It’s a biological fact that some things go inside our bodies, and other things come out. But “Into Me/Out of Me,” now on view at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, doesn’t spare the gruesome details. Organized by P.S.1 chief curator Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition includes work by over 130 artists who have together spent the past forty years probing the inner reaches, outer extremities and other ins-and-outs of our anatomy. In short, the show comes with more bodily fluids than the back room of a Berlin leather bar.

Visitors first get an introduction to the Viennese Actionists, a group of 1960s performance artists who found a means of subverting Modernism, and the bourgeois values it came to represent, through the violation and degradation of the human body (often their own). From there, the exhibition reveals the physical being as something of a Play-Doh machine—something that’s “[passed] into, through and out of,” Biesenbach writes—with results that range from transgressive, intimate and violent to intentionally sick or absurd.

Numerous groundbreaking works are represented: For example, Vito Acconci’s famous “Seedbed,” a 1972 performance in which he masturbated beneath a gallery floor while talking dirty to those walking above. Then there’s the notorious Artforum ad from 1974 that pictures Lynda Benglis wielding a scary-looking dildo, and that time in 1975 when Carolee Schneeman unfurled a feminist tract that was lodged inside her (menstruating) nether regions. Chris Burden gets shot by a friend, Andrea Fraser literally prostitutes herself and Matthew Barney becomes a gory operating-room subject in his film “Cremaster 3”—a work that’s installed beside a real-life bathroom that, in the humidity of a New York summer, happens to add another sensory dimension to the show.

There are also piss paintings (Andy Warhol), cum shots (Andres Serrano), acts of self-mutilation (Cathy Opie) and a fair amount of hurling (Mike Parr, Martin Creed). And that doesn’t even include the X-rated stuff (Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Jeff Koons, Larry Clark), which is squirreled away in a dank basement room. One might get the impression that the show is just an orgy of dark thoughts and money shots, but that would only be partially correct. The exhibition leaves you with a good sense of “the primordial relationship between the internal and external,” as Biesenbach writes, with works that also address eating, disease and the carnal dimensions of emotional bonds.

Nevertheless, the less explicit offerings—a drawing by Walter De Maria, a vitrine of pills by Damien Hirst—wither in the face of all the blood and guts. If anything, “Into Me/Out of Me” is a reminder that anything that could be done to the body in the name of art has already been done. Still, the visceral impact isn’t lost, and that’s probably the show’s greatest lesson: The body will forever be as pregnable as our relationship to it is fraught. It’s safe to say that we’ll never be comfortable with the idea of smearing feces all over ourselves (as happens more than once in the show). Or, at least, let’s hope not.

Men have been checking out women since the first caveman got inspired to club the object of his affections on the head. But now, an exhibition of work by female artists, currently on view at I-20 gallery, turns the tables—and, as one might expect, the girls respond with a bit more nuance. Called “Men,” and organized by the artist Ellen Altfest, the show includes ten paintings that portray the stronger sex in terms that are both personal and revealing. Rendering him in pastel flourishes of flowers and filigree, Chie Fueki feminizes the heroic figure in her painting without depriving him of his potency, while Karen Heagle’s portrait of a young man lying exhausted on the beach speaks of both frailty and longing. Overall, the show depicts the relationship that women have with men as being one of mixed feelings. The subject of a painting by Marina Kappos, for example, appears with his mouth taped shut. Perhaps it’s a sympathetic portrayal of manhood, for which masculinity often comes at the price of honest expression. Then again, maybe it’s just wishful thinking about a boyfriend who wouldn’t shut up.

In his sculptural installations, Banks Violette channels the ethos of teenage suicides and heavy-metal thrashing that’s inhabited by brooding American youth. And no less gothic is “War on 45/My Mirrors are Painted Black (For You),” a group show curated by Violette at Bortolami Dayan. Its title is borrowed from an album by the punk band DOA, and its premise follows accordingly: in effect, the show serves as a B-side for the five artists it includes. Each of their installations is meant to stand on its own, though they share a tendency toward black. The color dominates the show, from the sprawling wall decal by Philippe Decrauzat—interrupted by circles of enigmatic text—to Terence Koh’s “Untitled (C45),” a large wooden panel that’s been punched in and sprayed with urine and beer. Eighteen cans of unlabeled spray paint alongside a strobe light, both by Herwig Weiser, help give the show a counterintuitive sheen. But the total effect is one of dissonance that feels strangely well-tuned.