In the last 30 years, Robert Wilson has ranged over a lot of territory -- opera, architecture, dance, theater, painting, prints and drawings, music, film -- without ever really settling down. There are hundreds of semi-digested bits and pieces in his work: '60s minimalism, '50s suburbia, Joseph Cornell, Ren?agritte, black-and-white Hitchcock and Bergman films. His pregnant juxtapositions hover just beyond reach. He's the name on the tip of your tongue, that unusual flavor you can't quite place, a conversation overheard in an echoing room, spoken in a foreign language you studied long ago, but never quite mastered.

He is also something of a secular mystic. His early, plotless theatre pieces -- Deafman Glance (1970-1971), Einstein on the Beach (1976) and CIVIL warS (1983-1984) -- descended on audiences like visitations. The spiritual face of his work is usually oblique - in the slowness of a walk or in muffled offstage organ music. But it is always unmistakable.

In Wilson's 14 Stations, the religious dimension is about as straight faced as Wilson ever gets. His interpretation of the Stations of the Cross (also called Via Crucis, or "Way of the Cross,") the venerable Catholic devotion in honor of Christ's journey from the judgment of Pilate to Cavalry, fills the museum's largest gallery.

Each Station -- not all of them are based on scripture --represents a different moment in the progress of Christ's Passion. The centuries-old iconography is said to have been brought back by Medieval Pilgrims to Jerusalem, who, moving in both space and time, traced Christ's supposed steps in the ancient streets. The fourteen Stations have by now been endlessly repeated in stained glass, paint, sculpture, and living vignettes.

Wilson's 14 Stations was commissioned for the 2000 version of the Passion Play of Oberammergau, a famous and elaborate religious drama performed, every tenth year since 1634, by the inhabitants of this small village in the Bavarian Alps. At Oberammergau, Wilson's series of small huts or cottages were laid out in rows in a meadow near the Passionhaus, where the play is performed.

At MASS MoCA, the work has been reassembled indoors, in a massive, recycled industrial loft, flooded with light from towering windows. The only alteration from Oberammergau is a reduction in the height of Station 14, to accommodate the ceiling.

Like many of Wilson's large-scale works, 14 Stations tends to come apart in photographs. Without his meticulously arranged context and attention to scale, Wilson's juxtapositions look stagy, the many cultural references contrived and derivative. But walk into the space and the images click into place. The strangeness, which is oppressive in photos, lightens and clears. In parts, 14 Stations can seem trite and overbearing. As a whole, it weaves a peculiar, touching spell.

The 14 Stations is arranged around a plank boardwalk that runs the length of the enormous gallery, which is much deeper and higher than it is wide. Station 1, the place of Pilate's judgment, is in a low, Bauhaus-like structure across the near end. Stations 2 through 13 are in two facing rows of small, gabled houses.

The austere, gray clapboard buildings have reminded some viewers of concentration camp barracks, others of the chapels along the nave of a cathedral. On the pale gray gravel that replaces the Oberammergau grass, they look more like tiny seaside cabins, especially the kind that cluster around old-time Revival Colonies. Wherever you are, Wilson makes you feel you have come into an important place, one charged with some special significance or meaning.

The houses have no doors. You view the voyeur-like tableaus through small windows on the boardwalk side. Wilson explains they are meant for just one person at a time, to provide a sense of focus: "You can't talk to somebody, if you're looking inside the houses."

Inside, the richly saturated color of the walls (a different hue for each interior) surrounds each tableau like a shaman's cloak. There are things turning, rising or falling, lights, many scattered sounds, creaks, and snatches of music. At times, the complicated mechanisms don't stay quite far enough in the background. And the potential for technical difficulties is enormous.

Wilson's treatments are neither traditional nor abstract or directly contrary to tradition. He claims he "tried to eliminate Christian symbols more than to integrate them." Thus his vignettes have no crosses, which are, naturally, the dominant symbol of most Stations of the Cross. The lamb in Station 3 (Jesus Falls Under the Weight of the Cross) is one of the few obvious borrowings from Christian iconography. Otherwise, the religious imagery is implied -- easily read, but never specific.

