Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept

By Taliesin Thomas

I have been visiting the Whitney Biennale since the mid-1990s. During the years I didn’t make the show in person, I read the reviews published in magazines such as Art in America and ArtNews. Over the decades I have observed a certain predictable trope: the show tanks—either conceptually, physically, or spiritually. Nevertheless, the show must go on and the art-world must endure. This year, the post-covid era hangover as reflected in the overall tone of the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept is both intelligent and onerous. While the global ‘despair of imagination’ as embodied by this year’s installment is palpable, the exhibition is a heroic effort that reflects the art-heart of our moment.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept." Rénee Green, Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words), 2020. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Indeed, we must celebrate the radical intensities of contemporary life through our collective marvel of diverse aesthetic incarnations as an exercise in questioning, creativity, inter-relation, experimentation, mystery, and discovery. The Whitney Biennale certainly delivers all this and more, however, it does so with an air of cluttered thematics and psychological dislocation. To quote a series of phrases buried in the wall captions for Three Critiques—a grouping of post-human digital images by Daniel Joseph Martinez—this litany of existential descriptions could not be more apropos with regard to the ethos of the exhibition: ‘simulation,’ ‘vast phantasmagoria,’ ‘withered dreams,’ ‘adulterated visions,’ ‘feverous delusions,’ ‘fatalism tied up in the darkness,’ and ‘embrace madness.’ If the true spirit of the Whitney Biennial captures a ‘horizon of being’ as illuminated by these topics, there is also a strong attempt to tease out issues related to queer, anti-colonial, and ecological urgencies that resonate with political mindfulness.

Now in its 18^thedition, this landmark show features an intergenerational group of sixty-three artists and collectives co-curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin. For 90 years, the integrity of the Whitney Biennial has been—and continues to be—a faithful survey of ‘nowness’ that expresses the many complexities and possibilities of the American experience. Yet with that intention also comes the occasional cringe worthy candor that art inevitably discloses in all its hypothetical incompleteness. In his straightforward review “The Whitney Biennial Falters On” for Vulture, for example, art critic and rabble-rouser Jerry Saltz calls the exhibit a dated and topsy-turvy “black mirror of our times” that, split on two levels, has the effect of “drifting distracted through a spice market” (on the fifth floor) that goes on to materialize as “our collective trip into the underworld” (on the sixth floor). And in his straightforward review of the show for Artnet, writer Ben Davis comments that this exhibition—like many shows around the world at this time—demonstrates tones that are “reverent and restrained” while themes tend toward “ethical and memorial.” I agree with both Saltz and Davis: the recurring feeling I experienced during my disorienting journey through Quiet as It’s Kept was that a certain ‘surrealist-reality end-times’ energy is nigh. The 2022 Biennial is not ironic nor sarcastic, rather the viewer must be willing to “get to the bottom of it” (to quote Davis again) with rectitude, otherwise a convoluted atmosphere can overwhelm.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept." Photo: Ron Amstutz

While my encounter with the Whitney Biennale 2022 left me somewhat undernourished (which is ironic considering the sheer volume of art), many works in the show provide powerful moments of meaning with respect to personal mythologies as echoed through artistic embodiment. Video tended to dominate the scene, yet it was a challenge to absorb so many video works in their entirety while navigating this sprawling show. In that category, a documentary-style piece by Raven Chacon serves as a poignant reminder that the Navajo Nation people are still fighting for their sacred spaces, within both the geography of the USA and the so-called ‘art-world’ at large. A haunting sculpture by Rebecca Belmore of a cloaked figure standing atop of a sphere of bullets is a chilling commentary on the increased prevalence of gun violence. A clever work by Rose Salane, 64,000 Attempts at Circulation, consists of piles of counterfeit currency on top of tables, all items once used to trick coin-operated devices in the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority system. An installation by Alejandro “Luperca” Morales titled Juárez Archive (2020 - ongoing) showcases a series of tiny handheld viewfinders hanging on the wall, each one containing an image of his hometown in Juárez, Mexico. The preciousness of the images found within those plastic pieces seems to suggest how stories are found within stories (moral of the story: take a moment to take it in). And a psychedelic ‘co-authored’ AI generated installation by Wang Shui offers an ethereal landscape of otherworldly beauty through LED screens and a sculptural netting, creating a rarified “collage of ‘self-conscious’ generative adversarial networks” as described by the artist. This haunting work highlights the multiplex configurations found across a myriad of physical and algorithmic structures that synch through technology and are thus recontextualized through art, indeed a comment on the allure (and weirdness) of digital existences today.

Installation view of "Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept." Alia Farid, Palm Orchard, 2022.

We all recognize the overstimulation of our hyper connected society, and art objects have a way of promoting an ‘in your face’ critique that can produce feelings of woe and inquietude. We engage with art as a means for exploring areas of human consciousness—yet that, too, comes with a sense of responsibility when those realms reveal fantasticalities that are repositioned to provoke us. Thus, the Whitney Biennale is both a chorus for our times and a time-warp of ideas that must be explored for the sake of the show as tradition. The cost of admission is to rendezvous with a dose of aesthetic strangeness that encapsulates the bewildered reality of today, and this, I believe, brings us around to the notion that sometimes art can fail (or take us in circles). The world turns regardless, and each of us must find ways to stay afloat amid the daily wreckage. As a glance at the meta concepts and conditions of our era, the upshot is that the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept confirms that these issues are being expanded, contracted, suspended, and exploded—all at once—through aesthetic attention. Perhaps this is the greatest allegory of all, that art endures as an ever-fascinating trope of itself. In that regard, the Whitney Biennale is a continued triumph for all timeless times.

(April 6 - September 5, 2022)

Taliesin Thomas is an artist-philosopher, writer, lecturer, and collector based in Troy, NY. Since 2007 she is the founding director of AW Asia, NY and collection manager of Art Issue Editions, NY-two private art collections that serve as the foundation for collaborations with museums and artists worldwide. Thomas has lectured widely on contemporary art and she has published in Chronogram, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Contemporary ChineseArt (JCCA) andArtAsiaPacificmagazine in addition to regular reviews forARTPULSE. She is a faculty member at School of Visual Arts, NY and a visiting critic at the Arts Center for the Capital Region, NY. Thomas studied fine art, theory, and philosophy at Bennington College (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (Ph.D.).