The Sounds of Silence

John Haber
in New York City

The 2022 Whitney Biennial

The 2022 Whitney Biennial just does not know when to shut up, and why not? Held back for a year by the pandemic, its artists were crying out to be heard. Besides, with the first biennial since Donald J. Trump nearly refused to leave office, how could they hold back? How else, too, could they reflect the sheer chaos of art now? Not even a disappointing roster of artists can stand in the way of a creative display and a terrific exhibition.

Painting is back, and it is everywhere at the Whitney Museum, with one artist's work spilling over into another and wall labels that play hard to get. You may never know for certain just who painted what. Abstract painting collides with its less than obvious subtext as well, from a politically aware and multinational cast. Anything can serve as its materials, and installations shade into performance and new media as well, with the soundtrack on loud. So what accounts for the show's title, "Quiet as It's Kept"? The more you get to know it, the more you are aware of how much it plays close to its chest.

Your last breath

The 2022 biennial begins nearly in silence, with abstract art and, in the very next room, a dull roar. One might not even notice the sound, not when the room's sole object, a glass vial, claims to hold Thomas Edison's last breath. The entire floor sticks close to darkness, from its black walls to still darker art, as if to reinforce the hush. But the voices kick in soon enough, and they never stop. This is art as theater, and a theater demands the darkness, for an unprecedented devotion to film and video art. Yet it gives way in no time to color, sound, and light.

Right off the elevator, Denyse Thomasos hangs two of the largest paintings that you may ever see. Hundreds of white lines construct a space, an architecture, or an entire city. On a monitor to the side, Tony Cokes displays the loudest of cities, this one, and his own soft voice never can shut up. New York is still the best, he proclaims, "even if the best is not so great." He calls the work Shrink! If you have to settle, settle for nothing less.

Even diminished expectations demand to be heard. The show's title refers to a canny silence, from people like Toni Morrison, David Hammons, and Max Roach, the jazz drummer. The museum cites them all as using the phrase, and sculpture by Hammons still has a Hudson River pier to himself just across the street. Drumming kicks in, too, along with chanting, but as part of the show, in a two-channel video by Raven Chacon (who also created the dull roar). If Native American ritual gets on your nerves, she could only be proud. Also on video, Coco Fusco will keep rowing in New York harbor—until you get the message about Hart Island and the millions buried there in mass graves.

Color enters even here, along with the show's loudest voices. Daniel Joseph Martinez may speak of "becoming post-human and the evolution of a new species," but his "radical performative experiment" amounts to posing as Frankenstein and Dracula. And then the floor below, the largest floor, positively abolishes silence. Lucy Raven takes you to Los Alamos, where the "demolition of a wall" cannot approach the site's early atomic explosions. It comes as a shock all the same, with rippling digital transitions and the blue screen of death. One can almost hear explosions, too, from coppery bullet cases shining at the feet of a huddled figure, cast in clay from a sleeping bag by Rebecca Belmore.

More noise arises from the sheer collision of one artist with another. The floor's open layout, apart from makeshift wood frames for the display of art, turns even abstract painting into installations. They keep coming, too—like drawings from Ralph Lemon, who has produced hundreds in his global travels from the Mississippi Delta to Africa and Japan. They should keep coming indefinitely for Rick Lowe, who patterns his "symbol system" after a game of dominoes. Leidy Churchman brings the wings of her triptych forward, much like Claude Monet in his Waterlilies. Like an actual landscape, painting can become a space to itself.

It can be your space as well and the space of memory. In video by Alfredo Jaar, peaceful protests after the death of George Floyd end in police violence, but with consequences for you. A visible mist brings the horror of tear gas home, but not half as much as an overpowering wind filling the museum room. I tried to stand, wondering if I could. Is this biennial all about your own last breath? You may be at the center of this installation and the entire show, but you share that position with the artist and countless others.

Border crossings

This is not the most overcrowded biennial, thank goodness, with just over sixty artists. Sculpture sticks mostly to the great outdoors, leaving plenty of room for painting in the galleries. The Whitney's move to the Meatpacking District added terraces, here reserved for one sculptor apiece. Moody young men by Charles Ray, trendy but still glib, could be looking within or just keeping to themselves. Alia Farid sets out artificial palms in delightfully artificial colors. What will they look like as frigid air gives way to summer's green?

Nor is the biennial bending over backward to keep up with emerging artists or to recap the past. Most here are already becoming familiar but still young. It has not a single giant from the glory days of abstraction, Post-Minimalism, the "Pictures generation,"or the breakthrough years of the Lower East Side. A record number came from outside the United States, and some still do much of their work there. Born in Providence, Ellen Gallagher spends much of her time in the Netherlands, where the white profile silhouettes of her paintings have become a hit. So much for a museum of American art.

Still, they were not born yesterday. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha died just past thirty in 1982, Jason Rhoades in 2006, Thomasos in 2012, and Steve Cannon in 2019. This biennial is hardly the state of the art. And yet it positions itself as a corrective to biennials past. No one can complain about whites speaking for others, as befell Dana Schutz at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in painting the death of Emmett Till. No participant has threatened to walk out, like some at the 2019 Biennial in protest against a board member who made his money in tear gas and the defense industry, and Jaar openly defies the police.

