As one proceeds past this first generation, any remaining traces of formalism fall entirely away. I's chaos of walls, nooks, corridors, and videos. Phillip's heart lies in the madness of America, and remarkably, it almost starts to work. This show comes into its own as it at last reaches the 1970s, for all along it was imposing a conception of art at a century's close. All along, it is imagining the changed role of art in postmodern culture.
Alcoves try explicitly to run down history and culture, and they mostly come a clunker.
Some seem trite and irrelevant. Videos exhort children to duck and cover in fear of the bomb. Some alcoves, conversely, seem too familiar, as if people, power, ideals, and conflicts were put through a blender. Jimi Hendrix plays near lava lamps, the space race, and politics. The Rolling Stones playing behind a work of art add nothing, because the Stones played behind every moment of my life.