An exhibit touting 'art and rock 'n' roll'' conjures visions of album covers, vintage concert posters and portraits of Lennon, Joplin, Morrison, Hendrix.

Or paintings by Paul Stanley, Ringo Starr or Grace Slick, who have all taken up the brush as an alternate creative outlet.

But Sympathy For the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,on view through Sept. 7 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, doesn't fit that bill.

A lively cacophony shimmers and shape-shifts around you as you walk through the space. Strange musical sounds emanate from adjacent rooms, clashing initially but eventually weaving a paradoxical harmony.

Providing the backbeat is Slater Bradley's The Year of the Doppelganger, a four-minute video installation. In it, a long-haired, look-alike friend of the artist plays the thundering drums of Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks, sitting shirtless, pale and gaunt on the University of California-Berkeley football field. When the college's beefy football team practices around him there is a clash of cultures, each man representing a different side of masculinity, the muscular beat holding its own against brute strength.

Adding to the sonic circus is Tony Oursler's Sound Digressions in Seven Colors,which projects performances by experimental musicians on seven Plexiglas and aluminum panels. Stroll between the screens, and the sounds ebb and flow, allowing you to create your own mix.

One of the more surreal videos in the show is Pipilotti Rist's I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much,seven-plus minutes of sped-up, staticky footage of a woman frantically dancing while singing a chipmunk interpretation of The Beatles' Happiness is a Warm Gun. The performance starts to seem nightmarish, but nowhere near as much as Marnie Weber's wall-sized video A Western Song,24 minutes of can't-look-away queasiness. Shown in a dark room filled with rows of baled-hay seats, it tells of The Spirit Girls, a female rock band whose members died simultaneously and came back to life dressed in colorful, childlike Sunday best. Their subtle white masks suggest plastic surgery gone awry. Eerie, psychedelic music from the '60s plays as the women (girls?) wander around a farm with curious yet blank eyes.

THE RAVE

Equally disturbing though more literal is Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,a 15-minute video of various rave scenes over the years. It's meant to chronicle, not judge, but its dark, booming bass over silent, slow-motion images of people dancing maniacally -- many clearly on some illicit substance -- lends a sense of danger to their blissful smiles.

Another work with a double entendre is Robert Longo's iconic series Men in the Cities, drawings depicting smartly dressed dancers in the contorted throes of New Wave ecstasy. Continue to study them, though, and they seem to be writhing in agony as well.

Art gets dramatically interactive with Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), a soundproof Plexiglas box full of instruments and recording equipment that bands rent out and use. Onlookers can see the bands clearly but must put on the provided headphones to hear the musical mayhem inside.

Of course, no art-rock exhibit would be complete without Andy Warhol's Screen Tests of the avant-garde rock group Velvet Underground. Warhol asked the band's members to sit as still as possible on camera for four minutes. The gently mesmerizing effect of the faces reflects the tendency of VU's music to drone occasionally. The band pops up again in Jason Rhoades' jarring Velvet Underground Perfect World,consisting of 24 neon signs, one spelling out the group's name, and the other 23 displaying vulgar slang for female genitalia.

A pervasive theme in Sympathy For the Devil is tangible CDs, records and tapes that are becoming obsolete in the digital age. The best example is Christian Marclay's Untitled, for which he refinished the floor of a room with hundreds of vinyl LPs, now scuffed and dirty, like trash. It feels sacrilegious to trample discs by Eric Clapton, The Byrds, The Beatles, even Culture Club and Belinda Carlisle. (Marclay also contributes three humorously inventive works from his series Body Mix,which threads together album covers to fashion freakish new characters.)

COMPARING CIRCLES

More heavy-handed is Steven Claydon's Extinction,which juxtaposes circles the size of an LP, a 45 and a compact disc with a dodo bird, and Jack Pierson's PHIL SPECTOR, which spells out the embattled producer's name with discarded sign letters.

For all the rampant abstract expression of the exhibit, some of the most compelling works are straightforward, starting with Adam Pendleton's Sympathy For the Devil,90 pieces of black acrylic on white canvas mounted together to depict artists such as Patti Smith, Television and The Jam. Mark Flores' I Need More captures the fragile masculinity of a young Iggy Pop, vaguely sexual with mouth agape. At first, in Daniel Guzman's drawing Hand Kurt Cobain appears to be flipping the bird, but it's really his wedding ring-clad finger that's sticking up (a dig at Courtney Love?).

But most arresting is the massive Futurama by Scott King and Kevin Cummins, composed of three live concert shots of charismatic Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who hanged himself in 1980. The haunting digital print embodies what the best art -- and rock 'n' roll -- should strive to be: raw, confrontational and intense.

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