Whither the Whitney Biennial? The restoration of a primary curator, a thematic framework and public art in Central Park were among the distinctive features of the cyclical show's latest edition - Report from New York - also includes sound art

The first thing you saw at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, if you started at the top, was Ari Marcopoulos's big, color inkjet-printed photo-essay about snowboarders. Right in the center, and staring straight at you, was an especially cool-looking kid with a black eye. Two floors down, the show ended with a devastating, billboard-sized blowup of a postmortem photograph of Felix Partz by AA Bronson, both of them members of the onetime trio General Idea. The dirgelike humming of Lorna Simpson's nearby video installation was audible in the background. The Biennial's thematic armature, as established by the show's primary organizer, Lawrence Rinder, comprised "Beings," Spaces" and "Tribes." But the choice of work as well as the installation encouraged other readings, including the detection of a lifelike narrative arc. If that's not the primary interpretation Rinder had in mind, the scope--and seriousness--of his conception was manifest.

In his catalogue essay, Rinder doesn't hesitate to link, retroactively, the job at hand to the events of Sept. 11. Even before last fall, irony had become the new sentimentality, the thing no one in the culture business would admit to. At a panel discussion in the spring of 2001 that examined the putative ascendance of superstar curators, Rinder wondered aloud why such figures--himself, say--weren't used to promote the museums that employed them the way famous conductors were by symphony orchestras. The Biennial may have been closer to a rock opera (or grunge band gig) than to anything in the symphonic repertory, but it did make good on Rinder's analogy: it was an exhibition not so much chosen and arranged as performed, with feeling.

This was a problem, but an interesting one. Last time, the Biennial was a group curatorial effort, and the result was a rather diffuse exhibition. Returning the bulk of the decision-making process to one individual (sound art, film and video, Internet art and public art components were chosen with Debra Singer, Chrissie Iles, Christiane Paul and Tom Eccles, respectively) restored the possibility of mounting a survey with determinate character, which may be the last, best justification for an exercise widely criticized as having been outflanked by global roundups, on the one hand, and local commercial activity, on the other. And the conflation of conducting and curating reflects an inclination that has overtaken museum practice with a vengeance over the past half-dozen years; witness the venerable institutions around the world that have rearranged their collections by theme rather than chronology, region or medium. Admittedly, these have often been curatorial team efforts. Working with greater autonomy, and ratcheting the process up a notch, Rinder's Biennial usefully clarified the new thematic approach's minor strength (obscure features can be brought to light) and serious weakness (complex art is reduced to precisely those single features). More troubling is the problem that Rinder's performance lacked a certain measure of credibility. His catalogue essay affirms an interest in spirituality, in the soul-searching experiences of youth, in art arising from passion, not calculation. But every aspect of this Biennial, especially its installation, seemed calculated in the extreme: one possible conclusion is that virtuoso curating is ultimately self-defeating; art is better off when its essential anarchy is respected.

Thankfully, the work Rinder chose sometimes triumphed over all his good intentions. The late Margaret Kilgallen's installation, for instance, was a big, unwieldy mix of Lynda Barryish cartooning, vernacular architecture, blank verse, carnival hucksterism and pure visual smarts, all centered on a ramshackle painted tower equally evocative of the Wild West and Rapunzel. Kilgallen's installation stood out from a fairly numbing display of youth-cult paraphernalia, including Luis Gispert's slick photographs of floating cheerleaders and his even more luxe sculptures of composite automotive accessories; Janine Gordon's gelatin-silver prints of young boxers and mosh-pit surfers; and the painted, collaged and videotaped outpourings of the Destroy All Monsters collective, descended from a `70s noise band, and headed up now as then by the perpetually adolescent Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw along with Cary Loren (all today in their late 40s, which puts them among the oldsters in this show). In the same spirit were the beeping, blinking totems, ganged fun-house style in a darkened room by the Providence collective Forcefield and, more satisfyingly, the dazzling comics and game-board graphics of Chris Ware.

Other bright spots included the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, a veteren of the previous Biennial. An artist of voracious visual appetite and no table manners, his collages are great sprawling masses of hortatory text fragments and vaguely vegetal imagery, both drawn onto canvas that is cut in strips and interwoven, along with miscellaneous trimmings. Anne Wilson's tabletop universe is, by contrast, decorum itself, though the tiny forms strewn on the clean white surface, teased from bits of black lace, are every bit as woozily strange. Appealingly eerie, too, are Vera Lutter's enormous reverse-value black-and-white photographs-they're made with a camera obscura outfitted with photosensitive paper. The subjects included an airplane up close and a docked boat from a distance, both looking suitable for interplanetary travel. Rachel Harrison's hybrid photo-sculptures also came off especially well; it helped that she had some breathing room for a trio of recent works, including the heavy-metal-titled Bustle in Your Hedgerow, a dark green, boxy, L-shaped sculpture in which lurks a little photo of Liz Taylor, caught in a feathery pink nightie.