Josh Kline Asks, ‘Is This the Future You Want to Live In?’

Josh Kline b. 1979, United States Follow +

In a clear plastic bag abandoned on the cold concrete floor of Lisson Gallery is a male body curled up in the foetal position, dressed all in black, arms crossed over his chest, eyes staring dully ahead. Titled Mid-Career Artist (2024), the sculpture is a likeness of American artist Josh Kline, 3D scanned and printed in full colour.

Kline works the question of the relationship of the part to the whole. His work adopts the incisive and intrinsically convincing aesthetic logic that lives at the intersection of science and consumer culture—the look of holistic wellness in the digital era.

New York Follow +

He organises this work into distinct groupings, allowing him to construct projects and chapters that build on and riff off each other, lending an increasing gravity to his overarching positions as he matures into the status of an artist who’s been at the centre of the contemporary art world long enough to see a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum last year and, this year, simultaneous solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Lisson Gallery in New York. Across the intricate webs of suggestion and meaning he lays out, Kline describes smaller, one-off projects as ‘short stories’, and longer, more interconnected pieces as ‘novels’.

The part to the whole; the individual as a part of society; the internet as a part of culture; America as a part of the world. On an ethical and political level, this framework allows us to ask what we might owe anyone else, and what society might owe us—pressing issues in the ongoing political crisis unfolding around us—and helps us think through the thorny philosophical questions of how much we are able to know, and how much there is beyond our immediate sphere of knowledge that will remain forever speculation. Kline’s work has always felt impressively of its moment, and yet the earlier elements of his oeuvre seem no more dated than his latest contributions. As historical wreckage continues to pile up, he insists that we keep our faces pressed up against the glass, recognising that, together, we remain parts of this and many other wholes.

Josh Kline Social Media Lisson Gallery 5 September–19 October 2024
508 West 24th Street, New York

RP: You have your first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery this month. What have you been working on, and what’s in the show?

JK: I’m making self-portraits for the first time. All of the strategies that I’ve employed in making portraits of other working people I’m now turning on myself. Me in a recycling bag; me in pieces on versions of my studio desk and office chairs; my hands cast in silicone holding products or tools I use in my practice, displayed on drugstore shelves cast in silicone. All of it installed inside art fair booths inside the gallery. Even though self-portraits are at the centre of it, the installation is a project about precarity, debt, and real estate in cities like New York. It’s about the art world becoming the art industry.

In the original body of work about creative labour that I made a decade ago, portraits of artists were always present in the works alongside portraits of all the other creative professionals that I was documenting. But you could miss them if you didn’t look closely. With this new project, I want to speak more directly about being an artist today. And rather than asking other people to step in front of the camera, it felt like I should do it myself. It was time to implicate myself in these conditions that I’ve been exploring. It’s a show about selling the self.

RP: There’s been a general critique in the past year of novelists having to market themselves on TikTok, where the aesthetic of ‘being a writer’ becomes integral to marketing the work.

JK: This has been a core feature of creative life since social media emerged, but it’s become much more extreme because of the high cost of living today. There used to be a balance between experimental art and the commerce and patronage that supported that experimentation in countries like the United States where there’s no government support for individual artists. Since the pandemic, that balance has crumbled, shattered by the astronomical costs of living and working in cultural capitals like New York where the majority of exhibiting American artists are required to live in order to have a career as an artist. The commercial and residential rents; the cost of food, transport, healthcare, childcare, social life; and the cost of employing people who need to afford it all. It’s all colliding and creating deeply conservative conditions that foreground the market.

RP: I wanted to ask about the scanning technologies you use. Ben Lerner wrote a New Yorker piece on the conservation department at the Whitney that talked a lot about the resolution of the 3D scans that you were doing, and how they’re going to have to upgrade those 3D prints over time as the printing technology catches up. Have you seen a change since you started doing this work?

JK:

For sure. Both the scan and print resolution have made big jumps. When I first started making full colour prints in 2012 and 2013, the printer resolution was 72 DPI. Now it can approach 1800 DPI. The quality of the new prints is crazy. You can see all my pores in the new sculptures.

It’s still complicated to make work with these technologies. There are very few full-colour 3D-printers around. There’s no colour management with 3D-printers, they print very slowly, the materials are really expensive. I’m interested in it as a photographic process, but we’re far away from point and shoot photographic 3D-scanning.

“Art has the ability to place people inside a story and help them understand those connections emotionally.”

