“EVE-RAY-FOREVER’’ is a montage of flickering black and white film that’s played on a loop. More accurately, it’s three such films playing side by side.

Although the work, which is dated 1965/2006, has a complicated history, it’s essentially very simple. And it’s diabolically effective. It’s one of those rare cases in art of a bold innovation that prefigures a whole genre (the multiscreen video installation) and, rather than looking like a primitive precursor, actually looks sharper and more sophisticated than most of what came in its wake. (As I fell under its spell, I thought of the novelist Angela Carter’s little aphorism: “I like anything that flickers.’’)