Jordan Wolfson’s virtual-reality installation at the new Whitney Biennial, “Real Violence,” is the rare art work that comes with a trigger warning as well as an age restriction. No one under seventeen is allowed; minors will have to get their dose of carnage by sneaking into “Logan” instead. “Real Violence” requires a spoiler alert, too. If you like your shock undampened, turn back now. I prefer to know what I’m in for when depictions of extreme brutality are concerned, so I read enough about the video to feel preëmptively queasy as I lined up for a headset on Friday afternoon. Early reviews called the work disturbing, horrifying, repellent, nausea- and P.T.S.D.-inducing, but also a gratuitous trick, tin-eared and cheap. Word of it moved like a rumor through the rooms of the Whitney. “We’re going to look at Jordan’s thing,” a guy in his thirties said to his friend, who stuck out his tongue and slid his finger across his throat.

Here’s what goes down. Viewers are directed to a counter, handed noise-cancelling headphones and virtual-reality goggles, and instructed to grip the railing below them. The video begins with a view of clear sky glimpsed between buildings on a wide Manhattan street, as if you’re lying supine on the ground. You can almost smell spring. Then a cut, and there, kneeling on a stretch of sidewalk, is a young man in jeans and a red hoodie, an obscure, plaintive expression on his face as he holds your gaze. A man in a gray T-shirt stands over him: the artist. He takes a baseball bat and whacks his victim in the skull, then drops the bat, drags the man by his legs to the center of the sidewalk, and proceeds to bash his face in with a series of stomps and kicks. Blood gushes. The victim grunts and is silent. In the street, indifferent traffic is lined up bumper to bumper. Pedestrians mill around in the far background. The bat has rolled into the gutter; the batterer retrieves it and carries on. The camera cuts to a dizzying view from above; it feels like hovering upside down in a dream. Throughout, a man’s voice sings the two Hebrew blessings that Jews recite over the candles during Hanukkah. Abruptly, the sound cuts, then the image.

The whole thing lasts two minutes and twenty-five seconds, if you make it that long. “Oh! Oh!” a man in a beanie and duster coat shouted, flinching. He walked away shaking his head. At the opposite end of the table, a woman who had declined a headset stood next to her boyfriend, anxiously watching him watch the video on behalf of them both. A couple of boys who had just squeaked over the age limit took off their headphones, looked at one another, and broke into laughter. An older man, bald and flushed, pulled off his headset, blinking the vulnerable blink of the nearsighted. His glasses had gotten stuck inside. A museum employee darted around, wiping the gear with disinfectant.

A blond girl, twentyish, turned from the table to find her friend, who was standing at a distance, as if waiting for a passenger disembarking from a ship after a dangerous voyage. “Elizabeth!” the blond girl said. “You would’ve hated that!”

“I’m so glad I didn’t watch it!” Elizabeth said, visibly relieved.

An uptown woman who looked to be in her sixties, dressed in black and carrying a navy-blue Longchamp bag, was speaking sternly to the young museum employee stationed by the installation’s exit. “It’s nothing that I don’t know,” she said. She did, however, want to know what the point of the installation was supposed to be. Was the violence real, as advertised? The museum employee told her that she and her colleagues had not been given more information than what was contained in the wall text, which didn’t address the question. “It doesn’t look like anybody could survive that, even if it was thirty seconds,” the woman said.

The violence in “Real Violence” is not real, insofar as it is carried out on an animatronic doll enhanced in post-production. But the troubling veneer of realness is its aim. In an interview with ARTnews, Wolfson said that he had first tried working with a stuntman but found that the result looked too fake. He, the beater-upper, had to restrain himself from doing true harm. Using a doll allowed him to do as much damage as he could.

Knowing that such violence, real as it is, doesn’t have an effect on a real person does change the power of the art work, utterly—at least it did for me. My body, rigid with anxious anticipation, relaxed as soon as the fake blood began to pour. I imagined Wolfson stomping murderously on the doll, then sitting calmly before a computer screen to give it a human face. I watched “Real Violence” three times: first slightly blurry, without my glasses; then again, in focus; and a third time to catch the details that I might have missed during the first two.

Is this what people feel at target practice, firing cleanly at a paper mark in the shape of a man? Is this what gamers feel playing a first-person shooter, assassinating their onscreen rivals? Both of those activities make some use of narrative, that powerful tool that Wolfson forsakes. At the shooting range, or behind the video-game console, you are the protagonist in a contest for your own survival. Who are we supposed to be in “Real Violence”—the brutalized, the brutalizer, or a bystander, witnessing everything while doing nothing?

The first, instinctive reaction is the empathetic one: disgust, repulsion, anger at being made to watch an atrocity. But Wolfson complicates the violent scene he stages by neutralizing it. He and his victim are both white, both men, both around the same age and of a similar build. The two are apparently evenly matched in strength and social status. The only clue that we are given to direct our sympathies is their initial positioning, the submissive way that the victim kneels, staring at the viewer. (Like an ISIS captive without a hood, I thought.) One has power, the other none, but, by my third viewing, my narrative brain had invented a counterpoint scenario. Could the victim be the original brutalizer? The Hebrew prayers could indicate that some grotesque act of anti-Semitism was taking place, but the reverse could be equally true. Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates the success of an uprising against an oppressor; maybe this was an “Inglourious Basterds” scenario, an act of vengeance for atrocities committed by the man now laid low. (Wolfson, as the museum’s wall text notes, is Jewish.) Fiction is a morally plastic force; point of view can determine much. If Wolfson’s video were a documentary, there would be no excuse for what it shows. If it were a scripted movie, with Wolfson slotted into the hero’s role, we’d cheer for him from the first crushing skull crack.

All that said, there is something ultimately kitschy about the video—a slick, hollow quality to its orchestrated luridness. “Real Violence” didn’t seem as mysterious or unnerving to me as another work by Wolfson, last year’s provocatively titled “Colored Sculpture,” in which a giant redheaded doll that looks like a demonically possessed Howdy Doody is repeatedly hoisted and dropped to the ground by a set of clanking chains. In that piece, the artificiality was the point: watch the video on YouTube and see for yourself how quickly the mind vacillates between eerie sympathy for the tortured toy and fear of it. Both are equally pointless reactions—the thing can’t feel—but they stick. V.R. hasn’t yet taken the place of that kind of crude realness, at least not at the Whitney. Putting on Wolfson’s headset didn’t feel so much like switching one world for another as switching off the world altogether, substituting smooth, crystalline clarity for a video medium that we are more familiar with: the handheld shakiness of a smartphone camera capturing something urgent or horrible as it unfolds.

Wolfson’s contextless work does, after all, have a context: America, with all its indisputably real violence carried out daily on victims of flesh and blood. In the Biennial’s next room hangs a painting by Henry Taylor depicting the death of Philando Castile, who was killed last July by a police officer. The visual source is one that we all have access to: the video of the encounter that Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, live-streamed on Facebook. Taylor has painted Castile slumped back in his car, his eyes open, as the officer’s hand fires through the window. The style is loose, the colors stark: Castile’s white shirt, brown skin; the officer’s pink hand. It is the picture of a memory burned into the mind by a video that will never get any easier to watch.