In the opening scene of Nothing Doing (2025), Alex Tatarsky turns to reveal a mask attached to the back of their head. The mask creates a “double,” an additional persona occupying the performer’s posterior, complete with a plastic breastplate that transforms Tatarsky’s upper back into cleavage protruding from a cut-out style dress. The double lifts a top hat from their crown and waves their left hand across the back of their pelvis, shaking fingers to emphasize the spectacle of the hat’s removal. Tatarsky then emulates a classic hat-trick: tapping the hat’s brim and body with a cane that evokes a magician’s wand, they turn towards the audience— Tatarsky’s own face reappearing once again—and extract a plush toy rabbit from the hat’s opening. From nothing, something emerges.
In another moment, and on another sort of stage, two women huddle close to a camera lens. They are Mixie and Munchie of TikTok’s @2girls1bottl3, a pseudonymous duo who sits beneath the fluorescent lighting of fast-food restaurants, mixing ultra-sugary drinks and munching on ultra-processed food. From their initial post in September 2022, Mixie and Munchie create videos that reiterate a uniform structure: to the sound of ambient background noise, Mixie creates a cocktail, Munchie eats junk food, and the two women share the beverage as the video concludes. With their bright colors, repetitive simplicity, and emphasis on consumption (both literal and in terms of the consumer products the women wear and wield), the videos evoke what other writers might theorize as a variation of “slop.”1 Often referencing AI-generated images and text, slop is cheap, inane, and increasingly present throughout internet content and other media forms. Mixie and Munchie are not the products of AI (although, as writer Nicolaia Rips reports, they frequently encounter such accusations) yet their content assumes a slop-like quality in its nonsensical
style.2
At first glance, there is little shared between Nothing Doing and @2girls1bottl3. Tatarsky offers live performance on the theatrical stage—while Nothing Doing was included in the experimental theater festival Under the Radar, which ran from January 4–19, 2025 in New York City. Presented in partnership with Playwrights Horizon and performed at Chemistry Creative (Brooklyn, New York), Nothing Doing was commissioned for Under Construction, the festival’s work-in-progress series. @2girls1bottl3, on the other hand, is a strictly digital endeavor, with Mixie and Munchie uploading videos to TikTok on an approximately monthly basis. Nothing Doing is an hour-long production, whereas the videos on @2girls1bottl3 rarely exceed two minutes in duration. Tatarsky describes their artistic practice as clowning, “comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and delusional streetside rant.”3 Mixie and Munchie, by contrast, refuse to disclose information about their backgrounds, artistic or otherwise.
Despite these differences, Nothing Doing and @2girls1bottl3 both prompt us to ask: what the hell is going on here? Both performances center an unruly display of objects, costumes, and characters, directing our attention towards the bizarre, illogical, and hyper-stimulating. And yet, all this nonsensical clutter allows these performers to engage a shared theme: nothingness. Tatarsky’s title references the “doing” of nothing, while Mixie and Munchie repeat a performance structure wherein nothing much occurs.
Reading Nothing Doing and @2girls1bottl3 together, what emerges is an understanding of nothing as an experimental practice: a busy, effortful, and ongoing performance mode that represents its own order of things, rather than a lack thereof. Beyond dominant associations with absence and inaction, nothing becomes a method of exploring the slipperiness of meaning as it borders meaninglessness, the ways of being busy without being productive, the holes and cracks that open up into emptiness, and the slop that muddles value into insignificance. As an activity, doing nothing respects the lure of sense-making—of finding something to grasp onto—while also suggesting the hollowness of such a pursuit. Disentangling their messes of everything (objects, characters, sounds) into emptiness, Nothing Doing and @2girls1bottl3 ultimately illuminate the fictions upholding many of our social orders by revealing the hollow ground beneath.
Nothing Doing plays with the transformation of excess into lack, and back again, specifically through Tatarsky’s engagement with objects. Barrenness accompanies overwhelm first at the level of stage design, with the walls and floor of Chemistry Creative entirely painted white and the stage littered with various things.4 Clown shoes, a bucket, a large plastic carrot, and a tulle skirt dangle from and lie beneath a step ladder. A white picket fence supports a party hat, a horse head, and a blonde wig. A small platform holds miniatures of houses, tables, and flags—two American, one Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”). Tatarsky interacts with all of these objects, handling and discarding them in ways that reflect the pulling of the rabbit from the hat. Invoking the figure of the magician, Nothing Doing centers a performance form associated with the appearance, disappearance, and transformation of things into nothing, and vice-versa, as Tatarsky brings each of the strewn materials into and out of the audience’s view.
Tatarsky also disappears into the objects themselves, becoming new characters through the employment of a costume part or prop. For example, they transform from magician to magician’s rabbit, to a wayward horse, a corporate party clown, and a tap dancer. In one moment, Tatarsky tightens their grip around the plastic carrot, hunching and hopping forward as the rabbit who “killed the magician and took his hat.” The carrot later dangles on a string in front of Tatarsky’s face as they gallop and neigh, becoming the horse. Characters exist in excess, appearing, disappearing, and spilling into each other with nothing anchoring them to a stable self beneath. Each object, moreover, becomes nebulous in its function, lacking a clear and normative purpose as Tatarsky sifts through the plenitude.
