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Mika Rottenberg's latest video work, the 20-minute mini-opus "Squeeze," is what a faux-documentary survey of late capitalism might look like, were it co-directed by Matthew Barney and Terry Gilliam. The piece opens with the daily routines of rubber farmers in India — lots of close-ups on viscous, milky fluids trickling from trees. From there, it's a wild ride above and below ground, as Rottenberg connects this real industry to a subterranean fantasy network involving hand massages, exposed buttocks, and bored women eating sandwiches beneath heat lamps.

Half the fun is trying to determine the logic that exists behind the artist's imaginary means of production. The line between authentic industry and surreal nonsense is often hard to discern. The rubber-processing — which involves huge slabs of whitish, tofu-like material — is itself stranger than fiction. (It brings to mind Zarina Bhimji's excellent, haunting video from 2007 that depicts sisal production, "Waiting.") In Rottenberg's nearly all-female economy, silent and pulsingly sexual, everyone's doing their small part: crushing heads of lettuce with long wooden tools, squirting body parts with water, harvesting lettuce.

Other participants have less clearly defined jobs, such as the morbidly obese black woman whose role seems to be sitting on a rotating dais, flexing her hands and feet and occasionally transmitting some invisible mojo into the environment. Elsewhere, a rosacea-faced lady finds herself methodically squished by a malevolent machine; later, in a touch of cinematic magic-realism, she scrubs her red cheeks, generating a powder that seems integral to this mysterious cycle of creation. After a few minutes the viewer starts to map the basic geography of the action on screen. Parts of it take place in a barren, cramped room whose most prominent feature is a human tongue sticking out of the wall. (Various modified glory holes are important in the film: Small places through which to poke an eye, or perhaps an ass.)

"Squeeze"'s tension derives from one simple question: What the hell is getting made here? What possible product could be worth all this poking, smashing, sliding, stomping, crushing labor? The video doesn't provide an answer — at a certain point the whole thing just loops seamlessly in on itself, and we're back with the rubber harvesters. But a large C-print outside the viewing chamber might offer a clue. We see a woman, posing with a large brick of compressed garbage and vegetable matter, as if she's a showgirl on "The Price Is Right." It seems that the output of Rottenberg's perverse, convoluted, multi-ethnic toil just might be — to borrow a highbrow government euphemism popular of late — a crap sandwich.