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Where to begin in discussing Cuban installation/performance artist Tania Bruguera, whose new show, "On the Political Imaginary" is at Purchase College's Neuberger Museum of Art through April 11?

Bruguera is one of those in-your-face artists who uses images that are controversial, blatantly sexual and often downright disgusting — rotting sugarcane, nude performers burdened by raw meat and animal carcasses, gun-wielding actors, costumes made of earth and rusty nails to mimic African icons — as a way of provoking a response from the audience, which then becomes part of her art. At her best in this show, she approaches the brilliance of Douglas Gordon's "30 seconds text," whose exploration of life-in-dying is one of the most chilling and mesmerizing works I've ever seen.

"Untitled (Kassel, 2002)" has something of that work's spellbinding frisson. You enter through the darkened maze that was once the museum's cavernous Theater Gallery. Under the glare of a bank of lights in one of the constructed rooms, you notice a woman in a dark suit patrolling a mezzanine with a pistol. It's a toy gun, of course, you wonder. (You hope.) Then you think, Is she going to point it at me? That clicking sound you hear when the lights go off is the gun being loading and reloaded. (The work was originally performed in Kassel, Germany, site of a munitions factory in World War II.) Actually, I wasn't aware of the clicking sound. I was too busy concentrating on getting out of the gallery as soon as the lights came back on.

And that's what Bruguera wants: Coming as she does from a country that has been under a dictatorship for decades, she wants you to experience the paralytic power of imprisonment, physical and psychological, as well as the visceral thrill of vicarious bondage.

Bruguera is nothing if not a multi-layered artist. In the 1998-99 video "Displacement," above, she donned an earthen costume (also on display) to conjure the African deity Nkisi Nkonde, whom Afro-Cubans petition with requests by puncturing the figure with rusted nails. This also evokes the image of Jesus nailed to the cross and makes you wonder why one would torture a god to whom one prays.

Like a lot of clever artists, however, Bruguera sometimes overplays her hand. She doesn't trust the audience to get her work. The layers are piled on thick. In "Poetic Justice" (2002-03), right, based on her four-week residency in India, textured brown walls made of used teabags couch small video screens in which a hand is treated with a salve, for instance. The accompanying handout describes it thus: "The luminous scenes combine the dematerialized spectacle of technological modernity with the earthliness and immediacy of more traditional Indian products." Huh? This makes no verbal sense and obfuscates the visual metaphor of the teabag — a source of national pride in India and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Then there is Bruguera's troubling use of the body, particularly the female body. In "Studio Study" (1996), performed in the South Gallery 1:30-2:10 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, a nude actress encased in metal rings and tufts of cotton leans forward on a small pedestal, cupping a piece of raw meat. (Needless to say, this is not a show for kids.) It's is a loaded work that suggests everything from the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna, divesting herself as she descends to the underworld, where she hangs on a hook, to the HIV-positive performance artist Tim Miller, who got into such trouble in the Reagan era by cutting himself onstage and sending blood-laced pieces of paper out into the audience.

But "Studio Study," along with other works in the show, also makes you wonder why Bruguera feels the need to explore the debasement of the body, particularly the female body.

The actress Geneviève White, who performs the role four times a week, sees it differently.

"There's an element of restriction but also an element of freedom," she told me as she was leaving the museum after today's performance. "In a way, it's like putting me in a cage. But it's also keeping me from falling off a pedestal. It's harsh as metal and soft as cotton. It's empowering and diminishing."

I reminded her that some have used these same words to describe prostitution, stripping and porn.

Is "On the Political Imaginary" great art? Probably not. But it does make you think. And that alone is worth the price of admission.

The show is accompanied by "Contemporary Latin American Art from the Luis Calzadilla Collection," a wonderful introduction to this specialty. More about this exhibit in an upcoming post. 914-251-6100, neuberger.org

Photos courtesy of the Neuberger Museum.