“The Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night,” which opens today, is the 73rd in a series of annuals and biennials that have showcased contemporary American art. It is, however, the first to have a formal title. “Day for Night” is taken from Francois Truffaut’s 1973 film “La Nuit americaine,” which refers to the technique of putting filters over the camera lens to make daylight appear to be night.

Truffaut’s film – about the making of a film – is a brilliant, metaphoric exploration of the realm where life and fiction meet, interweave, and influence each other. A tragic farce involving love, death, jealousy, sex, betrayal, alcoholism, scandal, and stardom, “La Nuit americaine” is a film in which the director, played by Truffaut, claims that “Life is always ruled by conflicting forces” and “No one’s private life runs smoothly. There is more harmony in films than in life – no traffic jams, no dead periods.”

Certainly there are conflicting forces and dead periods in this year’s Biennial. But there are also a handful of interesting pieces here, especially in the areas of film and video. The engaging work, however, is pulled under by the show’s overwhelming political agenda. In the end, I came away feeling as though I’d seen it all countless times before.

For all of this Biennial’s carnivalistic variety, its drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, performances, and installations, the exhibition is little more than a one-act circus. Its artistic stances are currently accepted and lauded in the reigning Duchampian academy – an academy that was built originally on an anti-art stance of subversion, counterculture, and guerrilla tactics. It has reigned for so long that it now has nothing and nobody to rebel against.

But Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, the two foreign-born curators of this American exhibition, would probably suggest that all of this reflects the museum’s ability to present us with an accurate glimpse into the current zeitgeist. We Americans live, the show reminds us, in an uncertain, topsy-turvy world in which anxieties are heightened by war, natural disasters, political upheavals, and terrorist threats. “The artists exhibited in the 2006 Biennial,” the catalog’s introduction tells us, “are working in a liminal space – somewhere between day and night … [a] ‘twilight zone’ [where] everything is called into question … [where] meaning becomes ambiguous … [and where] the political, the erotic, the dark, the hidden, and the violent collide.”

Yet, when “meaning becomes ambiguous” in many of this Biennial’s artworks, it is because much of the art is confused. Rather than explore conflict, ambiguity, and confusion as artistic subjects (as Truffaut does in “La Nuit americaine”) many of the artists seem to have merely stopped when their works became ambiguous and confused.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial features more than 250 works by 101 artists or artist entities – more than triple that if you count the Wrong Gallery’s “Down by Law” and Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Peace Tower” (both 2006). “Peace Tower,” a 50-foot-high collaborative work among more than 200 contemporary artists, is the first work you encounter in the exhibition. Rising above the entrance to the Whitney, it is located just outside the museum in the Sculpture Court, and is made up mostly of handmade war protest signs attached to its armature like the skin of a tepee. “Down by Law” is a one-room installation that “brings together a family of bad men and women, a parade of wrong behaviors, illegal practices, suspicious faces, and corrupted minds” in works by more than 50 artists from the 1930s to the present. (Look for the pipe bomb.)

Overloaded with artists’ questions, accusations, commentary, and an endless blurring of boundaries among genres, this Biennial – from “Peace Tower” onward – is a sprawling mess of politically activist and/or reactionary artworks that collectively touch on every hot topic of our day, but offer very little aesthetic pleasure or artistic depth, and few surprises. The Biennial buzzwords this year are: Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Bush, Katrina, Duchamp, sex, terrorism, race, appropriation, opposition, transgression, and rebellion.The show is mostly made up not of artistic statements but, rather of statements made with and about art.

At its best, “Day for Night” exerts a collective, restless energy and a desire for change. But more often than not the exhibition is a cacophony of disparate voices cramped together under the same flag. The most successful pieces in the exhibition, despite their supposed messages, transcend both the works and the curators’ political and subversive agendas, as they manage to break free from the group and to stand alone. I was particularly taken with works by artists such as Urs Fischer, Kori Newkirk, Mathias Poledna, Angela Strassheim, Zoe Strauss, Nari Ward, and Francesco Vezzoli, whose entertaining and erotic film “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula'” (2005) will probably be one of the hits of the Biennial.

