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you to be responsible for those things occurring or being made?

AY Yes. There’s also a sense of participating in the world through these tools, through art. I’ve been asked multiple times, “How do you think that art is useful in the twenty-first century, if you think about all the other staggering issues that we’re up against, and how do you apply art in addressing some of these issues?” And I think first and foremost, it’s a communication tool; it’s a way that we can speak. So a lot of the concerns that I have, I’m able to channel through the work.

SO And Josh, how would you answer the same question?

JOSH KLINE I often tell people that I work in every medium except painting. I would say I primarily make installations, using the exhibition space as media space and building an environment and experience out of sculptures, moving-image work, and architecture. Outside installations, sculpture and video are probably the two media that I work in.

SO Something we’ve discussed previously is that the socioeconomic realities of the world have changed considerably and demonstrably in the last three years. How have those changes found their way into your work? To what extent have you been conscious of those changes and felt a need to address or respond to them?

AY One of the works that was in Laws of Motion when it was shown in Hong Kong, Immigrant Caucus, was a direct address. I had a show at the Guggenheim in 2017, and as I was going into preproduction, Trump was elected and I just felt flatlined. I had to pause for a while, and I didn’t really know what to do, how to respond. It was not an option not to respond. The Muslim ban was out

1/24/2019“Fiction or Future”by Sam Orlofsky

SAM ORLOFSKY We’ve just come from seeing the Vija Celmins retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I think it’s interesting to consider just how different both of your working methods are from hers. She’s committed to certain highly traditional mediums, and she has revisited select subjects repeatedly, over long periods of time. By contrast, you’re both associated with using experimental, nontraditional materials. I would classify you both as being closer to sculptors than, obviously, painters, but do either of you think of yourself as having a primary medium? If someone were to ask you what you do, is there a medium you start with in explaining your work?

ANICKA YI I think I would probably sincerely reply narrative. That’s the engine. Without narrative, it’s very hard for me to get excited about something, first and foremost—but also to conceive of threading it and seeing where it can go. If you think about how something that doesn’t exist in the world might get birthed, to me narrative is that umbilical cord.

SO So in other words, if you are aware that there are things that you would like to see or experience, the only way that can happen is for

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there, children were being separated from their parents . . . This was something that deeply resonates with me. My parents are immigrants, and the fact that this was happening, this toxicity, I knew that I had to do something. I had to take a knee.

I feel an urgency with everything that I do, because I could either work in the State Department, or for, I don’t know, a solar panel company, or I can make art. We’re all trying to work around these issues. There’s only so much I can do as an artist, but if I can address some of the issues that need addressing with the urgency that they require, then I feel very much a part of the collective conversation.

Immigrant Caucus started from a science fiction narrative. I wanted to create a drug that would allow a human to be able to experience the perception of another species, like a coral reef or a pink dolphin. And so I went to my biologists, and they humored me for about two minutes, before saying, “You know that’s physically impossible, right?” Because in order for me to experience what you’re experiencing right now, I’d have to remap my brain, my neural networks, and reshape my brain to yours, and we don’t know a lot about how the mind merges with the brain.

And so from there, that impossibility, that fiction, that’s where the art started getting hatched. I thought, Okay, well I can imply that there’s a drug through a scent-based work that’s transmitted through the molecules that you have to intake to experience it. And the idea was that if I combined the scent of an Asian American female and a carpenter ant, then as you inhaled this smell, in some way that would allow you to be endowed with this hybridized multispecies sensibility. So I worked with a forensic scientist, a perfumer, and an artist colleague of mine, Sean Raspet, to develop this scent.

SO How did you locate the fragrance of an Asian female?

AY I took sweat samples from a number of friends and colleagues. It was important that they were Asian American, because one of the primary factors contributing to our own unique smell is diet. As an Asian American, my diet is probably similar, economically speaking, to that of most of my friends and colleagues, and so it wouldn’t necessarily be ethnically distinct in that sense.

SO After you took the sweat samples, then what?

AY I sent them out to my forensic chemist down in Florida, and he performed a chemical analysis—essentially a molecular reading. Then it was my job to translate that dry data, and that’s where the narrative takes place. Because when I got back the sweat samples, they didn’t smell very “human,” and so I made the conscious decision to sort of—

SO You pushed it.

AY Absolutely. Whereas the ant smell was very garlicky, kind of spicy, some grassy notes. Lemony too. It was very food-like, and I wanted it to smell kind of animal, or like some sort of alien portal. So some synthetic elements were boosted in.

SO What was the sculptural vehicle you chose to contain the fragrance?

AY They’re ant insecticide canisters—from the 1970s, I think. There is a diffuser hidden inside each canister, and that pumps out the aroma.

so Josh, Anicka mentioned that Immigrant Caucus started from a science fiction narrative. I think it’s also safe to say you have invented a borderline sci-fi narrative as the logic for at least two of your last shows. Can you talk about how you use that rubric to inform your work?

JK I’m still working my way into narrative. I studied film, I’ve written screenplays for short videos that I’ve made on my own and with other people, but I don’t know if I’ve really

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cracked the narrative nut. Maybe I’ve become more of an art director for film—a kind of world builder—or somebody who creates the setting, which is why I make these installations.

Before 2014, I was making work that was about an extreme present— distilling out aspects of our time that are different from the past and different, perhaps, from the future. I was trying to talk about the future through the present, talking about things like posthuman or nonhuman or transhuman states that are coming into being via certain kinds of precarious labor conditions. But I was doing it though this material and image-based vocabulary rooted in the present. In 2014, I had a realization that I could actually speak directly about the future and set my work there. So I conceived of a five-part cycle of installations, and each chapter would jump ten, twenty years into the future, to some hypothetical moment in the twenty-first century when certain key issues will peak or manifest and transform society for better or for worse. Issues that I think are nascent now but that will become definitive of the coming century.

The first chapter started at the onset of the Great Recession, the end of the Bush Administration, Obama’s inauguration, the viral political movements that were inspired by the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter . . . that world. And then each subsequent episode jumps ahead. The second chapter, Unemployment, which I made in 2016, was about this moment that’s predicted to happen in the 2030s or 2040s, when automation, artificial intelligence [AI], and software gut the middle class and remove most of the professional jobs that are the foundation for it in the industrialized world. Unemployment asks questions about what kind of impact those transformations will have. I think there are some very clear parallels with what led to World War I, the

Great Depression, World War II—all these conditions that came, in some ways, out of labor issues and unemployment in countries like Germany and the US—and how these are mirrored by the conditions that are being created by technology, with little or no safety net in places like the United States.

As I was making Unemployment, the 2016 presidential campaign was underway, and there was a point in April 2016 when I read reports on new sociological studies that were able to identify latent authoritarian tendencies in a population. I was also seeing images of high school basketball games where you would have a team of relatively affluent white kids on one side and a Latino team on the other, and the first team’s fans would be dressed in Trump gear and American flags, holding big cut-outs of Trump’s head and chanting, “Trump! Trump! Build the wall!” The images looked like something out of Germany in the 1930s—but in vivid color. I started thinking that Trump could actually win. I started to think that these labor and technological trends could have an even more aggressive and violent conclusion.

