Kiki Smith, Daisy Chain, 1992. Steel chain with five cast bronze elements. Chain: 1,200 in (3,048 cm). Image courtesy of Pace Wildenstein, New York. Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson.

The two-floor show can be loosely organized into three major themes: metabolism, sexuality and reproduction, and violence. The artists use different media (primarily photography, video, installation, and sculpture) to explore the ritualistic, mythological, scientific, and historical aspects of how we interact with the physical world. With rooms dedicated to such bodily processes as vomiting and defecating, this X-rated exhibition is definitely not for the squeamish. Visitors under seventeen must be accompanied by adults.

The show attempts to introduce some non-traditional ways of considering the human form. For instance, Cindy Sherman’s photographs draw attention to the plasticity of the body and manage to imbue it with an unusual sense of drama. Kiki Smith’s Daisy Chain sculpture (shown) is an amusing commentary on the fragmentation of the body. Chen Zhen’s glass organs emphasize at once both their beauty and fragility. This theme is revisited in several works that deal with self-mutilation, such as the Azione Sentimentale of Gina Pane, in which this artist manages to capture a strange poignancy in ‘cutting.’ A similar effect is achieved in Sigalit Landau’s video that shows the naked artist playing hula hoop with a ring of barbed wire.

Unfortunately, by the time the visitor reaches the rooms focusing on various bodily excretions, some of which are depicted in particularly disgusting detail, the show starts to seem increasingly redundant. The curator’s relentless intent to stamp out all prudishness is slightly insulting. Visitors are made to feel like the displays are trying to shock them into submission. These controversial works do, however, demonstrate the way contemporary artists have been undermining traditional Modernist thought, in which art was always linked with purity. Many viewers leave these galleries with bewildered expressions. But not everyone seems to be disgusted; a staff member complained that people kept taking away one of the displays—Tom Friedman’s “diminutive sculpture,” called, quite descriptively, Feces on a Pedestal. Apparently some people’s desire to become collectors helps them overcome their squeamishness.

Just as some artists were pushing back the boundaries of art, others such as Marina Abramovic were testing the boundaries of the body. In this show, Abramovic, who is the undisputed pioneer of endurance art, presents her 1975 video Freeing the Voice, in which she simply screams until she loses her voice. Andrea Fraser uses her body in yet another way. By engaging in sex with a collector (who commissioned this particular work), she is making a comment on the commodification of art.

The rest of the work dealing with sex is located in the basement vault. Here the curators ingeniously incorporate architectural components of PS1 into the show, such as their use of the building’s decrepit boiler room. The basement galleries transport the viewer into the extremely personal and private realms of individual sexual acts. Through their explicit nature and their focus on the socially transgressive, these works are again challenging the viewer to embrace them in all their honesty.

The show also touches on the subject of disease, and the promises and failures of the scientific revolution. Damien Hirst’s installation Each Days as it Comes, consists of a cabinet full of neatly arranged pills. Hannah Wilke’s photographs of sickness are startlingly frank.

Into Me / Out of Me ends up being a traumatic journey that leaves the viewer yearning for some traditional beauty associated with the human form—and one tries frantically to capture fleeting moments of it. The overall effect however is disconcerting. The work of the Viennese Actionists, which amounts to little more than blood and gore, stands out as particularly sickening and pointless. The show seems to have highlighted everything off-putting about the body—leaving one with a sense of internal claustrophobia.

If you visit on a Saturday you can at least amuse yourself by observing the fashionable crowd which descends on Long Island City for PS1’s world-famous outdoor DJ dance party. The thumping techno sounds merge with the howling of Marina Abramovic and as the beer-fueled hipsters stumble through the galleries, they seem more concerned with each other’s hairstyles than with the unsettling images on the walls.

The author is a graduate student at Weill Cornell University.

Into Me / Out of Me continues through September 25. Visit www.ps1.org for more information.