Josh Kline: “We’re in a moment where the art market has engulfed the art world” – Plaster Magazine

1 October 2024

In his new show, ‘Social Media’, Josh Kline uses his own body to speculate on a bleak future for creative employment, as Travis Diehl finds when he visits the artist’s New York studio. A press release for an early 2016 exhibition by Josh Kline, titled ‘Unemployment’, is harrowing. Written by the artist pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, the text describes a world in which automation has lived up to its dire promise to put half the population out of work. You won’t be retrained, you’re no longer needed, you’re superfluous. So much for dystopia. The last lines offer a twist of what could pass for optimism: “You are not your job. You are not your career. You are a human being.”

But the work in that series doesn’t seem promising: grocery carts full of cast-resin aluminium cans; transparent studded virus-shapes containing bankers’ boxes stuffed with the detritus of cleared-out desks; and tinted full-body sculptures of men in workwear and women in grey dresses, lying in the fetal position, summarily bagged in clear plastic.

It’s a truism, although a rusty one, that artists imagine the world they want to live in. Josh Kline embraces that project. But first, he describes the world as it is now. Working with sculpture, video and their hybrids, Kline is two-thirds of the way through a cycle of exhibitions depicting the fall and rise of western civilisation. Before ‘Unemployment’ there was ‘Freedom’ (2014–16), tinged with the War on Terror and surveillance; after, there came the polarised consumerism of ‘Civil War’ (2016–17) and the rising seas of ‘Climate Change’ (2017–2024). The path to utopia – the final two instalments – winds through hell.

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Image: Josh Kline, Social Media, 2024 Installation. Exhibition view at Lisson Gallery New York, 5 September – 19 October © Josh Kline, Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.