So I added another chapter to my cycle, out of which the works in Laws of Motion come. That project is called Civil War. For me, if you’re looking at the twenty-first century, I think there’s a good chance that the consequences of automation for labor will lead to authoritarian states and policies, wars, and political violence that are reminiscent of what happened in the 1930s, but in a hyper-technological context. It’s sort of like cause and effect: Unemployment shows the cause, and Civil War is the effect, looking at a country like America disintegrating based on these divisions of labor, inequality, and class that are primed and then ignited by technological automation.

SO Discussing the present and the future brings us to one of the two primary reasons I was

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interested in pairing works by you both with some of the older artists in the show. In particular, I see Jeff Koons and Cady Noland as using a sort of real-time archeological approach to the ephemera they’re surrounded by. In your case, and to a certain extent in their case, it’s both a present-day archeological distillation of what surrounds us, and also an anticipatory archeological approach, which is to say that you are imagining what someone fifty or a hundred years from now will need to know about the time we’re living in. Can you talk a bit more about how you use scientific or biological language as a way of presenting the ideas you’re interested in?

AY I think I’m sort of the outlier in the show, because I’m coming from the perspective of the de-centered human, of challenging human exceptionalism, which is why I work with bacteria, why I work with organic matter. The works in this show are really laying down the foundation for a new paradigm in my work, which is about the transformation of the human. We have had a pretty good hack for four hundred years with the elitist fiction around what constitutes the human and the idea that we are an exception in nature. I really disagree with that, and so a lot of my project right now is to think about existence beyond the human, to think of humans as part of an ecosystem. Currently we all have trillions of bacteria in us, so can you say that you’re an individual? What constitutes the self when the self is comprised of a multitude of organisms?

And so I’m thinking about biological intelligence sharing, about the ecology of intelligence, and about the dismantling of evolution that we’ve been part of the last couple of hundred years. At first I was worried about that dismantling, but this is also part of evolution. The rise of automation, for example—to me it’s part of a larger system; it’s not the end of evolution, because you can’t destroy nature; nature always wins. However, what’s interesting is that we’re now open to the idea that consciousness is decoupled from intelligence. Consciousness has been at the apex in terms of rights. Who has rights? Those who

have consciousness. And yet with artificial intelligence we’re increasingly outsourcing our viability; this intelligence decoupled from consciousness is actually probably going to usurp us all.

SO Josh, do you have a way of thinking about this archeological approach to the present or the future?

JK When I make work, I’m thinking about two audiences: one is the audience of the present, and the other is an audience of the future. When you address the present, there’s the possibility of shaping where that present is going, of influencing people and suggesting possibilities. But there’s this other aspect of making a historical record like art, which is to talk with people in the near and far futures and to explain the times we live in, in ways that might be comprehensible to them. And to speak about these issues in a way that helps people in the future understand how people in the present made the choices that led to the world that they live in. It’s interesting that this exhibition includes work from Civil War, because it’s my analog project: I used traditional sculpting practices—casting, and compositing found objects—and almost no digital equipment. I shot the media component, a film called Another America Is Possible, in Super 16. So it was kind of a break from the technology that was shaping all of these things. I wanted to focus on the human impact and not the digital. But that’s just this chapter. With the subsequent projects I’ve envisioned, it’s going to be harder to use objects from the present to predict the far future, because they just won’t be there.

AY Can I just add that I’m most interested in the near future and not the far future? Because once we’re able to engineer a human brain, I have no idea what that future could be like. It outstrips my imagination.

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JK People ask me if there will be an AI chapter, and there won’t be, partially because my project is about human beings, and also because it’s very hard for me to imagine what that AI future might look like. It’s hard to imagine the wants or drives or desires of an intelligence that’s smarter than you are. By “far future,” I’m really just talking about the end of the century, and even that’s speculative.

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digital color prints “un-develop.” Haley Mellin spoke with Kline about crisis, longevity, and the role art might play in response to the threat of climate catastrophe.

GARAGE: How did you source these images?

Josh Kline: I shot the photographs myself using my phone. I chose locations where American power is created, expresses itself, or is stockpiled: Silicon Valley and San Francisco, where America’s technology industry is centered; Manhattan, America’s financial center; and Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital and the center of its political and military industries.

The images are lit by LED lights. What’s the significance of the colors you used?

Orange for DayQuil, purple for Dimetapp, green for Sudafed, and brown for generic medicine bottles. America is a nation of addiction and addicts, and a nation in pain: pharmaceutical pain killers, social media, political spectacle, gasoline, toxic food, neoliberal capitalism, religious extremism, guns, escapism.

How do decay, deterioration, and the challenge of conserving your work speak to our current world situation?

I’m interested in working with and talking about physical processes such as deterioration or melting. Melting is going to be one of the most consequential physical processes for our lives in this century. Scientists tell us that whether we limit global average temperature rise or not, some amount of sea-level rise is now unavoidable. It’s baked into the oceans and the atmosphere. Greenland and Antarctica are going to melt.

1/24/2019“Josh Kline’s Water Damage”by Haley Mellin

Since 2014, Josh Kline has been at work on a major cycle of installation-based projects concerned with the unfolding political, economic, technological, and biological changes that will shape human life in the 21st century. The first three chapters—Freedom (2015–16), Unemployment (2016), and Civil War (2017)—were variously exhibited in the U.S., the U.K., and Italy. The first components of a fourth, Climate Change, debuted in the Whitney Biennial and at 47 Canal in New York this past spring. In these new artworks, Kline continues to mobilize the strategies he’s developed over the last decade, using material transformation and transubstantiation to describe a future altered beyond recognition by human-made climate change, global warming, sea-level rise, and nationalism.

Among the Climate Change works are Kline’s Flooding Images, photographs of sites of American power, presented in colored frames and behind tinted glass. Inside their frames, the photographs are continuously inundated by water over time, “washing the images away like bad dreams or traumatic memories.” The images of the works that follow document the photo-graphs at various points in their transformation, as the

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As a world, the question we have to decide is: How much melting? Art is a way for people to come to terms with or to confront these phenomena emotionally, or it at least contains that potential.

Currently, oceans are rising at an inch per decade. As the waters rise in these works, I think about this visual being real one day in our cities and towns.

I’ve thought a great deal about sea-level rise since moving to New York in 2002. Over the years, while walking along New York’s streets, I sometimes try to imagine what they would be like under 6 or 16 feet of water. Based on current scientific understanding of global warming and its effects on the world’s ice caps, unless massive sea walls are built, New York and all the world’s coastal cities are doomed to drown later this century, possibly experiencing three to six feet of permanent sea-level rise by 2100. America—which is one of the main culprits behind rising atmospheric carbon levels—is a society whose power centers are located on its coasts. It’s a nation in the process of knocking out its own foundation. Many of the locations that I present dissolving in water are the places where decisions to take us down this irreversible and catastrophic path were or are being made. Once those places are lost to the rising sea, all we’ll have of them are images, which may also fade and disappear over time.

This series is prognostic. What is something that people can do to lessen their footprint on climate change?

