Not surprisingly, the exhibition of installations by finalists Sanford Biggers, Michael Rakowitz, and Ryan Trecartin - all of whom are under 40 - in Tyler's new Temple Gallery is attracting a steady stream of visitors, many of them students.

No surprise, either, that most of the students I saw were lounging on the chairs in Trecartin's installation, P.opular S.ky (section ish), in the darkened back gallery, watching his video. The Philadelphia artist conceived it as the fourth in a new series of video work, a sequel to those he showed at the Fabric Workshop & Museum during the summer. According to the wall text explaining his piece, the latest is "less dialogue driven than previous works" and more of an "audio composition or 'loud' silent film."

Trecartin's previous videos never struck me as containing much dialogue - more a kind of disjointed shouting back and forth - but his notion of a "loud" silent film seems more applicable to this video than the earlier ones. You can almost feel the jittery rhythm of old movie reels as his camera follows his zany characters, whose coloring is reminiscent either of of black-and-white negatives or overexposures.

The attendant props are typical Trecartin: some cheap white chairs arranged in a sandbox; a picnic table and two tripods inside a room-sized cage; a bank of three scuzzy airplane seats.

While Trecartin's world of partying and squabbling may make you fear for the future of the planet, the sculptures and videos of Biggers, a New York artist, are the most disconcerting work in this show. Of particular note is Bittersweet the Fruit, a life-size, lifelike zoopoxy sculpture of a tree from which he has dangled two long cords holding headphones for listening to the audio that accompanies a video playing on a tiny monitor inserted in the tree's trunk. In the video, a naked black man plays eerie chords on a piano, first with his hands, then with his feet, looking as if he is hanging in the air.

The references to lynching are obvious everywhere, and made more so by the dozens of beer bottles around the tree's base, but Biggers' presentation adds a layer of cartoonishness to his tableau that is disturbing in the extreme. His red aluminum-and-Plexiglas sculpture of half of a smile that blinks LEDs like so many white teeth is carnivalesque, as are two videos in which a black man enacts a narrative that involves a bus ride, an antique uniform, and applying clown makeup. I thought back to Joel Grey's amazingly creepy turn in Cabaret.

And then there's Rakowitz, who works in Chicago and New York, in the middle gallery between these seers of the past and the future. His territory in this piece - made between 2007 and 2009 - is the present, specifically the ongoing conflict in Iraq and the 2003 looting of Baghdad's National Museum, but the work really addresses the toll of war on any country's cultural legacy.

Briefly described, Rakowitz's The invisible enemy should not exist consists of a wood table shaped after an ancient Babylonian processional boulevard on which Rakowitz has displayed his handmade versions of antiquities looted from the National Museum, accompanied by cards describing their provenance. The familiar, hypnotic Deep Purple song, "Smoke on the Water," as performed by the Arab-music group Ayyoub, which was commissioned for this project, plays on inconspicuous speakers. It's an elegiac, poetic piece that makes its point immediately.