Revisiting the recent past is central to art now, and that means harsh criticism. It is unlikely to generate criticism in return. Even a politically charged biennial can play it safe. A record number of artists are people of color and women. "A Gathering of Tribes," the collective founded in 1991, is not the only space here for Native American art. Yet direct references to racism and sexism are few and far between.

A paradox? Not everyone is taking sides, because the entire show is living on borderlines. It sees those from abroad as both refugees and Americans—among them artists who have crossed from Canada and Mexico. It crosses the borders between abstraction and representation as well, with paintings that are "quiet as it's kept." It effaces the borders between artists, too, particularly on its largest floor. Almost no one gets a mini-survey rather than a work apart, but they have a way of popping up a second or third time in new contexts.

The curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, do allow enclaves from the madness. Partitions create an enclosed space for a record of performances by Cha, most nearly fifty years ago. She had a space apart in her lifetime as well, in exile from Manchuria and in her adopted land. Steve Cannon has space for the archives of "A Gathering of Tribes," while the museum's education department devotes its galleries (apart from Nayland Blake and his mission to bring art to the public) to Cassandra Press and its publisher, Kandis Williams. Dare I say that the three enclaves shout the loudest? And that brings one back to the border between loud art and "quiet as it's kept."

Listening for more

Some of the finest voices are the hardest to hear, with their own special quiet. In the darkness of the opening rooms, Adam Pendleton has black smears on canvas that only hint at his politics and, soon to come, Pendleton's abstraction. He filled MoMA's atrium just months ago, with an urban community, a struggle over Confederate monuments, and insistent text. Between his abstract paintings, James Little has broad diagonal stripes and stars in shimmering shades of gray. Could they hint at the American flag as an African American's contested ground? Now close to seventy, he has his own explosion into color on the floor below, with the texture of collage and with each dab enclosed in white.

Text shines out for Jonathan Berger, as the walls of a space for anyone to enter. It is an autobiography that one can only struggle to read, as his Introduction to Nameless Love. Someone has painted over a Tijuana billboard in white, and a corner bears illegible graffiti, in a photograph Mónica Arreola. It is just one more record of failed recovery, like border territory for Yto Barrada and commercial signs for Jane Dickson in a Times Square "burning, broke, and dangerous." When Danielle Dean reproduces idyllic images out of Ford ads, she alludes to environmental damage from Ford's rubber extraction in the Amazon. Guadalupe Rosales braves the darkness in his photos of East Los Angeles and Jacky Connolly for her video Descent into Hell.

Their sense of time and place is striking, for all the abstraction. Yet here, too, they cultivate silence. One might never know that Matt Connors explores queer identity, Awilda Sterling-Duprey an Afro-Cuban dance, or Lisa Alvarado the "vibratory cartography" of central Mexico. One might never know that Duane Linklater paints on tepee covers, like Sam Gilliam on unstretched canvas, in deference to indigenous peoples. (Rindon Johnson on leather and Dyani White Hawk on aluminum and glass beads do much the same.) Pao Houa Her has no greater love with mementos of her mother, and a seascape by Harold Ancart has no greater romance with its Guiding Light.

These are fine enough all the same, and who is to say just when an artist's intent matters? So what if Cy Gavin conjures "cosmic phenomena," beaver dams, forest regrowth, and invasive species when the paintings themselves are so good? Much the same puzzles dog any number of exhibitions now. The biennial does become more explicit now and then, but in assemblage and almost always to its detriment. Renée Green called a 1989 painting Lesson, and her banners in the lobby are all too determined to teach you a lesson. Body parts by Alex Da Corte and Andrew Roberts make it all too easy to turn away.

Yet sculpture, too, has its quiet. Kitchen cabinets by Emily Barker speak more eloquently for her disability by their translucency and silence—while a stack of her medical bills allows a bitter smile. A pitch-black Ferris wheel by Sable Elyse Smith, constructed from prison furniture, seems to have fallen forever silent, but still it (slowly) moves. (With her abstract architecture, Thomasos had in mind a jail.) I can get along with the lighter pleasures of bottle caps in motorized glass by Michael E. Smith, coins and slugs for fare beaters found in the subways by Rose Salane, a cartoon figure by Eric Wesley, or a damaged green monolith by Aria Dean without expecting more than they can deliver. I can get along with a construction by Rhoades without worrying too much about its allusions to the California gold rush.

As one last playing close to its chest, the Whitney keeps two of its best works to the stairwells. A wildly colored column by Rodney McMillian, running five full floors, would render any monumental column a thing of the past—while Rayyane Tabet has some questions for you. They appear as text in the utility stairs, with still more, nearing one hundred, in the galleries. What difference did the Declaration of Independence or Emancipation proclamation make, and what is the rule of law? For many Americans, they are questions of fact, and aspiring citizens must know the answers the heart, but they remain open questions, pressing questions, for anyone willing to listen. And keeping quiet is all about listening.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The 2019 Whitney Biennial ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through September 5, 2022, although portions remained on view through October 17. Other reviews look ahead to the 2024 Biennial—or back to the 1993 Biennial, 1997 Biennial, 2000 Biennial, 2002 Biennial, 2004 Biennial, 2006 Biennial, 2008 Biennial, 2010 Biennial, 2012 Biennial, 2014 Biennial, 2017 Biennial, and 2019 Biennial.