The most important thing that people can do—in America or abroad—is to work to support the American Democratic Party and to work to dismantle or neuter the American Republican Party. While, as individuals, we can make climate-conscious choices like becoming vegan or abstaining from air travel, these individual choices and their consequences

are dwarfed by the impact that governments and their policies have on the emerging disaster. Because of America’s global political, economic, and military hegemony, our individual actions of conscience will all amount to nothing if this country continues to be governed or obstructed by a political party that denies the reality or gravity of human-made climate change.

What role do you think politics can play in confronting climate change?

In the United States, we can support politicians and policies that align with the Green New Deal—and work to remove Republicans from power and keep them from getting into office. The most impactful and far-reaching solutions to the climate crisis are only possible at the level of government policy. This is really not an area that we can compromise on with the Right. I read somewhere that the American military has one of the largest carbon footprints on the planet; as long as Republicans are in office, no serious discussion of moving them to a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy footing is possible.

What are the implications of climate change for visual culture?

The climate catastrophe that’s coming could shatter our entire society. I have a hard time imagining capitalism surviving what’s coming, much less our mass visual culture, which is rooted in that economic system. Most of the coastal cities where the art, entertainment, and advertising industries are centered will be flooded out in the coming decades.

What does it mean to make artwork as a response to this ongoing catastrophe, rather than producing, say, polemical literature or going into direct action?

I don’t think that making art about political

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subjects precludes involvement in activism. Contemporary art is the platform that I have access to and the platform that I know how to use. Although I do write and have been briefly involved with activism in the past, I am not a writer or an activist. In terms of raising awareness of the issues that I’m concerned about, I can reach far more people through the art I make and the dialogue around it than I ever could through direct action or attempting to restart my life as a journalist at age 40. I believe there’s a role for artists, and for all other people who make a living through communication, to speak publicly about political issues and to use their work to contribute to raising awareness of the crises we face.

Who do you think of as your audience?

Before World War II, there was a belief among artists and many others that art could directly change society, that art itself could be an instrument of revolution. After the war, belief in art’s political potential swung into oblivion, and people ceased to believe that art had any capacity for political or societal impact. For the past 75 years in the West, art has largely been seen as an intellectual exercise, a space to debate formal issues or obscure points of academic theory. I think both of these extreme positions on art’s political potency ignore a wide swath of possibilities in between. While I don’t believe that art can be a revolutionary instrument in a mass-media society like the United States, I think it does have untapped potential for communication. For me, the challenge is the possibility of making a complex and rigorous art that’s open, that seeks to include rather than exclude the audience.

Given how a sense of disintegration is fundamental to this body of work, what are your thoughts on your own legacy as an artist?

As an artist, I’m living and working in the

present. It feels urgent right now to speak out publicly about the dark future our rulers are building and advocate for policies and perspectives that lead somewhere else, somewhere more hopeful. I always keep a future audience in mind when making my work. I want to be in dialogue with people in the future, to help explain the past out of which their future present emerged. The more I read about climate change, though, the less confidence I have that much of my work will survive the future that’s coming.

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10/4/2017“Josh Kline’s New Work Envisions a Coming American Civil War—to Be Followed by a Socialist Utopia. The show opens a new space for London’s Modern Art gallery.”by Brian Boucher

The projected second American Civil War, says Kline in a statement, would likely be “incomprehensibly vicious,” since its combatants won’t be separated by a Mason-Dixon Line.

The installation and film alike grow out of a larger cycle by Kline riffing on the future. Last summer, his “Unemployment” (seen at New York’s 47 Canal gallery in New York) looked ahead to 2030, its grim, spare installation alluding to the dystopian consequences of automation putting millions out of work.

“Subtle, ‘Unemployment’ was not, but it did strike a nerve,” Alex Greenberger wrote for ARTnews, reviewing that show.

“Civil War” builds on that bleak vision—with the obvious political reference being the brutalizing Trump-era politics rending the nation. “There’s no reason to believe that Trump is the end of this,” Kline warns in an email to artnet News.

All the same, one of the fascinating things about Kline, whose work has become a staple of forward-looking art shows like the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial and the recent DIS-curated Berlin Biennale, is how he nods towards some utopian possibility in tension with his bleaker premonitions.

In “Unemployment,” this came in the form of a series of promos for a world delivered from poverty by a universal basic income. In “Civil War,” it is that cheery Confederate flag burning, imagining a day when today’s bitter debates over racist symbols can could be ended, at last, without resistance.

“The future hasn’t happened yet,” he writes. “It can still be shaped in the present.”

A racially diverse group picnics in a sunny park, where they torch a Confederate flag on a bonfire, signaling an end to a long history of racial terror in the US. The image stands out in Another America is Possible (2017), a short video by New York artist Josh Kline that forms part of his show “Civil War,” the inaugural exhibition at the new space of London’s Modern Art gallery.

In the New York artist’s imagined future, the divisions at the heart of US society have finally burst into a full-on Civil War, Part II. Yet in the wake of this reckoning, he imagines the potential for a Shangri-La of racial harmony, universal basic income, and quality health care as a Constitutional right.

If this seems rather cheerful, the central sculptural element of “Civil War” lingers on the much bleaker likely outcome of future conflict: mounds of cast sculptures of children’s toys, colored gray like dust-covered rubble, commingled with chunks of concrete sprouting pieces of rebar.

The sad jumble alludes to the potential—maybe even the likelihood—of mutual destruction. The remains of the imagined battle, and the belongings of the American people, are piled up like so many corpses.

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If you’re going to paint a vision of doom and devastation, I think it’s also important to offer alternatives—some genuine hope devoid of cynicism. To present the public with a vision of the future other than the apocalypse. The right presents a vision of the future: more neoliberalism. Authoritarianism. What about the left? We need to be able to imagine—to visualize—a better future in order to build one.”

Josh Kline at Artissima – The First Solo Show in Italy

Ginevra Bria: You’re exhibiting Unemployment in Italy, for the very first time. At FSRR you’re showing more or less the solo you installed at 47 Canal. How did the Americans react? Meanwhile, has your idea, your vision/projection of a near future (2030), been changed?

Josh Kline: I think many people who saw it in NYC connected the show with their own experiences losing a job or being unemployed. People told me they identified with different works in the show—particularly with the sculptures of unemployed professionals in trash bags or the Contagious Unemployment sculptures that contain file boxes filled with the sort of personal effects people take from the office after losing a job. When you’re fired, it can be hard—especially for people in middle age—to find a new job. Our society treats unemployed people like lepers. Like an infectious disease. Employment and career are central to our identities. Getting fired can feel like dying. For Americans, I think there was also a connection with the economic and cultural forces propelling Trump’s candidacy in our recent election. My vision of the near future remains largely unchanged. I think that technological unemployment is going to be one of the

11/22/2016“Dissecting the Human-Machine System - A Josh Kline Interview”by Widewalls Editorial

A Human-machine system is a mechanism in which the functions of a human operator (or a group of operators) and a machine are integrated. This term can also be used to emphasize the view of such a system as a single entity that interacts with external environment. Following this human condition imprinting, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in Turin, on the occasion of Artissima, presents the first Italian solo show by Josh Kline (1979, Philadelphia), Unemployment. The exhibition, focused on the loss of job due to the augmented use of technology and the vision of humans as trash, proposes a vision of a probable future over the next 30 years. Unemployment began with Contagious Unemployment sculptures that were suspended from the ceiling. Inside these glass objects are boxes that contain sneakers, family photos, and documents—the personal belongings of laid-off employees, or their useless data.

