Robert Rauschenberg’s goal of operating “in the gap between life and art,” famously uttered in 1959, anticipates the less polite mantra of the ’60s: Tear down the walls. For artists, the walls in question were the divisions between aesthetic conventions and empirical experience, between the museum space and the world at large, and, not least, the barriers among the various media. In the mid-’60s, new electronic-music technologies and the invention of the Portapak (a handheld video camera) opened up new musical possibilities for artists — and not just formally trained musicians such as Laurie Anderson and Nam June Paik, but others caught up in the blossoming rock culture of the time.

The Museum of Modern Art’s “Looking at Music” explores the burgeoning of interdisciplinary experimentation between 1965 and 1975 with more than 40 video and audio recordings, books, prints, and collages. This rather loose-limbed overview ranges from small-circulation avant-garde journals to pre-MTV music videos, and embraces such diverse personalities as the Beatles and Bruce Nauman. In terms of sheer running time, the largest part of the exhibition is in the theaters downstairs, where nearly 50 films and videos will be periodically on view through December 21. (Among these treats are music videos directed by Laurie Anderson, Tony Oursler, and Andy Warhol.)

A few broad tendencies connect the work upstairs — a fascination with primal sensations and hypnotic repetitions, with new technologies and campy role-playing — but the results range wildly, from esoteric philosophizing to highly accessible entertainment. Unsurprisingly, works by several artists associated with the Dada-inspired movement Fluxus are on hand. Nam June Paik and Otto Piene manage to combine the unctuous and the rarefied in a 1968 piece consisting of a pearl-encrusted television with a single, unblinking diagonal illuminating its screen. Yoko Ono’s 51-minute-long film (1968) features a close-up of John Lennon’s face, with movements so slowed down as to be all but imperceptible. In a nearby display case, her piece “Fly” (1996) strikes a note of wistful sweetness with real stones and acorns wrapped in Zen-like instructions: “… Add a stone each time there is happiness … .” Eastern philosophies inspired composer John Cage to even more reductive methods. His drawing “Untitled (640 numbers between 1 & 16)” (1969) is just that: columns of handwritten numerals, in no discernible order.

An audio equivalent of sorts to Cage’s repetitions, Steve Reich’s 1966 recording overlays snippets of speech at slightly different intervals, so they become eerily mutating “sentences,” at once familiar and unintelligible. In a 1969 video, Mr. Nauman performs a one-dimensional version of this feat, speaking the words “lip sync” at the moments he hears them played back through headphones. Bruce Conner’s abstract, mandala-like lithograph (1965) and Wallace Berman’s print of multiple images of a hand (1967) similarly experiment with cyclical variations.

If some of these pieces have a conceptual austerity, a video produced in 1967 by the Beatles is at the opposite extreme, cheerfully gratifying fans with shots of the Fab Four cavorting to the sound track of “Penny Lane.” (It is the only video here that invariably elicits bobbing and nodding from visitors the moment they don headphones.) Among the videos occupying a middle ground between the pleasure of the Beatles and the rigor of Mr. Reich is a 1966 film by Lucinda Childs. This records performances during which the artist swings buckets and other objects through a darkened space, their movements converted into unearthly sounds by a sonar system.

The most concentrated efforts in the exhibition are also among the least conspicuous: issues of the small-press journals Avalanche, Semina, and Aspen examining the work of Mr. Nauman, Mr. Reich, Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, and other artists and poets.

Filled with writings, working diagrams, and even a flexible LP, they attest to the extraordinary commitment of the publishers. Elsewhere, drawings and photographs by Michael Snow, Robert Whitman, and Jack Smith have no self-evident connection to music; a little explanatory wall text might have helped illuminate their backgrounds in theater and film.

Inevitably, the intentions of some of the works in “Looking at Music” are strained by the transition from spontaneous production to museum showpiece. Is the film of Ms. Childs’s performance a work of art in itself, or just documentation? Is the LP cover that accompanies Mr. Reich’s recording part of the artwork? (Its design has an off-balance complexity you won’t find in the recordings.) On one display stand rests the violin from Laurie Anderson’s performance “Self-Playing Violin” (1974), in which the artist, wearing ice skates frozen into a block of ice, once accompanied herself by means of a speaker mounted in the instrument. The violin now duly plays by itself on the stand, but does it count as a 34-year-old relic, or as half of an ongoing performance? Such are the unavoidable pitfalls, perhaps, of an installation that must resurrect at least one or two of the dismantled walls between art and life.

But the exhibition amply succeeds in capturing an aura of freewheeling experimentation. For me, the most satisfying pieces reflected not the “raw innocence” mentioned in the introductory wall text — no work here seems entirely innocent — but instead a kind of impish agnosticism. These include Ray Johnson’s two oddball collages (1967 and 1973) assembled from sanded bits of board; their strange designs proceed according to some inner, evolving need rather than any preconception. And then there are the several music videos that irreverently spoof everything, including their own making. Devo’s 1976 post-industrial send-up of Johnny River’s “Secret Agent Man” — the verses are in fact very different — wickedly parodies nearly every cliché of rock. And the video “The Third Reich ‘n’ Roll” (1975) by the Residents, which gleefully presents T-bone steaks crushing a swastika and newspaper-hooded rock-‘n’-rollers, manages to confound our ability to take offense. (Well, almost. But where else can you find German Expressionist cinema set to surfer music?)

Until January 5 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).