The aide (to President Bush) said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

—Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004

The artists have lost their minds, and how could they not.

It isn't really a coincidence that the dates for this year's Whitney Biennial—a great big ritualistic survey of contemporary art intended as a pronouncement about the Zeitgeist—concur almost exactly with the dates of the first major Dada retrospective visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The early-20th-century absurdist war-protest movement can be summed up in four words, put down by Tristan Tzara in his 1918 manifesto: "Dada: abolition of all logic."

That concurs with the Whitney curators' description of their show as a sign of a culture gone mad, regressing into premodernity, and "preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent." The biennial marks time in two-year increments, and the curators' list of adjectives reads like a categorization of newspaper headlines on any given day since 2004. Failing to make sense of a politically and naturally horrifying world, many of these artists have turned, like the Dadaists, away from sense itself. The question is whether their irrationality will turn out to be a fecund disruption or an antisocial abdication, a form of disengagement that reduces their art to entertaining distraction. The answer is: I'm not sure.

My first two encounters upon arriving at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Manhattan's Upper East Side were with a mythical penguin on the first floor and a pack of pagan he-beasts on the second. I could feel the artists beating their breasts, and I could relate. Pierre Huyghe's film installation begins with a "real" journey to Antarctica in search of an albino penguin, and culminates in the penguin's appearance, messiah-like, among fake black icebergs on the skating rink in Central Park. A crowd watches, in a trance, and the penguin is made real by their devotion. Cameron Jamie's 26-minute film depicts a band of men dressed in Chewbacca-like suits and horned masks roaming a snowy Austrian village to a hard-rock soundtrack by the Melvins in honor of a pagan dark Santa named Krampus who alternately amuses and terrorizes the townspeople each year. Ancient ritual brings primal reactions even in a pizza parlor.

The cheapness of modern life is on display. A Family Finds Entertainment, by Ryan Trecartin, is a riotous, barely contained—yet narrative—hysterical attack framed as a house party. Francesco Vezzoli's satiric Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's "Caligula" lacks the element of disgust and ends up complicit with the soft core porn of Hollywood. On the other hand, Marilyn Minter's lurid paintings expose the depravity of seduction without ruining the fun. The puppet/rock opera video by Tony Oursler, Dan Graham, Laurent P. Berger, Japanther, and Rodney Graham (the show's only Northwest artist, from Vancouver) is a tired psychedelic rehash.

There are impulses toward the romantic, the gothic, and the mythic. Sturtevant summons the ghost of Duchamp in a dark theatrical remake. Dorothy Iannone films her face as it tracks her ecstatic climax. Gedi Sibony caresses the gallery as a body partly undressed. Mark Grotjahn whispers about secrets he won't tell. Urs Fischer, Hanna Liden, Trisha Donnelly, Anthony Burdin, and Angela Strassheim invoke the otherworldliness of cults. Eloquently and simply expressing pain are Robert Gober, Richard Serra, Paul Chan, Billy Sullivan, and Critical Art Ensemble.

There are plenty of failures, and the installation is ugly. Works by 259 individuals, 15 collectives, and several anonymous artists are pushed together as in a cluttered antique shop. But the curators are answering to a desire more anthropological than aesthetic. They have created the most symbolically accountable biennial ever—a scientific-minded move—by making it the first one with a title: Day for Night, referring to the François Truffaut film technique of shooting nighttime scenes during the day, with filters. The metaphor is beautiful.

jgraves@thestranger.com