“Unemployment is a very dark project”, underlines Josh Kline. “While working on it, I felt strongly that it needed to incorporate a hopeful or perhaps even utopian message as a contrast to all the sadness and tragedy I was presenting. It’s no longer enough to just call things out or point at things that are wrong in our world.

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defining political and economic issues of the 21st Century. The political upheaval getting under way in the West is likely to become even more extreme in the coming years as more and more jobs are automated. Once self-driving trucks hit the roads, I think it will become impossible to ignore the impact of these technologies any longer, or to blame them on immigrants or globalization. Our politicians seem unwilling to address the economic impact of automation on working people or its political implications. Instead, economic suffering is being used cynically as a way to further a slew of reactionary political agendas.

GB: Talking about “Productivity Gains (Brandon, Accountant),” a 3-D print of a laid-off professional, isn’t it a paradox, the fact that sophisticated machineries refined bodies of people fired for lack of employment (due to, also, a present-future technology development)?

JK: It’s not a paradox. It’s deliberate. The process of producing the works mirrors the processes at work in our society that I’m addressing. Human skills are digitized and then human beings are replaced on the job by software. Without much of a safety net, the people are thrown away.

The digitization of human lives is something that is constant and on going in our societies. People are actively creating astonishingly detailed images of themselves—digital clones—in the databases of social media companies, banks, government agencies, health insurance companies, Amazon, etc. To produce the sculptures of people in the show, the men and women were 3D-scanned using digital cameras. A 3D-model was then produced from the full-body photographic scan, which was partially 3D-printed and partially CNC-milled (carved by computers) out of foam. The resulting sculpture is then placed in a recycling bag and exhibited on the floor.

During the visit, in front of Productivity Gains, we talk about a sort of contrappasso’s effect: economic crisis affected the lives of people, shifting them suddenly, reducing them.

GB: Could you please explain this concept and which kind of parable we should learn from their stories?

JK: These sculptures are portraits of real people who have lost their jobs. They are unemployed middle-class (or formerly middle-class) professionals. Each of them had a job that is predicted to be replaced by software in the coming decades. Accountant (Brandon’s profession), lawyer, banker, administrator, secretary: these are jobs that currently form the backbone of a middle-class family life. But perhaps not for much longer.

The rising tide of right-wing politics across the West is in many ways the result of an earlier wave of automation, the replacement of working class factory workers by increasingly sophisticated manufacturing robots. Even if Trump raises trade barriers and is somehow able to force corporations to reopen factories in the American rust-belt, the factory jobs aren’t coming back. Those factories will be staffed by machines. Cognitive jobs are next. Already many of the short articles on the Internet are written by algorithms. The question my exhibition Unemployment asks is what happens to the people when these jobs disappear—when most people are no longer needed to work? When the middle class ends. I also wanted to have a conversation about the necessity of work in a world with automation. Most work is drudgery—mental or physical—and most people hate their jobs. Can the benefits of that automation be distributed to the many instead of just to the few? Can we free ourselves from work?

The Meaning of Unemployment

GB: Near the sculptured bodies you set are a

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series of shopping and granny carts, each filled to the brim with more disturbing relics of the future, also wrapped in plastic recycling bags. How could silicon in itself, as plastic material with its peculiar features,could reveal/represent a middle-class defeat? Why did you use this specific material to create casts of garbage (as tins, computers, ans so on) choosing also to represent a part of a multi-racial society? Could you please shortly describe your approach to this artwork?

JK: I cast plastic and glass bottles, aluminium cans, and various examples of typical office equipment in pigmented silicone rubber. This rubber (called Dragonskin) is what’s used in cinema special effects and prop making to create prosthetics—fake skin or fake body parts for the camera. It’s also used to make sex toys. In both cases (in the West) skin-colored rubber has become an almost universally recognizable stand-in for the human body. In my recent sculptures, these cast beer bottles, coke cans, and office phones are placed in recycling bags.

In New York, where I live—one of the most disturbing images of poverty is the common sight of an old woman or old man pushing a shopping cart overflowing with scavenged recyclable bottles and cans. In the richest country on Earth, there are elderly people forced to support themselves by picking soda cans out of the trash. This sight is a familiar one across the globe. In Unemployment—which is set in the future, I wanted to visualize the middle class as a site of poverty. To imagine the formerly prosperous American suburbs as a slum.

GB: Why did you choose to shoot a video where nothing, or nothing bad, happened? Is this video something close to a sort of hoped, inspired reassurance for the future? Did you enhance, by the dialogues, for example, a sort of fake message to the visitors/audience?

JK: It’s possible that political commercials might be the one kind of advertising that truly is country-specific. Universal Early Retirement, the video in my project is an American political ad from the future. I didn’t want to create a simulation of a commercial or an ironic parody of a commercial. I wanted to make a real commercial for a potentially viable political solution—Universal Basic Income—to the problems I’m exploring, which is mass unemployment due to automation. The style of the video is based on real commercials that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders aired during the Democratic primary campaign. This is what political messaging in America looks like now and how it will look like for some time to come there. In order to be real advertising, the video needed to harness the same forms and strategies used in real advertising. Otherwise it wouldn’t be believable for an American audience as something sincere—which it is. I collaborated with a writer I know who makes a living in advertising designing commercial campaigns and a director who shoots commercials, as well as a film crew that could realize the resulting project.

The content of the video was informed by interviews I conducted with the unemployed workers who modeled for the recycling bag sculptures in the other room. As part of the interview, I asked them for their thoughts on the idea of a universal basic income—a regular salary given to everyone from the government that would cover basic needs (rent, food, etc). Almost all of them thought that it would make people “lazy.” When I asked them what they would do if they didn’t have to worry about money, all of them described active lives volunteering, helping others, spending time with family, going back to school, or pursuing creative passions like writing, music, or art. In the video I wanted to attempt to rebrand—to reimagine—unemployment as a family values issue. And also to turn it into something positive. Instead of being about failure and laziness, the

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absence of work becomes about taking control of your own time and following your own dreams. Universal basic income is part of a path beyond capitalism.

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5/6/2016“An Art Show That Addresses the Economic Collapse Head-On”by Kevin McGarry

The figures are 3-D prints of laid-off professionals Kline found and fabricated in Baltimore. “She was the president of a small company that developed educational curricula for Wall Street,” he explains, stepping past a woman in a skirt suit. “He was an accountant.” There is something altogether mortuary about the scene, which the artist describes as a period piece set in the near future, possibly the 2030s. These types of jobs aren’t extinct yet, but processes of automation have already begun.

A third room contains sporelike glass bubbles blown around moving boxes full of personal effects: running shoes, stilettos, mugs full of highlighters and family photos, all the office errata a soon-to-be disgruntled discharge would pile up and take with them on the day they receive their pink slip. “I call these ‘unemployment viruses,’ because when you’re unemployed, it feels like you’re sick with something, the way that people avoid you,” Kline says. “These are different stereotypes of different sorts of people.”