Another successful work is introduced here with a near apology for its inclusion in this Biennial. The catalog states,”Paul Chan keeps his art and his politics separate, or at least he claims to.” Mr. Chan, actively political in his private life, created the wonderful and strange fairytale cartoon video “Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization – After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier” (2003).

Included in this Biennial is Mr. Chan’s hypnotic “1st Light” (2005), an eerie trapezoidal projection on the floor, backed by projections of violet light in the corner of the gallery. Within the trapezoid, which feels like an underwater debris field, swim dark silhouettes of electric poles, transformers, and dangling, sperm-like wires that are interrupted by rising objects such as eyeglasses, cell phones, bicycles, and automobiles. Falling occasionally in the opposite direction are human figures. Though they cannot help but remind us of September 11, they do not feel bound by the events at the World Trade Center.

Lucas deGiulio supposedly practices an “anti-Modernist aesthetic.” Nevertheless, he creates sensitive, delicate works out of twigs, flower pots, and found objects, such as “Can Barnacles” (2005), a soda can that he has transformed into a barnacle-covered creature. In “Yeast-in-Jar Holograms” (2004-06), the artist has embedded glass jugs in the gallery walls, which offer green aquarium views of sculptures made of wood and roots. “Scavenger Words” (2005-06), a sculpture made of flower pots, sticks, and other materials, a cross between Giacometti’s Surrealist works and the art of Richard Tuttle, is the most arresting and poetic work of his on view.

In the accompanying text for the 2006 Biennial, artists and artworks are commended for their ability to “contest,” “challenge,” and “obscure” norms, traditions, artistic values, and power; for their “strategies of cultural resistance”; and for their “precisely calibrated critique of a global culture that constructs identity through consumption and branding.”

But there are negatives to this approach. For artists such as Matthew Monahan, a talented and inventive figurative sculptor, it’s as if he is deliberately sabotaging his work through bad editing and problematic installation. “Twilight of the Idiots” and “The Heckler and the Troubadour” (both 1994/2005) together comprise a large grouping of his small figures made of wax, foam, encaustic, wood, gold leaf, and metal, as well as a wounded, melancholic figure made of crumpled paper. Some of Mr. Monahan’s sculptures resemble Greek or Aztec gods; others, fetishes, totems, or voodoo dolls, and each is unusual and informs the rest; but what the curators refer to as his “raffish” presentation, with glass and unfinished drywall, dwarfs and undermines his beautiful handling and juxtaposition of materials.

The academy’s fashionably reactionary policy is the only policy it has. Despite all of this Biennial’s various media, its fresh blood just out of graduate schools, and its self-taught artists alongside seasoned veterans, the exhibition offers basically only one voice. In near robotic, cookie-cutter fashion, the 2006 Biennial showcases the same old anti-aesthetic, anti-Modernist art for which recent Biennials are so well known. Even when it comes to the inclusion of sculptor Richard Serra, one of the most accomplished artists in this year’s exhibition, we see not one of his masterful “Torqued Ellipses,” but rather a badly drawn political poster.

What is the relevance and purpose, I wonder, of a closed-door Biennial, a show that is made up only of artworks that are deemed by the academy to be “rebellious” and “subversive,” when the only values the academy respects are those of rebellion and subversion? How, exactly, does artistic rebellion differ from conformity in an environment where the academy honors and respects nothing but rebellious art? Who are these artists rebelling against? Certainly not the art world establishment.

There are a few bright lights in this year’s exhibition, but as a whole this Biennial – the trademark of the Whitney Museum of American Art – seems to have outlived its objectivity and usefulness. The 2006 Biennial, whose myopic agenda is self-perpetuating and self congratulatory, represents the state of the American academy, not the state of American art.

Until May 28 (945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).