The other side of the clock: the 2002 Biennale of Sydney.

Biennials offer the promise of a clean slate: the crackling vision of the director meshing seamlessly with a zeitgeist. But too often they are like movie franchises, the same cast or lookalikes, a few plot twists, some thrills and spills, and the hope that audiences will lose themselves in the moment. As with any long-running franchise, the Biennale of Sydney (launched in 1973) has had some extraordinary highs and near franchise-ending lows. Handing the first biennial of the new century over to an artist - British-born, Australian-based (for now) Richard Grayson - was both a risk and a sure bet. Grayson's studio practice is rife with cultural doubts said out loud, often shockingly funny and delivered with self-effacing wit. He professed an ambivalence towards the biennial format, and has never been included in the Sydney Biennale (that may well be the subject of a work some day). But instead of toeing the line, correcting the wrongs of the past or bettering the last hit, he listened to the voices in his own h ead. There can be many chattering away, yet his title is explicit: "(The World May Be) Fantastic." He used brackets to suggest a working title as well as possible multiple meanings.

This is not an anti-theoretical proposition, but one developed with curiosity, erudition and deriving its energy from a range of demonstrations, rather than a single perspective stuffing the many into an illustration. Grayson wrote that he has assembled artists "who use fictions, fakes, invented methodologies, hypotheses, subjective belief systems, modelling and experiments as a basis for their work." Moreover, he wrote of the creative act: "to generate alternative worlds or to offer alternative readings of this world." Alternative -- as with many words in the art lexicon -- can be worn down from promiscuous usage. Nor is this a nothing-is-real Strawberry Fields approach.

Instead, Grayson spoke of the "universes of possibility" with -- in essence -- fifty-six solo shows representing twenty-two countries. But nationality was not the point. Grayson also embarked on this enterprise without marquee names. Chris Burden, Vito Acconci and Panamarenko were the only readily recognized representatives. Included was work by the unlikely Henry Darger (Chicago, 1892-1972), far beyond the conventional limits of most journalistic biennials. Darger was a visionary outsider who probably never considered himself an artist, but wrote, drew and painted for sixty years. The accumulation of his work was discovered after his death. While Grayson does not attempt to engage the issue of what is or is not art -- that question kept bubbling to the surface, and was answered in part by visitors and staff speaking of work in descriptive terms, not by name -- "have you seen the talking shoe?"

The "talking shoe" by Joao Penalva (b. Lisbon, 1949, lives in London) is a travelling tent/magic-lantern video installation with folding chairs and strings of carnival lights scattered on the floor. The video of a single male, distressed brogue shoe, spotlit, is projected onto the tent exterior. The shoe chatters away in a thick Irish brogue. Get it - brogue-brogue? Like a bar-room encounter, the cadence and accent are difficult to understand but never-ending. Slowly, the shoe reveals that various body parts have been amputated, blown off or lost, until, voila, the shoe is all that's left. The counterpoint is Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (b. Tokyo, 1968, lives in Ho Chi Minh City), a matter-of-fact video of cyclo (rickshaw) drivers pulling their vehicles along the ocean floor. It is not an aquatic fantasy, but very real -- the drivers go up for air and return to keep pulling their vehicles. The effort is compelling viewing, and there is a metaphor -- a memorial to those who lose their lives as asylum seekers (as "bo at people"). But you don't need to know that, and not to trivialize the human tragedy, artists are often asylum-seekers in their own way. Another verite video, by Blast Theory (London collective, est. 1991), unravels slow-time shots of a city at night blending into each other: a dream-like or Kafka-esqe state, what the night watchman sees. An ambient soundtrack drifts through this netherworld of no beginning nor end. Living in nighttime is merely on the other side of the clock.

Susan Hiller's (b. Tallahassee, 1942, lives in London) Witness installation is a room with 600 dangling speakers, each offering testimonies of UFO sightings from around the world.

Entering that space you experience the chatter immediately. Passing through the speakers -- in a room bathed in blue light -- could be the experience of being on the alien ship. You can lift up any speaker and hear the witness speaking, although not necessarily understand -- each is in the mother tongue. Hiller is not a UFO advocate, but retrieves and presents. It could be equally effective as an archival presentation -- but it's art. There is no particular UFO sub-theme in the biennial but an unexpected variant appears in the work of Pope Alice (a.k.a. Luke Roberts, b. Alpha, Queensland, 1952, lives in Brisbane). The Pope began as an Antipodean performance in Roberts' work in the early 1980s, but is now the generator of a cosmology that embraces many cosmologies: the lost continent of Mu, Pharoah-like audacity, alien encounters (the Pope's attire has evolved from pontifical to extra-terrestrial), Andy Warhol and Margaret Mead. That's merely scratching the surface. Roberts transformed a gallery space into an improbable South Sea Island setting titled Greetings from Amnesia: Mu Pavilion @ 4am.

Not surprisingly, the obsessive compulsive appears in this mix. Kataryzna Jozefowicz's (b. Lublin, 1959, lives in Gdansk) work was made over a three-year period, 1997-2000, a five-by-five-metre field titled Carpet, comprising magazine clippings of people's heads. It is not a collage as the heads sit upright -- the crowd in history -- as if carpet tufts. Shirley Tse's (b. Hong Kong, 1968, lives in Los Angeles) work, Polymathicstyrene, is also a labour-intensive enterprise. Tse drilled and carved slabs of blue polystyrene into a provisional mechanical, industrial landscape, installed along the walls but cantilevered out on polystyrene supports. The hallmark of the obsessive-compulsive is not the elevation of the humble material but the adherence to a vision -- and to work the unworkable. Jozefowicz called her process a "paper mantra." A different version of the obsessive is the work of James Angus (b. Perth, 1970, lives in Sydney). He suspended a custom-made hot-air balloon, which he titled Shangri-La, upside-d own within the architectural spectacle of the Sydney Opera House. Angus noted that although the balloon was tethered, because of the continuous internal air circulation it "kissed" the concrete structural members of Joern Utzon's fantastic architectural vision.

The Canadian contingent included Kim Adams, Rodney Graham, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. They did not look out of place. Indeed, what makes this biennial engaging and elusive, are the moments when ideas slip across each other -- as if cultural plate tectonics.

Luke Roberts sent out Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo clones into the other opening venue (other than where his work was mounted), with a photographer playing instant-karma paparazzi. A polaroid from that session exemplifies the spirit of the biennial. Cang Xin (b. Suihua Province, 1967, lives in Beijing), who licks his way around the world, is seen licking the Andy clone. This is not an art-party pose -- the expression of "Andy" verifies a true amazement and disbelief.

After my first morning at the MCA venue I walked uptown, no longer dwelling on what irritates me about big cities, but taking notice of the small, accidental pleasures in the world. There are dark moments in this exhibition, but it is not wrapped in the cloak of sorrows. That is the difference between the consciousness-raising and the ready-angst, and gives this biennial a true distinction.

Ihor Holubizky is a Canadian writer and researcher, living in Brisbane, Australia. His contributions to forthcoming publications include: The Edge of Everything, Banff Centre Press; Body Power / Power Play Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and a perspective on world art for Foundry Press, UK.