Kline made a splash last year with his installation included in the New Museum’s Triennial “Surround Audience,” the memorable protagonists of which were soldier mannequins in gray-blue fatigues whose faces were occluded by Teletubby masks like infantilized Storm Troopers. Both bodies of work refer to key issues he feels will come to define 21st-century politics. “The project at the New Museum was about democracy and political speech in the corporate commons under mass surveillance by government security,” he says. “This new one is about the middle class as it loses its jobs to software over the next quarter century — the lawyers, the journalists, the accountants, all the office workers, and what to do with this huge swath of the population.”

A cheery proposition waits around the corner, where the suburban carpet yields to a subflooring

Josh Kline’s “Productivity Gains (Brandon, Accountant),” a 3-D print of a laid-off professional, is among the works in Kline’s new show “Unemployment” that address the effects of the mortgage crisis and recession on real people. Credit: Joerg Lohse

As an artist who matured during the rise of the so-called “attention economy” — which has rewarded practices that combine a miscellany of ingredients into sometimes tenuous works of art — Josh Kline’s anticipated new solo show at 47 Canal gallery demonstrates how a little editing and restraint can elevate unnerving sculptures to an indelible mise-en-scène. Titled “Unemployment,” Kline’s exhibition begins in the gallery foyer, where the stuffing of an easy chair upholstered in clear vinyl is in plain view: shredded financial data, credit card offers and mortgage contracts formerly belonging to the artist — and to the unemployed persons represented in his show. In the main exhibition space, amid illuminated shopping carts replete with empty plastic bottles custom-molded in the shape of human hands and discarded computer keyboards silicone-cast in a full spectrum of skin tones, life-size individuals in business attire lay on the polyester sandstone carpet. They are curled in the fetal position and bagged in plastic like yesterday’s recycling — because, in a sense, they have been recycled.

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made of Amazon Prime boxes, complete with their disconcerting smiles. A patchwork blanket made of middle-class brands and fabrics — the Gap, quilted down, etc. — is spread before a projection of a new video by Kline. Done up with the saccharine rhetoric of a campaign spot, it’s a jazzy propaganda for universal basic income hinging on the trope of creating more time for living. “For me, the video is completely sincere — it’s what I believe in,” Kline says. “But I wanted to couch it in the language of political advertising. It’s like an ad from the future.”

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presentation of the present.

JK It’s more complicated than that. Many of my peers are turning to communications strategies from mass media and advertising as a way to escape the self-referential conversation of the art system. In much of this work, advertising’s syntax is a useful formal strategy or a device. It’s also a vernacular.

DA Is it important to you to contextualize your art or the art in ‘ProBio’ – the group show that you have curated at MoMA PS1 – with regard to art history?

JK I think most – but definitely not all – of the artists in ‘ProBio’ feel pretty strongly about getting away from a focus on art history. It’s partially a reaction to the 2000s and the MFA system, where older artists make younger artists justify their work against the art-historical record and via theory.

DA Don’t you worry you could get painted as anti-intellectual?

JK Not really. You can use art to have serious conversations about a whole universe of topics that has nothing to do with the art industry.

DA It’s funny, part of me doesn’t care about the rest of the world at all.

JK Meaning you side with the hermetic art conversation?

DA Not ‘side with’ exactly; I just enjoy it.

JK I think that’s why it’s rare for this kind of work to be tackled on its own terms. It’s one of the reasons it’s important for artists to be writing and curating at the moment, so we can

7/9/2013“Focus Interview: Josh Kline”by Domenick Ammirati

Domenick Ammirati Let’s get this out of the way: posthumanism?

Josh Kline For me, it’s about technology changing what it means to be human. There’s a self-actualization aspect to it that’s potentially positive, but I mostly associate it with the relent less push to squeeze more productivity out of workers – turning people into reliable, always-on, office appliances.

I’m probably not the right person to throw down about posthumanist theory. I go with the simple definition from sci-fi novels: people who are no longer human. I read Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles a long time ago, but I’m uncertain how much has stuck with me. I’m not sure I see them as a starting point for the art I’m making or interested in, which is reacting to real-world events, not theory.

DA I feel like what’s being identified as ‘posthuman’ in contemporary art comes precisely from that kind of relation to the general culture. But, if so, you could argue that the ‘posthumanist’ art of the moment is just the latest extension of the lineage of Pop – a relatively direct re-

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put the work in a 21st-century context.

I sympathize with artists who wanted to get out into the larger media world. Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Shamberg are great role models. I’m also an admirer of artists like Alex Bag, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and Michael Smith – artists who tried to cross over on their own terms.

DA But what’s wrong with a critic or an art historian having their crack at it? Take a label like ‘neo-Surrealist’, for example. I’ve seen it applied to you and to other young artists. It seems sensible on the face of it.

JK There’s nothing wrong with it if they’ve done their homework. None of my friends or peers who have been misplaced in that category talk about Surrealism at all. That’s all coming from two or three art historians. Surrealism is something that pop culture absorbed 75 years ago. It’s part of how we communicate. Advertising is a system of communication based on desire and the irrational. So is comedy. We’re entering the augmented-reality era. I think the work in ‘ProBio’ anticipates that, rather than looking back to the 1920s.

DA There’s something about the recombinatory aspect of the times that makes sure-footed critical judgements difficult. You could just as well argue that you’re, say, ‘neopostminimalist’; I’m thinking of your ‘Share the Health’ series (2011–ongoing) – little plastic Donald Judds teeming with bacteria.

JK How about Land art or neo-geo? Every art movement has been absorbed and digested. The gestures are like Photoshop filters – click and apply. When I made the anti-hand-sanitizer dispensers, I was thinking about the Duane Reade pharmacy chain’s 2009 rebrand as an ultra-contemporary lifestyle/hygiene centre. Sometimes the dispensers are landscapes, growing microbes sampled from places like an ATM machine or

a clothing store; sometimes they’re portraits, with bacteria from the mouths of graphic designers or ‘undesirable’ immigrants.

DA Reproducibility is a consistent motif in your work. The bacteria take care of it themselves, of course, but a lot of your recent sculptures are made using 3D printing.

JK The recent heads, hands and feet come from 3D scans of people. You can print the finished file over and over again. They’re like solid videos. The installations and the more ephemeral sculptures are things that can only be experienced in person, though. They’re like performances. You have to be there. They don’t really translate in photographs.

DA There are aspects of your work – the scanning of the human body, the cheek swabs – that invoke medicine and medical instrumentation. To me it seems that, despite the current wealth of work dealing with technology, there’s a lack of critique of the way it’s used to repress the sheer fact of mortality.

JK The medical industry’s not-so-secret long-term goal is repressing mortality altogether. They want to understand the human genome in order to prolong youth and eliminate all the diseases that cause death. But for most of humanity, life is still suffering and hardship, especially outside the world’s upper-class zones. As an artist who’s thinking about the consequences of technological innovation, I think there’s an obligation to raise questions about who benefits. Since Google isn’t doing it, someone needs to think ahead and ask who gets radical life-extension and who gets to work as a greeter at Walmart with no health insurance. .

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with with the internship candidates were intended to travel with you, coloring the rest of the work. It’s multitasking, performing double duty as a video and an audio piece. The video was shot in a single afternoon in the gallery. Everyone who responded to my post for interns and showed up is included in the video.