In six of the Stations, a mysterious hanging boulder (a favorite Magritte motif) suggests Jesus' heavy burden. Veronica, who wipes Jesus' brow with her veil in Station 6 of the traditional series, is transformed here into a gigantic, looming Shaker sister, blanched white except for her staring blue eyes, toting an enormous iron. The Daughters of Jerusalem in Station 8 become six more Shakers, calmly seated in two rows, and holding knitting needles. Despite the vaguely masochistic gestures of their needles, these women seem just slightly smaller than life size; their colorless faces somehow comforting instead of menacing.

Shakers turn up again and again. In Station 5 (Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Carry the Cross), a Shaker-style chest of drawers floats near the ceiling, the partly-open bottom drawer lit from within. In Station 7 (Jesus Falls a Second Time), a Shaker stove dangles above the floor, where, in a video set in an opening, a naked, white painted man crawls across grass. In Station 11 (the Crucifixion) a lighted glass tube rises from a Shaker bed, huge bubbles rising in its liquid contents as the sounds of thunder and rain fill the tiny space.

Though they seem worlds from the Catholic iconography, the Shakers seem to belong in Wilson's stripped-down, spiritualized space. The Shaker "Jerusalem" is forty miles away in Mount Lebanon, New York. And the celibate Shakers who sublimated sexual urges into ecstatic rituals and sensuously simple furniture, seem a perfect complement to the cool, ascetic eroticism that shivers through all Wilson's work.

As the Passion story reaches its climax, the imagery inside the houses grows more vivid and overtly surreal. Station 12 (Jesus Dies On The Cross) is a pack of glossy, eyeless red wolves, howling under a panorama of mountains. It turns out to be one of the weakest and most derivative of the series -- a near knock-off of staged-scenario photographer Sandy Skoglund. Wilson plays the moment as a melodramatic climax. In scripture, it is a deliberate anticlimax. Wilson would have done better to stay closer to the ghastly simplicity of John 10:30 "he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."

Station 13 (The Dead Jesus Laid in Mary's Arms) is a giant Cornell box where the floor is covered with clear-lighted vials, birds float, and a glamorous female face (is it the Holy Mother or our own modern Madonna?) fills a curtain against the back wall. This time, the allusions work. The scene is a classic surrealist assemblage, serene in effect, in which the pop culture image resonates deeply with the Christian icon.

Only at the very end does Wilson break with tradition altogether. The final Station in the series, usually depicts Jesus laid in the sepulcher. Wilson elides the Entombment with the Resurrection: a white figure, suspended upside down over a blue bed in an arch or apse of tree branches shaped like a half-buried boat. It is an oddly disturbing image, like a rebirth reversed or postponed.

Wilson has been described as half genius, half fraud. Like his fellow mystic-artists, Caspar David Friedrich or William Blake, for example, he treads a delicate line. So much of the effect is in creating a seamless, otherworldly persona. The slightest misstep, and the whole thing looks humbug. In our world of unashamed, agnostic fakery, it is next to impossible to pull off what Wilson attempts to do.

Yet seen as a whole, 14 Stations succeeds beautifully -- a series of nuanced phrases that are carefully, even delicately, arranged in a single, powerful exclamation. Here, as in Wilson's best work, you get the sense that his most powerful images exceed his own ability to account for them. His symbols are never literal because his approach is essentially intuitive, not intellectual or even really aesthetic, despite the polished elegance of all his creations.

Wilson calls the installation a "mysterious journey" where "time and space are two crossing lines, a structure that forms the architecture of everything." Like the disconnected symbols in a recurring dream, the 14 Stations suggest that meaning might not just be something that points to something else. When Wilson succeeds most completely, his meanings -- broken in a cynical, post-modern world -- break free of the metaphorical resurrection of themselves.

View images from Wilson's 14 Stations.

Read a review of Jarvis Rockwell's "Maya" exhibit, on display at MASS MoCA through October 14, 2002.

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