ONE RECENT WEEKDAY, I was sitting with the video artist and retired professor Cecelia Condit in the dining room of her fairly nondescript apartment in the upper-middle-class Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood, Wis. The space also doubles as Condit’s studio, but other than a laptop and a few hard drives, scant evidence of a working artist could be found. Over grapes and pudding, we watched my iPhone, which was spitting out audio from “Possibly in Michigan,” Condit’s brutal, surreal and darkly funny 1983 art musical that is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Shot using then nascent video technology and set to an eerily chipper Casio-fueled soundtrack provided by Karen Skladany, who also acted in the film, the 12-minute “Possibly in Michigan” follows a masked cannibal named Arthur — played by, at different points, Condit and the actors Bill Blume and Stephen Vogel — as he stalks Jill Sands (playing a character named Sharon) and Skladany (as Sharon’s friend Janice) through a nondescript Middle American shopping mall. (Despite its name, the video was filmed in Cleveland, where Condit was living at the time.) The cannibal follows the women home, at which point he’s murdered and then eaten himself. The film ends with the body being disposed in a couple of trash bags and picked up by a local garbage collector.

As we listened to the audio, a variety of direct-to-camera performances played on the phone’s screen. We were on the social media app TikTok, which is best known for user-generated short-form (typically 15-second) performance and lip-sync videos, whose vast majority of its estimated 100 million users worldwide are under the age of 30. In the past year, TikTok has been a viral incubator for a number of internet success stories, like the 16-year-old Missouri grammarian (@kelsiesatt) whose 45-second video about the Oxford comma has 3 million views, or the 14-year-old Amish girl (@amishbek) from Pennsylvania who explains to her followers the proper pronunciation of “Lancaster.” The platform has also made this 71-year-old artist into an unlikely Generation Z cult hero — and pointed to a possible new way for art to find a place in popular culture.

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“Wasn’t that good, though?” Condit asked me as we watched the TikTok user @jumpingspider theatrically gesticulate to audio from “Possibly in Michigan.” (The video has nearly 160,000 likes.) “Because of its innocence,” Condit continued. In conversation, Condit can vacillate from folksy to deadpan and back again. Many of Condit’s unnerving, fairy-tale-like videos feature the artist’s own narration, and her real-life voice mirrors that of her voice-over work, a kind of singsong, deliberately unplaceable lilt.

For over three decades, Condit served as the professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has been a practicing and respected video artist since 1981 and has worked steadily on the margins of both contemporary art and avant-garde cinema for over 40 years, though her grim subject matter has kept her from the mainstream. Her first video, 1981’s “Beneath the Skin,” serves as an account of an ex-partner of Condit’s who murdered another woman he was romantically involved with at the same time as the artist. He then hid her mummified body in a bedroom closet.