JB For me, I guess I was relating to it as coming from a place not so far removed from these interns—not just age-wise but also feeling sympathetic for them because I’ve had many an interview like that in the past, not knowing what to expect and also knowing how to perform in that role. Although each of the applicants occupied different subcultures in a way, all of them shared the continuity of being part of this specific age group … for instance when you asked them about taking recreational drugs like Molly, or kinds of prescription drugs to stay focused, they treated it as no big deal. Do you feel as though that is something you think has changed between your generation and the youth of today?

JK Molly is the kind of word that makes a generational divide visible. People in their 30s don’t know what it means. The first time I heard it used, I felt like I was on the wrong side of a drawbridge. Much of what was discussed in the interviews involves trying to map this generational boundary that divides thirtysomethings from the current desirable demographic.

In the interviews I also wanted to explore the role of drugs in the lives of young people. Within our small sample of twentysomethings, it seemed like they were much more open about their prescription drug use than people my age would be. What they told us about their actual usage habits and the usage of their peers was in line with what I remember

1/20/2012“Josh Kline: New York, Dignity, and Self Respect by Jenny Borland”by Jenny Borland

Josh Kline’s first solo show in New York, Dignity and Self Respect at 47 Canal, welcomed its viewers to the residual shock of the present, in a culture fueled by energy drinks, reality television, LED lighting, and the virtual Internet world that increasingly infringes upon daily existence. As an artist, curator, and collaborator, Kline’s practice often transcends the physical art object to pinpoint the nature of labor and productivity in a climate of posthuman conditions. We discussed his work and exhibition on a rare day off in Brooklyn.

Jenny Borland After watching the entirety of your video What Would Molly Do?, my experience of the exhibition seemed to shift—perhaps creating anxiety as I felt more implicated as relating to these interviewees. I’m curious about the video’s role in the show and if you could discuss some of the decisions made while filming?

Josh Kline The show’s focus was creative labor. Lifestyle aspirations encourage young people to make tremendous sacrifices for their careers today. Young creative people cast aside their dignity and in many ways, their humanity, for a chance to get started on the road to self-actualization. A job interview can be seen as a kind of sacrificial altar where you offer yourself up as a commodity, as a product. In the exhibition, I was offering up a suite of human products: the hands and gestures and biological material of creative workers, images of mass-produced celebrities, drug foods, and, in the video, potential interns.

The video played a central role in the show. The monitor was placed in the center of the room, but speakers were placed around the gallery so that the sound permeated the space. When you walked around the installation, the interviews and the discussion

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from my early 20s, though. When I was in high school, a lot of my friends were on drugs like Ritalin, Zoloft, or Paxil. In college people took Ritalin or coke to study or finish projects. In the art industry, I feel like I hear a lot of stories from people my age and older who need to take sleeping aids because they’re so keyed up or stressed out. They take Ambien, Tylenol PM, Ny-Quil in order to turn themselves off at night. I’d be curious about the drug habits of people in the financial sector or in medicine … In order to work all the time we’re going beyond just taking simple drug foods like coffee, and becoming reliant on more complicated substances, altering our brain chemistry in really profound ways so that we can keep up with the demands of communications technology. Human beings have a hard time staying focused at a desk for nine to ten hours straight, five days a week. Posthumans have Redbull and Adderall.

JB How did you find these subjects—did you post an ad somewhere, like on New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) or Craigslist, advertising an internship? Did they know that they were participating in a video for an exhibition?

JK I posted to the NYFA website and also to Craigslist seeking interns. The post was for interns to help an artist produce his first solo show. I work full-time, leaving me with very little time and energy for my own work. I thought I needed interns to pull off my plans for the show. At the same time, though, I wanted to address the idea of internships. I wanted to get into the heads of people actively seeking to work for free—people who would work for free and help me shovel money into my own credit card debt art production bonfire.

No one was told in advance that there would be a camera. They also didn’t know that they would be interviewed by other people—by my collaborators, artists Michele Abeles, Alex Kwartler, and Gloria Maximo. The camera was

in plain view in the gallery and everyone was told at the beginning what was going on. They all had to sign release forms on camera. For me, the surprising thing is that no one walked out, and also how comfortable people were with being recorded. Most of them got really into the whole situation and totally opened up to us and to the camera.

JB Definitely, like some kind of talk show, it felt like a situation where people could really show off their personalities by being aware that a camera was in the room. When you hear the audio from the piece in context of the exhibition, especially while looking at the celebrity portraits, it suggests a feeling of always being aware of celebrity or reality TV culture and how it permeates through daily existence—could you talk more about your relationship to these concepts and how it affects your work?

JK I shot the video before making the portraits, so the images that ended up on the walls of the gallery were informed by the video. Ariel Pink was discussed in one of the interviews and he appears in one of the typecasting portraits. It seemed like a natural extension of the conversation in the video to confuse someone like Ariel Pink, who is a kind of music icon of the late 2000s, with Kurt Cobain who was an icon of my own generation’s teenage years. In the video, you have the recently young mining the currently young for information about taste and trends.

Celebrity is part of this. I’m interested in the economic function of celebrities and in their cultural function. Along with drugs and labor, I think celebrities are also a route for understanding where we’re going as a species. Celebrities are kind of posthuman in the ease with which they can alter themselves and in the way that they’re so integrated with media. What celebrities can afford to do today, everyone will be able to afford to do tomorrow. When you think about the way that social media networks

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work, we’ve all kind of taken on a bit of celebrity in our own life. Celebrities are surrogates—that’s their economic function. They simulate life for people who don’t have time to actually live. If you’re working full time, if you have children, a family, you may not have time for friends, so you can watch Friends on TV and it’s a very low maintenance relationship with people you don’t know—you know them, but they don’t know you, there’s no drama, it’s a very one-sided thing. What’s new with social media is that we can also now live vicariously through the lives of friends and acquaintances as they post to feed.

Celebrities are these commodities that fit into standard sizes and are shared by large numbers of people through media. They come back over and over again and fill certain niches. Kurt Cobain wore dresses. Ariel Pink wears dresses. Kurt Cobain had long hair. Ariel Pink has long hair. Their drug use. A certain kind of humor in their lyrics. A celebrity is supposed to be a unique person. They’re the .0001% who is lucky enough to make an extravagant living as an actor or a rockstar or whatever, and yet they’re chosen because millions of people can easily identify with them, with their faces. When one of them gets too old or worn out they’re easily replaced. The MTV version of Skins is the masticated and regurgitated end-product of Kids. Winona Ryder was a slacker and dated the lead singer of Soul Asylum. Natalie Portman is an over-achiever and dated Devendra Banhart. Nicki Minaj wears a Harajuku outfit made out of stuffed animals to the VMAs. Bjork wore a swan outfit to the Oscars while she was promotingDancer In The Dark.

JB Right, which is why the blending technique that you use in the photographs is so successful—it’s uncanny to look at these faces that you recognize every day, but then stepping back to realize that it doesn’t even matter who exactly you’re looking at, they’re all part of the

same mold. That leads to another question I had about your exhibition, for me it generated an environment that seems palpable, existing in some kind of space between the virtual and physical world. Moving further from what you’ve said about technology and the Internet, but also in the sense of commodity—in this particular show I felt as though I was in a Duane Reade, like in the water aisle or the drug aisle, so I’m wondering how that comes into play?

