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

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.

“I had been making this work that was rooted in dark comedy,” says Kline. “I started thinking about the absence of a whole spectrum of other human emotions from contemporary art that had been present in earlier forms of art, even present in modernism. Where was sadness, where was grief, where was loss, where was hope? Where’s the rest of human emotion?”

Kline’s studio in Chinatown, New York, has mosquito netting covering the drop ceiling and back wall. Behind his workstation is an apocalyptic mood board, snapshots of the Golden Gate Bridge against flaming skies, urban tent camps and ambulances, which resemble the scenery from ‘Climate Change.’ This latest, and most-involved, suite of sculpture and video, currently featured at MOCA in Los Angeles, provides something like relief – the way a disaster movie might show melted ice caps, ruined buildings, Manhattan underwater, nothing left but possibility after the worst comes true. Several video interviews, displayed on monitors inside orange tents arranged like a refugee camp, show ‘survivors’ describing the old world and how it was swept away. Dire poetry by Kline is printed on the tents’ walls.

It can be hard to tell how ironic, or how sincere, Kline means to be. One of his videos, a kind of test for later utopian chapters, depicts a sunny suburban world with the Zyrtec-induced clarity of a pharmaceutical ad, in which universal basic income (UBI) has freed people to explore their potential. In another video, a diverse group of friends gather around a bonfire to drink beers and burn Confederate flags in a vision of an anti-racist holiday. Like U.S. political ads – like propaganda, in fact – the videos are one-sided. There’s no internal conflict, no argument. Except that, to me, they reek of sarcasm.

“I think that says more about you,” Kline says. “Or the viewer.” He’s found that the flag-burning piece (‘Another America is Possible’) evokes different responses in white and non-white viewers, while the UBI ad (‘Universal Early Retirement’) speaks a language more familiar to Americans than to Europeans.

Maybe, Kline allows, the videos aren’t entirely successful. “They’re attempts at a kind of utopian art,” he says. “What would it look like if the left used the tools of advertising, that are so well developed in America, to sell its ideas? What if it got over its taboos against advertising and actually used highly effective tools for communication?”

Kline studied film in school, then spent several formative years as a film programmer. He’s been making sculpture for two decades, but moving images set the tone of each series. One of his better-known sculptures, part of ‘Freedom’, consists of looming Teletubbies in riot gear. Surveillance footage of protesters plays on screens in their Kevlar-sheathed tummies. Another piece from the same era, Crying Game, uses crude deepfake software to generate footage of Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, and their neocon cohort wearing prison jumpsuits and tearfully repenting for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s the world as it is, and the world as he’d like it to be.

And yet, artists tackling political themes today risk being dismissed as overly earnest, or deeply cynical. Kline sees this as a hangover from the failures of the 20th-century avant gardes. “There’s this tendency to push towards extremes,” he says. “Like art is either capable of causing revolution on its own, bringing a new world into being. Or it’s not. It’s completely impotent in terms of affecting the world.” Yet between those possibilities, he continued, lie “different kinds of agency and action for art and artists in relationship to society.”

A lot of that agency, maybe, resides in Kline’s work’s paradoxical bluntness. The bagged obsolete workers remain shocking, even as so much climate-collapse porn loses its sting. Indeed, the most uncomfortable aspect of his grim visions is that they’re not warnings nor exaggerations – more like calm fantasies, chilly windows into the present, or to familiar-looking futures.

For his current exhibition, ‘Social Media’, at Lisson Gallery in Chelsea – his first with a blue-chip gallery – Kline decided to make self-portraits. Rather than renderings of archetypal, precarious workers, now it’s his head and limbs spread on tables like a disassembled robot. It’s his body curled up in a bag. “It’s all sculpture. And it’s all me.” With his usual clarity, it’s as if Kline is foreseeing the obsolescence of the contemporary artist as we know them. “We’re in a moment where the art market has engulfed the art world,” he said. “And it’s foregrounded above the concerns that have dominated contemporary art over the last 70 years.” This, he says, is driven by the cost of living, especially in New York. It’s no accident that Kline’s show opened alongside the fall art fairs, and is installed on modular art fair-style walls. “It felt like I should make this show about the selling of the self.” And the not-so-subtle subtext: while he still has a job.