The wall text for the 2014 edition of the Whitney Biennial opens with a defensive admonition: “The field of contemporary art is far too vast for one exhibition to encompass,” it reads, disclaiming the idea that the the biennial is actually a comprehensive survey of current practice, as most people seem to think it is. In that same spirit, let's admit that the Whitney Biennial itself is far too vast for one so-called review to encompass—lest it become nothing more than a list of names and dates, an archive of the stuff that's been crammed into and across three floors, a courtyard, and a lobby gallery.

This biennial is the brainchild of three curators, from three different places—Anthony Elms (Philadelphia, and formerly Chicago), Stuart Comer (New York by way of London), and Michelle Grabner (Chicago and Wisconsin)—and the floors have roughly been divvied up among them, with a few exceptions. One might expect this to give the Biennial a schizophrenic character, but it more or less holds together, with some nice call-outs and resonances from floor to floor.

Let's start with the weird backbone of the exhibition, and the reason why you should avoid the elevator in favor of the stairs: A 12-channel sound installation by Charlemagne Palestine, emitting from a series of speakers that have been decorated, a la Mike Kelley, with an array of abject stuffed bears and elephants and strands of bedraggled scarves. The piece (which was recorded by the artist in the museum space itself) is a mantra of unease, a bed of haunted synth-like sounds humming and dying and punctuated with the occasional affected human voice. Palestine's inclusion here (he was Elms's choice) colors much of what you see on other floors. It's not mood music, per se, since this Biennial's flavor isn't exactly Nightmarish Doom, but it does have an outsized influence on the way you experience the show.

For instance: Head up to the fourth floor, Michelle Grabner's domain, where the introductory wall text is paired with a straightforward, albeit intense, portrait of Barack Obama taken byDawoud Bey. The Commander-in-Chief's gaze is complicated by the fact that, while you're looking at him, you're also awash in the stairwell's audio, and that droning miasma of sound suddenly makes Barack look like the sort of hard-assed Machievelli who could, well, order a fleet of drones to hit a country we're not technically at war with.

But let's start back downstairs, or at least try to make some necessarily reductive, broad-stroke characterizations about what this biennial means and how it reflects the temperaments of its respective curators. What do they care about, and why does it matter? Elms is a bibliophile, a lover of the archival and collectable, and all of that is clear from the second floor—which, and we can argue about this, is probably the smartest one here. I'd venture that everything on this level, including the sculptures and paintings, has to do with language in various forms: language that communicates, or fails to; language that is bent or broken or impotent.

The link is sometimes obvious, as in Susan Howe's Tom Tit Tot, 22 letterpress prints that take found writing and twist it into concrete poetics. These prints, arrayed in a vitrine, share a room with Elijah Burgher's excellent colored pencil drawings incorporating written spells (sigils) and a hanging acrylic-on-fabric piece that also reads like imaginary hieroglyphics. Even Charline von Heyl's grid of 36 drawings—incorporating appropriated images of Russian and Polish folk art, spray paint, graphite, and other media—takes on the appearance of a typographical chart, itemizing letters from a distant past or an unknown future. And  the Carol Jackson sculptures spread throughout the space—some on pedestals, some hanging from the walls—are like graffiti forms pouncing into three dimensions: a bit cheesy in a Frank-Stella-in-the-'80s way, but boldly confident in their alien funkiness.

Other rooms in this floor-covering expansion of Elms's brain feature archives a bit like masoleums, extolling the underappreciated dead. One corner nook organized by the collectivePublic Collectors is dedicated to Malachi Ritscher, a Chicago audiophile known for obsessively recording live concerts, jazz and otherwise, and also for protesting the Iraq War until  2006, when he committed suicide by lighting himself on fire in a very public place while carrying an anti-war placard. I didn't know any of this; did you know any of this? Part of the point is that you probably didn't, and that an American man can self-immolate without becoming any sort of folk hero. But here he is in the Whitney Museum, his posters and suitcases and recording devices and Butthole Surfers' set lists arrayed like holy objects, which is certainly a beautiful homage, but also a bit sad.

In an adjacent room, Joseph Grigelypresents a dissection of the life of a deceased painter-cum-critic, The Gregory Battcock Archive. It brings together printed matter, photographs, postcards, and other materials in vitrines, as well as some posters on the wall. There's an art review from the New York Free Press, circa 1969, the prose all bebop beatnik bounce. On the wall there's an actual abstract painting—supposedly the only remaining work by Battcock—that is pretty bad in its generic mushiness. Is this the archive as homage, celebration, or simple oddity?