JK I’m glad it worked! I was thinking a lot about what I like to call New Century Modernarchitecture—computer-designed glass buildings with generative architecture, where you have these fractal algorithms determining the arrangement of windows, a kind of computer-driven modernism—and I saw Duane Reade as an expression of this, in addition to goods like Patagonia jackets, Uniqlo, and Aeron Chairs. In the 2000s, the Retro Decade, the Internet came and eliminated the present in a way, especially in places like New York. You had people flawlessly recreating the fashion, music, and style of the past and living in it, completely immersing themselves in it in order to retreat from the present. At a certain point, Duane Reade re-branded itself and it was remarkable because it was so conspicuously contemporary. It’s design for people who want to live in the present, or who are even future-oriented. There is a continuing thread of modernism, though, because this hyper-present design is being built with modernist building blocks. New high-tech materials and old retro ideology. I wanted to distill that feeling of being in … not future-shock, but maybe I should say present-shock. It’s the feeling of walking into a Duane Reade and being like, “What is this?” For me, it really came down to the LED lights that are on the shelves lighting the products. It’s the first time in human experience that we are using a light source that doesn’t involve something burning—glowing diodes—and it’s being used to highlight body wash. In Duane Reade,

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the LED light is a very cold xenon light—it’s the lighting of 2010 through 2012. So I wanted that element in the show, grounding the installation in a certain moment through lighting display design.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of installations in our culture, on what use they have. I’ve come to see them as a very primitive forerunner or testing ground for virtual reality. Video games are one kind of virtual reality, but I think installations are another step on the way to the immersive augmented reality and virtual reality that’s probably coming around 2020 or 2030. Like where you could put on a pair of cheap sunglasses and actually walk around in a seamless photographically-realistic virtual space. The Internet right now is in its “radio days,” and television is coming right around the corner!

I think installation is a great way of exploring what it will be like to walk around in virtual space, in a three dimensional simulation. I don’t think this is necessarily what most installation artists are thinking about, per se, but I think it’s actually what’s going on with the medium. With my installations I want to communicate through mood and through visceral reaction. So like with what I said about the Duane Reade lighting—if you’ve spent time in these stores, regardless of how much you thought about it, the memory of that kind of lighting is in you somewhere. I’m interested in communicating through these unconscious symbols and the cultural baggage that we accumulate as we go through life.

JB Could you talk a bit more about the water bottle sculptures, not only in this show, but also in the context of other places where they’ve appeared in the past … is there a specificity for each exhibition? What is their function in the larger idea of your work, a commentary on plastic?

JK It’s a joke about plastic water bottles. A few years ago my collaborators Jon Santos and Anicka Yi were both obsessed with this idea of water bottles leaching plastic while sitting in hot trucks in the sun. They thought we all needed to get glass or metal water bottles and start drinking tap water because bottled water was full of toxic plastic molecules. So I thought, why not just put the plastic in the water at the get-go? I boil the water bottles in their own water and then refill them with the plastic-infused water. The first boiled water bottles I made were Poland Spring bottles. After that I got really obsessed with these Duane Reade branded three-liter bottles—that were unfortunately discontinued—that look like computer architecture. It’s like drinking out of the Frank Gehry building in Chelsea. Their branding was pretty intense—a barcode Statue of Liberty on the label and the copy on the front which became the work’s title: “It’s clean, it’s natural, we promise.” On the back: “ … bottled in New York State for New Yorkers.”

JB These are so specifically New York bottles—if the works were to be shown in say, Europe or Los Angeles, would you “tap into” the water industry as it appears out there?

JK Actually, the Duane Reade bottles have already been abroad. They were in a group show that Dispatch (Howie Chen and Tim Saltarelli) organized in Copenhagen over the summer, although not on shelves, just on the floor in a kind of prop-styled product display arrangement. So they’ve already been shown in Europe. They take the New York brand and style along with them. Europe is full of generative glass architecture. but branded for California with different mountains and some red on the label. The Poland Spring bottles are different. They wouldn’t make as much sense in Europe. The European equivalent of Poland Spring is probably Volvic or Evian. That’s what you drink in a conference room in Germany. If I show bottles in Los Angeles, I would probably make them with Arrowhead

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water bottles. It’s the same company as Poland Spring, Nestle, but branded for California with different mountains and some red on the label.

JB I also want to discuss the hand sculptures. They instantly reminded me of those wax totemic objects, used in churches in Portugal and Spain as a way of healing if you have an ailment, physical or otherwise, you can find an object or body part signifying that, and throw it into a flame. I’m curious what these hands in the exhibition symbolized for you, or if it could have anything to do with this kind of process?

JK I actually hadn’t known about the wax objects, but it makes total sense, like Catholic ritual magic. With the Creative Hands I wanted to appropriate and mass-produce people. They’re kind of a companion piece to the intern video. Whereas in the video I’m making a medium or subject out of interns, here I wanted to use creative workers—consultants, graphic designers, DJs, curators, studio managers, retouchers, etc. The show was about taking human beings and turning them into products and lifestyle as a form of advertising. With the sculptures I wanted to appropriate the hands of people who are actually shaping our culture. They’re cast silicone, skin-colored silicone rubber – which is already kind of a stand-in for flesh. I also wanted to break down the boundary between the person’s hand and their lifestyle technology objects, so it would just become one fleshy thing on the shelf for sale…at Duane Reade, in this LED xenon lighting.

In a kind of roundabout way they might be connected to those wax effigies. I’m a big fan of Paul Thek’s meat pieces—which were made of wax. I’m sure Thek was aware of the ritual use of those wax objects and that history. For me, I see the meat pieces as objects that have outlived their own original meaning and that have taken on a whole new set of significances. I think they’re going to resonate

very differently for people in the future. They made me think much more about the human ear that scientists grew on the back of a mouse a few years ago than about Catholicism or mortality or any kind of critique of minimalism. When I saw them at the Whitney last year I remember thinking, it’s like a Bruce Sterling novel, this is posthumanwork.

JB Yes, it’s fascinating to see them repeat themselves for future generations, because he was making them in the 1960s, at the same time as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes; it’s incredible to realize how old they are, and what function they may have had then could be vastly different now. Going back to the hand pieces—since so many of the subjects you use are collaborators, or friends of yours, I’d like to know how this notion of collaborating and participation with other artists has come into your work and informed your practice, whether in projects you’ve curated or in your own art-making?

JK I guess it really depends on the situation. For this project I wanted to use people I knew as subjects, including myself—one of my hands is in it as a curator’s hand, as well as friends like Margaret Lee. Margaret is both my gallerist and an artist—in fact she’s a past collaborator (and uses collaboration as her medium)—but I cast her hand with her day job as a studio manager in mind. In terms of collaboration, I feel like the production for this show in particular has really confirmed for me that I don’t want to be in this Northern European solitary studio practice tradition. I’m more interested in production models that come out of filmmaking or music. I’ve been thinking a lot about hip-hop albums and the way that certain producers and rappers approach making an album, like Kanye West just loading tracks with his friends. Why can’t you do that with a show as well, and bring in all these people that you’re already having a dialogue with into your work, and make all those influences visible? Why can’t you put

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the credits out in front?

