1978).There is a vomitarium presided over by Sue Williams’s self-portrait cast from her own puke, “Vomithead” (1990). Mike Parr’s “The Emetics [Primary Vomit] I Am Sick of Art [Red, Yellow and Blue]” (1977) documents the artist throwing up primary-color dyes in a pristine, white, art gallery. And feces make many appearances. Walter de Maria’s “Rome Eats Shit” (1970) is a placard containing these words; Tom Friedman’s “Untitled” (1992) features a turd on a pedestal; Piero Manzoni’s “Merda Artista” (1961) is a can of the artist’s excrement. Welcome to Pooh Corner.What comes out must go in, so several rooms are devoted to eating. But Mr. Biesenbach declines to show contemporary representations of one of art’s most timeless themes: the pleasures of the table. Instead, we get to contemplate Mona Hatoum’s “Deep Throat” (1996), a sculpture in which the plate is a little TV screen on which you watch an endoscopic film of the artist’s digestive system.Laceration, self-mutilation, and puncture also fill some galleries. (Or should they be called wards?) Chris Burden is acknowledged as a father figure in the tradition of the art of self-injury. Included here is documentation of the Californian having himself crucified on a VW Beatle, and a DVD of himself being shot. These keep company with Marina Abramovic’s “Rest Energy,” a 1980 video of a performance in which her partner suspends a taut crossbow at her breast. Both these artists are represented by grainy old films, mere souvenirs of the performances where the true drama occurred. There are plenty of exhibits elsewhere, however, that offer blood and guts in Technicolor. Mat Collishaw’s “Bullet Hole” (1988–93) blows up a wound to a multi-panel, 7-foot-by-10-foot photograph. Another screen shows Sigalit Landau performing a hula-hoop dance with a barbed wire ring.“Into Me / Out of Me” also devotes sections to pregnancy, crying, breathing, screaming, putting things into and pulling them out of one’s body (the vagina being a favorite egress), and bleeding.All of these, however, are solitary pursuits. Mr. Biesenbach has consigned intrusions and extrusions that involve two or more people — sex, in other words — to an old boiler room in the bowels of the building.Here the emphasis is on anal penetration, with highly graphic portfolios of gay sex by photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. Other works in this dimly lit, packed display include Alex McQuilkin’s breakthrough 2000 DVD “F—-ed,” a headshot in which she heroically attempts to apply lipstick while, off camera, being entered from behind.For such a hot, sticky exhibition, the cumulative effect is strangely unvisceral. Part of this owes to the preponderance of dreary black-and-white photographs and texts. There is barely any painting in the show, and what there is consists of limp illustration. Furthermore, the thematic, room-by-room organization quickly feels anal-retentive.The experience, in fact, of this bizarrely methodical exhibition recalls the Musée d’Anatomie in Montpellier, with its graphic waxwork displays of the different stages of diseases. Established in 1794, the museum is now a period piece of logical positivism at its most kinky. “Into Me / Out of Me,” therefore, although based on material that was ascendant in the 1980s, is actually old news by more than a century.Upon leaving this exhausting, puerile display, it struck me that a single painting by Francis Bacon would have metaphorically fused every sensation laid out so literally by the photographers, performers, and video makers in this show. And it might have penetrated the viewer where almost nothing in this show does — the solar plexus. But metaphor, depictive relish, and the catharsis of painting are obviously too transgressive for some.Until September 25 (22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46 Avenue, Queens, 718-784-2084).

Art as a Four-Letter Word

Art as a Four-Letter Word

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