The performance of nothing exists in close relationship to chaos, with typical signifiers of emptiness, such as holes, already abundant with meaning. When Tatarsky-as-rabbit informs the audience of their homicidal antics, they begin “searching for a plot,” only to discover a “plot hole.” A sleight of hand reveals that the referenced “hole” is a Fleshlight—when Tatarsky shakes the sex toy so that its inner sleeve falls to the floor, the object gains a life of its own. Tatarsky wrestles with it, spinning the sleeve so violently it repeatedly hits them in the face. The flesh-like matter is superfluous, an image of carnivalesque sexuality where divisions between bodily interior and exterior, between symbolically controlled and uncontrolled sexual appetites, dissolve. Like the opening scene’s masked double and an additional ass-shaped mask that Tatarsky wears (telling us: “my head is on my ass, which means my head is my ass”), what is inside is out, backwards is forwards, and empty is already filled. “I’m a hole,” Tatarsky growls, lassoing the casing-less Fleshlight above their head. “I’m a plot hole, I’m worm hole, I’m a rabbit hole. I am flesh. Flesh with no function.” The hole represents nothing, but its heightened movement is a “doing” of everything.
Contending with the relation between excess and emptiness is similarly essential to Mixie and Munchie, as their practice of nothing involves controlling abundant movements, objects, and appetites. Their videos revolve around spectacularized presentations of diverse objects to their virtual audience, with everyday items accompanying those that are markedly unusual for their respective contexts. In one video, Mixie slides a tall drinking glass in front of the camera, pouring a pink-colored soda into a cocktail shaker while Munchie snacks on a pizza slice. In another, Mixie shakes ice cubes in her hand, rolling them onto the table as if they are dice. In yet another, Munchie grinds an Oreo cookie with a mortar and pestle, sprinkling the crumbs into what appears to be the soil of a potted plant before spooning the mixture into her mouth.
Brandishing object after object, the women organize signifiers of excessive consumerism and gluttony into a contained choreography that amounts to very little action. They create a sensation of stasis out of constant flux: although costumes, props, makeup styles, wigs, and filming locations differ from video to video, the women rarely deviate from their repeated gestures and standardized progression of ingredient-to-drink. Their gestures, moreover, are both seemingly meaningless and deeply referential. Presenting each object to the camera, Mixie holds the ice cubes, liquor bottles, and other equipment in front of her palm, citing YouTube makeup tutorials wherein content creators hold products in a similar way to steady camera focus. Making absurd this familiar style of movement—now showcasing food, drink, and unusual additions to the cocktail-mixing process, rather than cosmetic items—Mixie and Munchie re-contextualize recognizable internet signifiers into empty gestures.
If, as Mixie and Munchie show, nothing involves active and ongoing effort, then it also includes small ruptures that trouble its organized chaos. Although Mixie and Munchie hold blank expressions throughout their videos, their eyes occasionally dart around their filming location, disturbing their deadpan with these small, rapid movements. Locations typically appear generic and almost un-placeable, with the camera highlighting the fluorescent lighting, wall displays, and occasional brand logos of the various fast-food establishments that the duo films within. Yet, at times, the appearance of an employee within the camera frame disrupts this secluded sense of nowhere. Although nothing much happens throughout the @2girls1bottl3 content, something illicit is, in fact, occurring. Mixing their own cocktails in a McDonald’s or a Domino’s Pizza, the performing duo participate in prohibited activities that threaten to make something—a legal situation with store employees, for example—out of their cultivated nothing. Extreme appetites further threaten to unravel the contained expressions of bodily needs. The account name “@2girls1bottl3” references a scatological pornographic film that was near-mythical on the early 2000s internet, tying Mixie and Munchie’s controlled consumption to its most uncontrolled iteration. Nothing, for Mixie and Munchie, is not a practice of merely containing excess but of continuously re-drawing its flexible and slippery boundaries with everything.
Nothing Doing and @2girls1bottl3 challenge our ability to make sense of things, guiding us through excess and slop without clearly discerning between value and valuelessness, meaning and meaninglessness. The performances encourage recognition of nothing as a crucial foundation for what we perceive, understand, and believe in, positing the blank surface as a simultaneous depth. In Nothing Doing specifically, this insight takes a more political dimension. Tatarsky references land (and “land back”), borders, and nations. They sing a song with the lyric “I love the American flag!” and later mention a grandmother who hails “from a country that no longer exists.” Following from the performance’s practice of nothing, we can understand that there is also nothing underlying the nation and its glut of symbols, flags and anthems. There is nothing upholding borders but their own fictions and our belief in them. Yet, in the works of Tatarsky and Mixie and Munchie, doing nothing does not indicate one’s complicity or passive reception of these broader fantasies. Rather, nothing offers a way of experimenting with their fictiveness, of playing with the power that these iterations of slop command.
: :
Endnotes
- Max Read, “Drowning in Slop,” New York Magazine, September 25, 2024, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-generated-content-internet-online-slop-spam.html
- Nicolaia Rips, “Who the hell are 2girls1bottl3?,” The Face, September 18, 2023, https://theface.com/culture/2girls1bottl3-mixie-munchie-interview-tiktok
- “Nothing Doing,” Under the Radar, accessed March 27, 2025, https://utrfest.org/program/nothing-doing/
- Scenic, costumes, and prop design in Nothing Doing is by Andreea Minic. Sound design is Shane Riley.
Miya Shaffer