JB I think that also speaks to your practice as a curator as well. Were you originally curating before making work as an artist?

JK Yes and no … I went to film school and moved to New York with the goal of being an artist in 2002. I ended up interning and freelancing for quite a while—which is probably the beginning of all this—then working as an arts administrator and a curator, and subsequently gave up making art for two or three years. I got a studio in 2006 and then in 2007 I formed a collective with Anicka Yi and Jon Santos called Circular File, and started seriously getting back into making work. When I started working as an artist again, I was trading studio visits a lot with peers and seeing a lot of work that wasn’t really being shown in New York. I wanted to see it come together in physical space, and re-engaged with curation from the perspective of an artist, organizing exhibitions focused on objects and images. When I curate video screenings and exhibitions, which I do for my job, I try to keep it very separate from my concerns and interests as an artist. With the shows that I curate involving objects, like Skin So Soft, the group show that I organized for Gresham’s Ghost this summer, I’m operating as an artist. It’s a way for me to think about my own work in relation to the work of my peers and about the relationships between their work. With Skin So Soft I had been seeing work that made me think a lot about a new posthuman approach to the body, made by people who weren’t really aware of each other’s work, and I wanted to put them all in a room together.

JB It makes more sense hearing you say that it’s an extension of your art practice, such as in the Gresham’s Ghost show, the environment was cohesive in a way that a standard group show might not be—you could notice that there was a deeper understanding or collaboration between

these people rather than just throwing them all together based on a theme or thesis.

JK Exactly. The Nobodies New York show, which was the first show at 179 Canal, was like that too. I felt like I had these three separate groups of friends—artists who I was in a dialogue with—and I wanted to see all their work together in a space. I’d see one of them here or there in random group shows, but I never saw their work in a group exhibition context that made sense to me. I would walk through these shows feeling like I was looking at a bunch of severed limbs. Together in an exhibition space, though, all their weird, messed-up solo jokes suddenly made much more sense. You could see all the other people cracking up.

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go on. In this vision of the future, people will continue, but perhaps as products and services instead of as human beings.

In my show at 47 Canal, a lot of the work comes out of thinking about this transition, about the transformation of creative people into mass-produced or mass-distributed goods, services, or advertising. It’s also about a generation in the process of being deprecated by the market as trend forecasters look to the tastes of the young people of today for this season’s sounds and colorways. The youth culture of the ’90s and of the 2000s are reference points for the show, but the installation’s setting is today.

ABF: Your work speaks to communication strategies. Over the last few months, the occupation movement has brought back hand signals, chanting, and the general consensus model of group governing. From where you stand, how is Occupy Wall Street doing with communication?

JK: I think Occupy Wall Street is doing an incredible job with communication. Less than four months ago the entire conversation on the news was about austerity, deficit reduction, and finding more ways to transfer more money from the poor and the middle class to “job creators.” I sometimes wonder if the Democratic Party and their supporters are throwing the game deliberately. The 99% and the 1% is an incredibly persuasive and effective argument.

ABF: Do you read Adbusters? Where do you get your news?

JK: I bought an issue once in the late ’90s and found it forgettable.

12/16/2011“Interview with Artist Josh Kline”by Amanda Beroza Friedman

The following interview between artist Josh Kline and I was conducted via email. We cover work, media, hands, and the end. 2012!

Amanda Beroza Friedman: For your current exhibition, Dignity and Self-Respect, the press release is amazing. And fatal. Is the world ending? What do the ’90s have to do with it?

Josh Kline: Someone’s world is always ending. That’s the nature of aging and death. The teenagers and twentysomethings of the ’90s, born in the ’70s and early ’80s, are finally moving into undeniable and irreversible adulthood. It’s extremely difficult to use thirtysomethings to sell youth culture.

Unlike previous generations of artists and musicians, this generation moved into early adulthood absolutely thrilled to participate in focus groups and pose for product-placement shots in exchange for sponsored drinks, complimentary magazines, unpaid jobs, and the chance to be near some reissued retro sneakers. You spill your personal problems and innermost secrets on social media and Facebook turns it into entertainment for other people and sells advertising around it. Even after the asteroid hits the Earth, some life will

VSF

I read the news on the Internet at my desk at work while I eat lunch. Also, I’m a podcast junky. I listen to a lot of news while I work in the studio and while I cook.

ABF: What does the creative sector mean to you? How do you define hard work?

JK: I see the creative sector as the area of the economy that encompasses creative workers: artists, designers, people in advertising, filmmakers, writers, stylists, etc. – all of the people who are making a livelihood or trying to make one generating cultural products and services. For me the idea of the creative sector has become synonymous with unpaid or underpaid precarious labor and with debt-driven aspirational lifestyles.

How do you define hard work? For some people it’s thinking and worrying until your stomach hurts. For others it’s working 70-90 hours a week. Or maybe it’s an ideology with roots in Protestantism imported from Northern Europe? If you’re an Indonesian maid working 6-7 days a week in Hong Kong who gets pushed out of a window, maybe it means something completely different.

ABF: Hands are important to a maker. What was it like to make those included in “Dignity and Self-Respect” and can you talk about the process?

JK: With the Creative Hands, I wanted to physically appropriate and mass-produce the hands of creative workers, of the people who actually shape our culture. They’re the counterpoint to the show’s lone video What Would Molly Do?, which presents interviews with intern candidates. Whereas in the video I’m presenting interns as subjects, with the hands I wanted to present people successful in the roles that the potential interns aspired to reach – consultants, graphic designers, DJs, curators, studio managers, retouchers, etc. I wanted to show both ends of the commercial creative lifecycle. The hand and

the objects they hold are cast in skin-colored silicone rubber – which is already a proxy for flesh. Each person is holding a tool, a piece of lifestyle technology – an iPhone, a mini-bottle of Jameson, a Blackberry, a bottle of Advil, a digital camera, etc. One hand is wearing a carpal tunnel wrist brace.

As subjects, I selected people I knew. Friends. I wanted to implicate and involve my own social network. My own hand is in there holding a bottle of Purell, representing my life as a curator and all the hands I shake. I cast my collaborator Jon Santos’s hand – he’s a celebrated graphic designer and well-known DJ. I cast the hands of a famous artist’s studio manager (who is also an artist I collaborate with and my gallerist); of Ken Miller, the former editor of Tokion; of Cynthia Leung, the head of PR at Balenciaga; of my friend Jasmine Pasquill who retouches images for the covers of major fashion magazines. I brought them in one by one, and with some expert help from other friends (Jesse Greenberg and Margaret Lee), I cast the hands, produced molds and then proceeded to produce a series of rubber sculptures. In many cases the subjects collaborated, selecting the objects in their hand or the gesture that was captured. Ken had the idea to use a mini-bottle of Jameson and Cynthia had a very specific grip in mind for the Blackberry.

ABF: What are you most excited about in 2012?

JK: Excited is probably the wrong word, but I can’t take my eyes and ears off the coverage of the Eurozone meltdown. It’s a non-stop economic cliffhanger. Spring and summer are going to be interesting times.