Into Me/Out of Me

Editor and P.S. 1/MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach credits the late Susan Sontag with sparking the idea for this survey of Body and Action art in the course of their conversations about artistic approaches that describe and question the human condition. Into Me / Out of Me gathers work focused on the imagined, descriptive and performative acts of passing into, through and out of the human body--explorations and visualizations of the wet and the dry, the inner and the outer--and the physical exchange of the body with the material world. Spanning over 40 years and featuring an international group of more than 130 artists, it addresses the primordial relationship between the internal and the external in three chapters: "Metabolism" (eating, drinking, excreting); "Reproduction" (intercourse, conception, birth); and "Violence" (shooting, impaling, perforation). Featured works range from Hannah Wilke's unflinching self-portraits in illness to Matthew Barney's performance-based installations to Kara Walker's antebellum figures. Artists include Chris Burden, Valerie Export, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Patty Chang, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Frank Moore, Carolee Schneemann, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Marina Abramovic, among many others.