Dark times produce inspiring art. Just as the cold winds of a recession begin to blow across New York City, a new day is dawning in the downtown art scene, and I may have witnessed its genesis on a blustery October evening in Tribeca.

Everything seemed somewhat normal as I greeted my friends outside ApexArt, a gallery on 291 Church Street across from the Tribeca Grand hotel. We were there for Fauxgala '08, an exhibition of prints, photographs, and videos as well as a piece of performance art entitled "The Man Piece, a Group Show" that I still can't get out of my head. One wall of the gallery was covered with framed portraits of people smiling, screaming, and looking blissful.

A video projector broadcast human forms onto another. A third held mugshots of notorious artists of the past hundred years, from Francesco Clemente to Urs Fischer. As the crowd filed in from the street, shaking off the autumn chill, a polite man circulated through the room offering popcorn from a plastic mop bucket. It was an appropriate accompaniment to the cheap white wine on offer, the standard tipple for any art event.

Gradually, aspects of the performance began to reveal themselves. A woman in a head-to-toe mylar bodysuit stood atop a platform in the corner, slowly contorting her body. A thin man clad in boyish blue shorts and suspenders maneuvered through the crowd, his eyes darting around nervously. A blue-skinned man wearing a shiny vest, white tube socks, black dress shoes, and briefs made of multi-hued feathers navigated the room on a plastic tricycle, his prosthetic elephant ears and trunk transforming him into the Hindu god Ganesh.

And in the center of the room, a castle of cheap sandwich cookies, stacked high and glued into a tower. Were these the hors d'oeuvres the invitation promised? No, it was a work of art entitled 66,000 Calories, or The Distance Between The Spectacular Oreo and The Disspiriting Generic Pathmark Chocolate Creme-Filled Sandwich Cookie, Measured in Units of Urban Desperation.

At least that's what it was, until Ganesh abruptly smashed into it, sending the 66,000-calorie tower crashing down amid the crowd. Cookies scattered across the floor, and every conversation in the room fell silent. Shouting ensued between Ganesha and Suspender Boy. An attendant hurriedly swept up the ruined castle, opening the center of the gallery for a performance that had just begun.

Four artists emerged, including a bespectacled man who resembled John Oliver wearing a prison-style orange jumpsuit. A green-shirted man with blue paint on his face began systematically defacing the artist mug shots with red paint as the others looked on. Once this was accomplished, the group broke into an energetic and well-rehearsed dance routine to the Cure's "Why Can't I Be You?" complete with flailing arms and dramatic gestures.

It was amusing, but I remained somewhat skeptical until the treacly strains of the 1971 song "If" by soft rock progenitors Bread came on over the loudspeakers. As David Gates sang "if a picture paints a thousand words, than why can't I paint you?" the quartet pantomimed the highs and lows of love, transforming themselves in the process from a quartet of kooks in a gallery to artists with an offbeat vision for the coming era of art.

It was performance art at its finest, a classic, bizarre, downtown happening. As the music continued, the artists twirled, howled, and stomped and the crowd looked on with disbelief. I smiled to myself, pleased to have stumbled into one of those authentic - if absurdist - experiences that makes New York one of the most stimulating cities in the world.

While the show was a one-shot deal - performance art, by its nature, must be ephemeral - ApexArt and spaces like P.S. 122 and The Brick are increasingly hosting raw, cutting-edge events that bring New York back to its gritty origins as a sharp-elbowed city of strivers, poets, and weirdos of all stripes. While it's unlikely that your next visit to a gallery will involve a Hindu deity smashing into a tower of cookies, just knowing that such things happen in this city make seeking out the experience that much more gratifying.