I’m hoping that at some point in the future it will get easier and more routine to make 3D prints, but that’s likely a couple decades away. In order to get photorealistic colour, the lab I work with at NYU has to print endless colour samples and then match them to the original objects. I’ve spent the last two months at the lab comparing little plastic tiles of my jean jacket, my shoes, and my skin with the real thing. It helps to think of photogrammetry scans as photography that’s merged with sculpture. A large amount of sculpting and retouching in the computer is necessary because of the innate inaccuracies and deviations of 3D scanning. But I’m still fascinated by it. There’s something about a 3D photograph—essentially a solid hologram—that stops people in their tracks.

RP: Let’s talk about Climate Change, the large-scale solo exhibition currently on view at MOCA Los Angeles. How does that fit into your work?

JK: I have three bodies of work that I’ve developed since 2007 or 2008. One is this body of work about creative labour (2009–14). The second is called ‘Blue Collars’ (2014–20)—the fractured portraits of working people in the service sector and associated video interviews I’ve made. The third and largest body of work is an untitled cycle of installations (2014–ongoing) divided into chapters that speculates on where the 21st century is going—the politics and economics of the future. The fourth chapter in the cycle is Climate Change, which is what I’m showing at MOCA in an exhibition curated by Rebecca Lowery and Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo. I’ve been working on this chapter about the climate crisis for the last six years, since 2019. This is the first time I’ve been able to put all the pieces together. It’s an immersive suite of total installations that incorporate film, video, sculpture, architecture, and lighting.

RP: I find it interesting that there’s this Filipino diaspora constellation happening in L.A. now, with Paul Pfeiffer‘s show at MOCA earlier this year, and then the David Medalla show at the Hammer Museum.

JK: It’s incredible—but of course no one writes about it. I don’t know if anyone is trying to put the pieces together in regard to Filipino American artists. Paul and I are part of a loose group of Filipino American artists who have been in dialogue for more than a decade. None of us make work that foregrounds our identity, which probably makes it even more difficult to pin us down. This is in addition to the difficulties that Americans have with fitting Filipinos and the Philippines into the neat racial and ethnic categories they like.

“The one thing that I didn’t see coming so quickly was the threat that AI poses to artists and creative workers.”

Some of us participated in a talk together at the ICA Philadelphia in 2019. Paul, Michelle Lopez, and me, with Joselina Cruz, who is the director and curator of MCAD Manila. We talked about how, as a group, we’re not foregrounding identity in our work and speculated on why that is. This isn’t exclusive to Filipino American artists, of course. I come out of a wave of Asian American artists in New York in the 2010s who were not making work about identity—who were claiming the same agency that white people take for granted in the U.S.—to make art about whatever we’re most interested in. It’s going to be interesting to see how people react to this self-portraiture show I’ve just made. Most of my work over the last decade has been focused on the bigger picture, on society.

RP: What I’ve found really cool about your work from the beginning is the level of resolution and detail, these tiny little handholds that implicate the viewer as a participant and give you these little ledges to grasp onto within the hyperobject. The Adderall or Google Glass or Cronut that hooks you into it.

JK: I’m interested in these materials, these substances, for different reasons. One is their meaning: what does Adderall mean? Many people take Adderall in order to outperform their innate human abilities in the workplace. Coffee and cigarettes serve the same function. And so do smartphones, computers, and now AI. They’re all agents of transformation for the purposes of posthuman labour productivity and the profits of employers.

But I’m also interested in these substances because they are icons—because of their instant recognisability. They’re a shorthand that allows for the creation of an art that’s more open to the viewer, more accessible or legible through these common objects in our lives. People who live in a society with Adderall know what Adderall means.

RP: And that’s, again, the beauty of the detail. Moving over to your mid-career retrospective at the Whitney last year, Project for a New American Century, you have work like Contagious Unemployment (2016), the viral vitrines, for instance, where you compose a portrait through the objects that they might have around them on their desk at the office. It might be highly generic, a combination of various stereotypes, but then it also becomes a real person, in the same way that the ‘Creative Labor’ body parts might or ‘Blue Collars’ full body scans might. It resonates with people. It’s a portrait of a person and a portrait of a society at the same time.

