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Mr. Rinder also extends the theme of structure in space to other disciplines. It's there in the obdurate, boxy sculptures of Rachel Harrison; in Mr. Holloway's tender lattice of broken and rejoined branches; in Anne Wilson's scraps of unraveled lace, pinned down like entymological specimens; and in Ms. Celmins's paintings of spider webs, which come across as dark, breath- on-a-glass versions of Luminist transcendence.

The "Tribes" floor upstairs delivers a welcome blast of high visual energy. The subject here is transcendence, too, but a whole intense other kind. Sometimes it's delivered through music, as seen in Janine Gordon's intrepid photographs of mosh-pit ecstatics and Ari Marcopoulos's picture of a crowd transfixed by wall-of-sound techno- music. And sometimes it's produced by political outrage: the twisted, hallucinatory landscapes filled with Boschian figures by the Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based painter Yun-Fei Ji are an example.

Art itself can be a powerful communal stimulant, as suggested by a room full of fantastic crocheted costumes, abstract videos and ear-splitting sounds made by the collective called Forcefield, based in Providence, R.I. And then there's organized religion. Always a force for both liberation and repression in America, it's also the source of a terrific video by Mr. Jankowski in which a Baptist televangelist from Texas, backed by a gospel choir, preaches the religion of art to a packed congregation.

The Internet is the ultimate (so far, anyway) tribal site, with all the implications of concord and conflict that implies. And the biennial's program of Internet- and software-based art, organized by the adjunct curator of new media arts, Christiane Paul, approaches it that way.

A Web site by Margot Lovejoy is a repository for accounts of changed lives (www.myturningpoint.com). Another, by Mark Napier, tests the Internet's border- breaching unruliness (www.potatoland.org/riot). A third, by Josh On and Futurefarmers, zeroes in on the politics of electronic communication, tracking the usually hidden links among the corporations that have commandeered digital media as a marketing tool (www.theyrule.net).

The biennial has even inspired a Web site of its own, albeit an unofficial one. Created by the artist Mittos Manetas just days before the opening, it's meant to be a kind of online counterexhibition, providing access to the work of dozens of Internet-based artists not in the show itself (www.WhitneyBiennial.com).

The film and video program, organized by Chrissie Iles, is a crucial part of the exhibition. It shares many of its themes and, as in the galleries, a home-made aesthetic prevails, with film hand-edited, layered, written on, manipulated through performance. In fact, if I had to name my favorite biennial artists, I'd pull at least two from Ms. Iles's selection.

One is the elusive expatriate American Robert Beavers, who lives in Switzerland and has three short films on the schedule, each with the structural clarity and rhythm of complex poems, sensuous and percussive. The same can be said of the work of the biennial's youngest artist, Glen Fogel, who, at 25, is a find. His "Endless Obsession," a kind of homoerotic mystery play only five minutes long, is a stunner.

As I've suggested, by no means everything in the 2002 show is anywhere near this magnetic. And even pieces that make a good first impression can start to feel thin with repeat viewing: they're the ones that benefit most from Mr. Rinder's themetic scheme. But a few artists stay in the mind after you're back out on the street, and I'll end with two of them.

One is Stephen Vitiello, who is in the sound art installation organized by Debra Singer in the lobby gallery. He recorded his piece "World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd" during an artist's residency in the Trade Center in 1999. That summer, he attached contact microphones to the windows of his studio on the 91st floor of Tower One to pick up ambient outside noise. But the day after the storm, he picked up the sounds of the building itself. Swaying in the wind, it creaked like a wooden ship and sighed like a living thing, a whale crying under the sea.

And there is the San Francisco-based artist Chris Johanson, who has created a stairway installation titled "This is a picture about the place we live in called Earth that is inside of this place we call space." It starts with a vertical strip of painted wood on the first floor and culminates on the fourth with a galactic mural and an abstract painting of God as a sunburst. Passionately utopian, it's about light as sustenance and greed as poison, about the power of fellowship and the possibility of being lifted up. With its almost childlike, graffiti-based images and its huge ideas, Mr. Johanson's work is an inspired addition to the show, and to this city right now.

The ``2002 Biennial Exhibition'' remains at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, and in Central Park through May 26.