MIT exhibit bends more than gender

The List’s spacious galleries have been divided up into discrete viewing rooms with tall plastic partitions. But sounds spill liberally from one room to the next. Spoken dialogue, if it’s attempted - as in the video by Kalup Linzy satirizing daytime soap operas - is an instant casualty. And you’re never sure whether that dissonant, oddly timed soundtrack reflects the “avant-garde’’ credentials of the work you’re watching or belongs instead to the film featuring dwarfs and transvestites next door.

Never mind. Curators of contemporary art tend not to bother about pristine listening environments for video. Noise spillage and a hectic atmosphere are at one with the prevailing low-tech philosophy of most video art, and with an ongoing war against clinical, “white cube’’ viewing conditions.

Here, the conditions also fit the show’s essential thrust, which is - above and beyond cross-dressing - a more generalized interest in blurring boundaries, a gleeful spreading and smearing of identities.

The first work, projected onto a tilting wall above a threshold, is a short film by Marcel Duchamp, made in 1924-25 in collaboration with Man Ray. Duchamp was famously photographed in drag by Man Ray, and signed some of his works with the name of a female alter-ego, “Rrose Sélavy’’ (a pun - typically Duchampian - on “Eros, c’est la vie.’’)

Cross-dressing, we’re reminded, is hardly new. Several photographs here by the fabulous Surrealists Claude Cahun (from the late 1920s) and Pierre Molinier (the late 1960s) emphasize the point.

But Rush includes them primarily to buttress his main contention, which is that artists today have gone beyond the obsession with sexual identities that dominated academic art talk in the 1990s. Instead, like those earlier artists, they’re chasing bigger subjects, and cross-dressing is merely the means: They’re interested in human souls instead of “gendered identities.’’

This sounds - and is - refreshing. But Rush’s insistence that cross-dressing is “incidental’’ to these artists’ “multiple expressions of their multiple personalities’’ feels a little forced. It would be odd, would it not, to mount a show of football-themed work in order to demonstrate how the artists involved have all outgrown their childish obsession with sports? And yet that’s more or less what Rush is suggesting.

The fact is that a man dressing as a woman and a woman dressing as a man both remain highly charged - and inevitably comic - phenomena. That special charge is what lures the artists here to drag’s various possibilities.

While it may be true that cross-dressing was incidental to Duchamp’s conceptual ambitions, it’s also true that for him, everything was incidental; nothing was “of the essence.’’ He was bent on undermining every idea of seriousness he encountered.

Rrose Sélavy’s film here, called “Anémic Cinéma’’ (another piece of wordplay: “Cinema’’ spelled backward is almost the word “anemic’’), features a rotating spiral - one of Duchamp’s so-called “rotoreliefs’’ - and various nonsensical French phrases that also spin in a circle. It’s momentarily diverting, no more.

But it leads the way to several works by Andy Warhol, who appears in drag in a series of Polaroids further into the show. Warhol took his cue as an artist - and perhaps even as an artistic “persona’’ - from Duchamp.

“I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts,’’ he famously said, restating a theme that goes back, of course, to Plato’s cave. The tension between appearances and truth is also at the heart of de Laclos’s 18th-century play “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’’ which may be why, when watching the nearby video of Warhol having makeup applied to his face, I could not help thinking of Glenn Close, in the film of “Dangerous Liaisons,’’ putting on makeup in the opening sequences, and pathetically wiping it off at the movie’s tragic end.

Pathos and defiance are at the heart of conventional performances in drag. We see both in Charles Atlas’s video footage of extraordinary drag performances, and in various parts of John Kelly’s miscellaneous video excerpts. When, at the end of Kelly’s onstage performance, in drag, of Joni Mitchell’s “Down to You,’’ he takes off his dress and wig and puts on male clothing, it’s funny, after a fashion. But Kelly’s performance has been so sincerely matter-of-fact and the song itself so poignant that laughter is withheld and something more disorienting and moving takes hold. The performance could have come straight from a routine by the choreographer Pina Bausch.

The best works here are ambitious videos that create self-enclosed fictional worlds. They’re by Ryan Trecartin, Michelle Handelman, and the duo Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn.

Handelman’s video is a riff on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.’’ Its fragmented imagery is projected on four screens with a soundtrack that’s as creepy as its highly stylized depiction of moral and physical decay. The scene that shows the main character’s heavily painted face kissing his fouled up alter-ego speaks directly to the Warhol film nearby, but the contrast - between Handelman’s camped-up melodrama and Warhol’s uninflected neutrality - is neat.

Dodge and Kahn’s film “All Together Now’’ has nothing to do with cross-dressing, as far as I could see. Sure, some of the characters wear hooded suits concealing their gender, but everything else about their identities is also concealed. Regardless, it’s an unsettling and weirdly engrossing film.

It shows a cast of unwashed adults and children scavenging on the outskirts of a major city. Nothing in the film, which lasts just under half an hour, quite makes sense. We watch the obscure workings of a marginal society with a sense that all but a handful of mores have been forgotten or discarded. The hooded figures work as a team in some underground location, and at one point engage in mock sex. Dead animals are hoarded, prodded, partly buried. Urine is stored in a bag, saved for some later purpose.

It’s all, as it sounds, quite disgusting. And yet there are flashes of intimacy, of human sweetness, and then just simple moments of mystery, with the result that you’re compelled to keep looking.

Trecartin’s film, “K-Corea INC. K (Section A),’’ which has a spacious, soundproof room to itself across from the gallery’s main entrance, is better still. It’s a fast-paced, choppily edited parody that skewers the vacuity at the heart of our culture: the insipid ubiquity of corporate-speak, cellphones, BlackBerrys, and body image, but also the deeper bind of a language that no longer denotes, of habits of communication that have hardened into monologues, rants, psychotic self-love.

Trecartin appears in the movie dressed as a young woman who uncannily resembles Britney Spears. But, according to Rush in the catalog, Trecartin and his troupe of actors “don’t care about gender roles.’’ “Cross-dressing in the 1990s was subscribing to gender roles,’’ he quotes Trecartin as saying; “it’s not a role anymore; it’s about bodies being in space, whether on the phone, or online, or in a store, or in a movie.’’

The sentiment echoes the argument pushed forward by Rush’s show. But a male body in space or on the phone or online is different from a female body, and different again from a male body pretending to be a female body. Trecartin and the other artists here know it.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.