JK: This comes directly out of my training as a filmmaker. The interior of the plastic viruses in the Contagious Unemployment sculptures is a little film set. You don’t need a press release to explain what’s in the background of a living room on a film set; everyone knows what those objects are, and their combination instantly gives the viewer a lot of background information about class and wealth. The Whitney survey brought together work about the creative class, work about the middle class, work about essential workers. Together it’s an attempt to create a portrait of early 21st-century life in the industrialised North through labour and class.

RP: And part of the thesis, especially in Civil War, is the evisceration of the middle class via automation and AI, and the disappearance of a certain category of jobs in the future. You see this kind of bifurcation of the sort of essential labour or bare life form of existence in the relief workers in Adaptation or the shelters in Personal Responsibility, and then the collapsing middle class. Since AI has exploded so much further even in the past year, has your thinking on that shifted at all? Or accelerated?

JK: The work is science fiction, it’s speculative. But so far, my thinking hasn’t shifted. When I made the work about AI and the middle class for Unemployment (2016) and Civil War (2017) I was responding to what was happening with artificial intelligence back in 2015 to 2016 and the speculations at the time made by people working in the field. My understanding was that you might see AI or automation deployed in a way that would eliminate middle class professional jobs en masse in the 2030s or 2040s, when it would become impossible to ignore.

“My work is not prediction, it’s speculative fiction. And the question it always asks is, ‘Is this the future you want to live in?’”

I don’t think that this first wave of AI is going to do it. I think we’re likely to see a second or a third wave that comes later in the 2020s, or in the beginning of the next decade, where there will be big breakthroughs that start rapidly eliminating the need for bankers, secretaries, office workers, professional jobs of all stripes and flavours. The gutting of the blue collar industrial middle-class continues to push rightwing politics to extremes. I still think what AI is poised to do to white collar workers is going to make things even more explosive.

The one thing that I didn’t see coming so quickly was the threat that AI poses to artists and creative workers. What’s become possible with text-to-image generation, and now text-to-video generation—this is shocking. It’s going to change culture and art in ways that are very difficult to understand right now.

RP: What’s your stance right now? Is this something that you would consider in producing your film or video work?

JK:

Yes, for sure, but for moving image work, its use—at least for me, at least for now—is limited to deepfakes. I’ve experimented with it over the last year or so, and it was surprisingly difficult to get it to give me what I wanted. It couldn’t generate what I see in my mind.

I can see a future where it will be much cheaper to make film or video. Artists won’t need so much expensive gear and you won’t need to hire the crew to use it. All those specialist craftspeople are going to lose their livelihoods in the process, though. What happens to them? Those have been good-paying jobs for creative people. We’ll have a Niagara Falls of AI-generated moving image content, produced for free, flooding the internet on top of the glut of moving image content from social media, also produced for free, that has already flooded the internet. It will make it that much harder for young artists to stand out and build careers.

RP: There’s been a debate recently over how didactic, how aesthetic, how conceptual art and the environmental conversation can be or should be. What’s your thinking on that? What do you want your work to be doing, if anything?

JK: In lockdown I came to see the pandemic as a kind of dry run—a preview—of things to come later in the century as the climate crisis accelerates. What ties together all of the disasters, big and small, that we’ve lived through in the U.S. over the last 25 years is an increasing disruption of normal life.

The climate crisis will bring the greatest disruption of all when it begins dramatically erasing the world’s coasts and coastal cities at mid-century. Scientists and politicians do a very poor job of making people understand what sea level rise means for them—massive dislocation, massive disruption of our lives, massive suffering—not just for someone else, but for all of us. Art has the ability to place people inside a story and help them understand those connections emotionally.

In Personal Responsibility (2023–24) there is a series of tent sculptures, each one is based on a different shelter that’s been used somewhere around the world by migrants or refugees. Inside each tent, there is a fictional video interview with a future climate refugee who tells a story about surviving or living through climate disaster.

Underneath the science fiction, there’s a larger conversation about responsibility. Who is responsible for this? Is it the responsibility of the individual to fix these large, systemic crises or is it the responsibility of society? And what is the responsibility of a society like the U.S. that’s been so instrumental in producing these crises? It’s about America and its role in the world, but then there’s also this personal aspect—this question of individual responsibility. My work is not prediction, it’s speculative fiction. And the question it always asks is, ‘Is this the future you want to live in?’ —[O]

Social Media is on view at Lisson Gallery, New York, until 19 October 2024. Josh Kline: Climate Change is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles until 5 January 2025.

Main image: Josh Kline, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Isabel Asha Penzlien.