Alexandra Tatarsky: Sad Boys in Harpy Land, 10–19 March 2023. Photograph by Maria Baranova. Image courtesy of Abrons Arts Center.

The best and only East Village gallery with an Irish pub facade is O’Flaherty’s on Avenue A, which over the last few weeks became the site of the refreshingly ugly shit show “O’Flaherty’s Gelatin O’Flattering,” an exhibition by the Austrian collective Gelitin, who hosted a series of performances that could only described as epically claggy. Working by themselves — and with their guests Young Boy Dancing Group — Gelitin’s performances coalesced around their use of plaster, paint, hot wax, spit, water, baby oil, urine, sweat, and soap to create bacchanalian scenes worthy of divine revulsion.

On Ash Wednesday this year, the group of Gelitin men, clad in diapers and torn miniskirts, ceremoniously proclaimed to the overstuffed room that from here on out, “today shall be referred to as Ass Wednesday,” before proceeding to stick paint brushes up their rectums. With the assistance of Young Boy Dancing Group, who is one of the more popular anally-fixated performance art collectives on the scene at the moment, Gelitin began painting portraits of audience members by dragging implements lodged in their sphincters across canvases laid between their feet. At first, the performance felt a bit saggy and slow, the spectators initially hesitant to volunteer themselves as subjects. But by the time the first of the portraits were revealed to the audience, in all their unruly and clunky impressionistic pleasure, there was a surge of electricity as audience members became increasingly desperate to have their likenesses rendered by a hole.

Warhol’s interest in mass reproduction of his own portraiture work, along with his well-known prediction about everyone having their fifteen minutes of fame in the future, quickly came to mind. Over the course of their chaotic hour, Gelitin depleted themselves in the thigh workout of the century as they tried to keep up with their audience’s increasingly ravenous demand for ass paintings. Gelitin’s result was somehow both anticlimactic and extremely special, the value of their performance smartly foregrounding the audience’s relationship to the event, rather than the paintings themselves, which frankly looked like shit.

In a later performance, more aesthetically driven by their younger counterpart Young Boy Dancing Group, the two collectives congealed to perform one of the more spectacular fire hazards downtown performance has seen in ages. On a thin plywood runway that ran the length of the O’Flaherty’s dark back room, the groups tempted destruction while wielding tapered flaming candles held in their mouths, between their toes, and up their orifices. Dropping lit candles on the wooden set, themselves, or the audience basically constantly, Gelitin and YBDG created a moving and supercharged human sculpture that taxed the performers, threatened to set off the sprinkler system, and gave their audience a proper edging all at once.

Both groups are amazing at relating to the audience using a dramaturgy I’m going to call chaos porn, which creates mucky, discombobulated situations that sometimes invite genuine danger or total humiliation to the performers, while at the same time creating scenes that are extremely photogenic and meme-able, partially because of the scenes’ visual relationship to pornography. At every “O’Flaherty’s Gelatin O’Flattering” performance, audience iPhones recorded the event from all sides continuously, in a manner that sometimes felt more like a faggot-ridden Kim Petras concert than an afternoon of performance art in a gallery. This juxtaposition of humans caked in dirt and discharge alongside our desire to Internet-ify such a thing, might signify an important underlying aspect of performance art’s role in contemporary society, which is to satisfy a desire to watch people make messes of themselves.

David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) is (among other things) about a cult of perverts who fetishize car crashes. The main characters, a film producer named James and his wife Catherine, are dissatisfied with their sex life, and the only thing that can turn them on anymore is watching recreations of famous crashes, or reenacting the crashes themselves. In an oversimplified summation of the characters’ emotional arc, the couple essentially becomes increasingly addicted to the sensation of watching people get wrecked, the only possible outcome being that they must edge closer and closer to wrecking themselves. In pursuit of the movie’s final thrill, the couple stage a high-speed car crash that results in James’s car sending Catherine’s careening into a median. And then, in the film’s final scene, the two make love in the grass, among the ruins of Catherine’s obliterated vehicle.

In some ways both Gelitin’s and YBDG’s performances feel like watching car chases that are always about to take a simultaneously debilitating and life-altering orgasmic turn, and the downtown New York art scene became rightfully intrigued. Before the shows, lines consistently wrapped around the block. Afterward, Instagram became flooded with different angles and clips of these performances. The need to share in this way is of course partially motivated by a desire to show one was in close proximity to something cool or interesting or trendy, but I think the Instagramability of these performances also points to something deeper about their purpose.

The viral potential of the wrecked or fucked situations set forth by Gelitin and YBDG provides a clue about a kind of catharsis taking shape now in the media: one that occurs by way of seeing our own depravity erotically reflected back to us, without having to become fully depraved ourselves. The performance body becomes an sexual agent that helps us understand ourselves as the filthy, chaotic, irredeemable whores we are — torn asunder and clogged with discharge by the world around us — without having to actually put our own bodies in scenes of public humiliation. Similar to how we watch pornography, or make erotic art projects out of human degradation (see: MessyWorld.net), we come to performance to watch people get wrecked and wreck each other in a simulated way, while remaining in the comfort of our own private spectatorship.

Another related instance of chaos porn in performance is Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land, currently running at Abrons Arts Center (with a recently added show on Sunday, March 19), in which the performer sustains the act of humiliation for nearly ninety minutes. From the start, we understand Alex’s act to be a show that’s basically about not being able to make a show, due to the hellscape of the artistic mind (which becomes physically represented in a couple inventive ways that I won’t spoil). Crashing into dead-end after dead-end, the performer gives cogent staging to the type of nightmare in which you’ve been thrust on stage without notecards and asked to give an impromptu TEDTalk before thousands of people, as you grasp for fragments about what has made your life meaningful. The result is kinky: one that’s certainly related to the experience of being edged toward a meaningful message, without necessarily achieving a purposeful thematic relief, beyond the sheer humiliation of simply existing in front of other people. It’s a pleasure to see Tatarsky using their own body to genuinely invite and represent the circumstance of abjection that makes up a creative life, in all its catastrophes. Tatarsky’s car keeps crashing, and it’s purposefully cringe, but even so we crane our necks from the passenger seat, unable to look away.