Stuart Comer's third floor is the most self-consciously hip in this biennial, and the one most interested in tapping into new media. There's a room-sized installation by Bjarne Melgaard—now best known for making a chair sculpture that Dasha Zhukova pissed everyone off by sitting on—featuring female mannequins, digitally-printed penis pillows, and videos of animals. (It's colorful and energetic but somehow flat and subdued, like a Ryan Trecartin environment that's had all the kinetic life sucked out of it.) There's a piece by Ken Okiishi: five Samsung televisions playing generic programs, turned on their side, their screens daubed with oil paint. A Fred Lonidier work—a 1976 piece that could have been made yesterday—is a wall hung with t-shirts, their fronts custom-printed with images and news announcements related to the GAF Corporation. (The shirts get larger as it goes, from child-size to a Men's Large, perhaps a nod to the way in which we grow up with companies, our lives colonized by their narratives.)

And an entire room is given over to ephemera from the publishing house semiotext(e)—including a fancy, silvery wallpaper that collages images, posters, announcements, and the like. Several semiotext(e) titles are propped on little shelves, as if we're in a highbrow gift shop. (Semiotext(e) is trending right now! Fun fact: Head over to Zach Feuer right now and you can see sculptures by Brad Troemel that vacuum-seal the imprint's monochromatically-covered mini-volumes into color field arrangements augmented by faux-dredlocks.)

Elsewhere on the floor Comer's focus becomes a bit more diffuse. There's a whole area that seems weirdly nostalgic for the mid-'80s—David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, a book by Martin Beck focused on the playlist for a party held in 1984. Which is fine, the Biennial isn't a survey of our contemporary moment, and these throwbacks are paired with work by Danh Voand others, but: Why? Meanwhile, Zachary Drucker and Rhys Ernst's photographic seriesRelationship, 2008-13, is one of the biennial's true stand-outs—it tracks the pair's criss-crossing gender transformations (male to female, female to male), and is beautifully composed, funny (some Sarah Lucas-y humor, wherein eggs stand for balls and bratwursts become penises), and unabashadedly sweet and sentimental. The only misstep is in hanging the series in the same room as A.L. Steiner's playfully subversive documentary images, which are close enough in style and attitude that the nearby hanging creates a sort of ghetto of photographic queerness.

Comer does include a fair amount of painting as well. Keith Mayerson's dozens of canvases, hung chockablock, are notable for having absolutely no defining signature style whatsoever. There are paintings of shipwrecks; of Elvis; of Tin Tin; of Times Square; of James Dean hanging out in a tree, masturbating. Individually, they're not much; together, they're a statement about taste (bad and good) and an obsessive work ethic.

Up to the fourth floor, which is helmed by Michelle Grabner, who touts her mission as being about “curriculum building.” That reeks of school, but Grabner's true M.O. is to focus craft: ceramics, textile, and enough color to stun an elephant. The focus here is more on things: Ricky Swallow's patinated bronze sculptures, which resemble delicate little folded-cardboard constructions; Sheila Hicks's drooping masses of rainbow materials; Sterling Ruby's Lucio Fontana-aping ceramics, like oversized horrorshow ashtrays. Everything is pretty bright and immediate and there's a mini-focus on women abstract painters: Amy Sillman,Jacqueline Humphreys, Laura Owens, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Suzanne McClelland (plusRebecca Morris downstairs). Philip Hanson's paintings turn quotations from William Blake or Emily Dickinson into hippy spirals that are pretty unbearable, but they're notable as a reminder of Elijah Burgher's New Age vibe on the second floor, minus whatever ironic distance that younger practitioner might have. As a curator, Grabner wants to grab you by the shoulders and say: Handmade still matters—like Karl Haendel's intricate, realistic graphite drawings, hung in a very Baldessarian arrangement, or Shio Kusaka's stoneware and porcelain vessels, decorated with tear patterns or dinosaurs.

What does the 2014 Whitney Biennial mean? Who knows, really. If we had the time or inclination we could offer some conjectures about the ever-expanding field of painting (Dashiell Manley, Dona Nelson); Americans' obsessions with early-20th century European experimental theater (Shana Lutker, My Barbarian); self-portraiture recast as space-age camp (Jacolby Satterwhite); video-as-voyeurism (Michel Auder filming people through apartment windows, Dave McKenzie filming an unaware Henry Kissinger); or the ironic importation of the tropics into bone-cold New York City (Radames “Juni” Figueroa's cozy, heated hut out in the Whitney's courtyard).

But trying to draw too many cross-connections in an exhibition of 103 artists seems just plain silly, and arbitrary. So why not end in an arbitrary place? If there's one weird object in the entire biennial to dwell on, perhaps it can be a notebook in a vitrine of effects from David Foster Wallace, who hung himself in 2008. Its cover features two blue-eyed kittens rolling around on a bed of roses, beneath the heading Cuddly Cuties. Heartbreaking in its simplicity and aura of posthumous awfulness, it's a fitting place to stop—before you descend that staircase of dread and rejoin the wider world.