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About 20 percent of the 2022Whitney Biennialis really alive.
Thats passably high for one of these cattle calls.
Theres very little here thats really bad.
Too much thats mild.
Give things that strike you as boring time and they get better.
Seeing one another and touching antennae again in the flesh feels more important and pleasurable than ever.
The star of the show may be the space.
Walking through the rampantly filled fifth floor is like drifting distracted through a spice market of art.
We wander, peck, and pass on to the next display.
Its a swap meet of unlike items, a rejoinder to minimalism.
It is dark, filled with alcoves, bottlenecks, and ceiling installations that make the world topsy-turvy.
Some of it feels dated, the dying remnants of a contrived postmodern fracturing.
There are long wall labels projecting meanings that are not actually in the work.
If you dont like the art, youre seen as hostile to the cause.
(Ive been called pro-climate-change!)
But the causes arent the problem; its the generic way these artists treat them.
For better and worse,Quiet As Its Keptis a black mirror of our times.
Two telling exclusions complicate things, however.
But the video does seem like an unexamined influence for much of the show.
This is art as testimony and witnessing, participating both in its own time and in a historical continuum.
The past few years have seen art turning in that direction.
Which brings us to the other exclusion.
Amid the dross is a generation of artists of color who have jump-started something magnificent.
None are included in this show.
These snubs are doubly curious because the demographics of this Biennial are exemplary.
Of the 59 individual artists in the show, 16 were born outside the United States.
Have certain artists been shunned for making it on the market?
I thought minority artists having success was part of what all this is about.
As a way of honoring the past, almost a quarter of the artists have been in previous Biennials.
Oversize and brooding, they exude an otherness that changes the gravitational fields around them.
I could write a whole review of these men.
Of those making their Biennial debut, there are some powerful examples of artist priestcraft.
Nearby is a stack of 7,865 sheets of bills from one year of their spinal-cord-injury and chronic-pain management.
It is bureaucracy and callousness made visible.
Lucy Ravens video installation of beautiful southwestern landscapes followed by muffled explosions shook me.
and What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen?
It may not be a great work of art, but it is a mystical gate.
I seeDavid Wojnarowicz, who famously installed art in a pier along the Hudson.
Here are demons and angels and the smell of sex and fear of contagion.
