"Bim Bam" , a film by Dara Friedman that features slamming doors

In a grainy black-and-white film from the 1960s, the artists Vito Acconci and Stephen Kaltenbach try to push each other out of the picture frame. In another of similar vintage, Bruce Nauman bounces in a corner as if in an autistic trance. In a color film called “Freedom” from 1970, Yoko Ono tries to get out of her purple bra by breaking the connecting cord in front as a droning sound composed by John Lennon plays in the background.

These and most of the other films, videos and photographs in “Off the Wall, Part 1: Thirty Performative Actions,” a lackluster exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are not what you would call enduring works. Culled from the museum’s permanent collection, they are dusty artifacts of a time when traditional possibilities seemed exhausted, and avant-garde artists became preoccupied by theory, performance and new technologies.

The show’s earliest piece, a 1948 film by Maya Deren called “Meditation on Violence,” records a Chinese boxer gracefully executing ritualistic moves. Otherwise, few of the actions depicted involve traditional skills. They are best viewed as thought experiments revolving around basic questions about art: what it is, what it is for, how it is best presented and so on. Chrissie Iles, the Whitney curator who organized the exhibition, observes in a museum news release that the show’s works represent “the end game of Modernism in their various rupturings of the autonomous space of painting and its primary location — the vertical plane of the gallery wall.”

Kalup Linzy, right, in drag in his "As da Art World Might Turn,"

In Dennis Oppenheim’s “Echo” (1973), the filmed image of a section of a white wall is projected onto each of the four walls of a darkened gallery. In each projection, a man’s hand intermittently and resoundingly slaps the wall as if to emphasize its material factuality. The paradox is that the projected wall and hand are immaterial. The fun is in the hand-slapping rhythm that envelops you. For the cognoscenti, it is a wry joke about Clement Greenberg’s insistence on the flatness of Modernist painting.

“Bim Bam,” a film made by Dara Friedman in 1999, could be a reply to Mr. Oppenheim. It shows side-by-side scenes, rotated 90 degrees, in which a woman vigorously opens and slams a door and goes back and forth through the doorway. In the twin scenes you look from a dark room to a glowing, undefined space beyond. It is as if the door slammer were stuck in the gap between reality and Platonic transcendence.

A more pedestrian line of inquiry is broached by works having to do with the floor: a 1975 row of copper plates by Carl Andre that you are allowed to walk on; an early ’70s video in which Paul McCarthy inches along face down while pouring white paint from a can ahead of him; and Andy Warhol’s painted copy of an instructional dance diagram displayed horizontally (1962). Hard to believe now, but such works raised questions about painting and sculpture that artists and critics once urgently cared about.

Defying gravity, on the other hand, Charles Ray appears up in the air, his body tied to a tree branch in a 1973 photograph. And members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company rehearse an act that has them suspended by belts and ropes so they can perform on the wall in a 1971 film by Walter Gutman. (Ms. Brown’s work will be featured in Part 2 of “Off the Wall.” That segment, “Seven Works by Trisha Brown,” will run from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 at the Whitney.)

Works from the ’70s by other women turn to social and psychological concerns. Dara Birnbaum’s video in which sometimes she appears to gaze directly into the camera lens and sometimes looks out of a mirror might have to do with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories about self and other. Hannah Wilke’s film of herself seen stripteasing through the transparent panels of Duchamp’s “Large Glass” plays on the full title of that piece — “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” — but it is also a feminist assertion of erotic self-determination. Martha Rosler’s video “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,” in which the artist is subjected to all kinds of measurements by a team of technicians, satirizes the male-dominant scientific cult of quantification.

As the ’70s turned to the ’80s, popular media and its representations became major subjects. Robert Longo made photographs of people twisted like gunshot victims in B movies. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe portrayed himself made up as a woman. In a video by Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen, Cindy Sherman plays herself in a mock interview with an art dealer; she appears in outfits matching those she wears in the fake-film stills she is showing. Early in the postmodern era, it seemed that we were all role-playing performers with multiple personalities.

Now, in the age of YouTube, this is not just a theoretical proposition, as we have been witnessing an explosion of online performance art. Kalup Linzy’s career has been one of countless begun on the Internet. Here the semitalented Mr. Linzy stars in a comic drag soap opera in which he plays a blond-wigged woman who dreams of success in love and art and manages to achieve both.

As a spoof about blind narcissism, Mr. Linzy’s video projects an uncomfortable truth. Neurotic self-absorption is a common occupational hazard for today’s artists. Once it was said, “Be yourself.” Now it seems that all of us want to be loved for what we pretend to be. It’s enough to make you pine for the good old days of Romantic authenticity.

“Off the Wall: Part 1 — Thirty Performative Actions” is on view through Sept. 19 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.