Since its opening in the spring, Josh Kline‘s survey exhibition “Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art has been the subject of praise and concern—the former for the complexity and purposefulness of the work included, and the latter for the many ways that work has proven prescient about an increasingly troubled and tumultuous world. Dating back to 2011, the sculptures and video work in the exhibition have a not-especially-flattering story to tell about America’s socioeconomic state, and the global climate crisis comes in for withering appraisal too.
As the exhibition heads into its final weeks before closing on August 13, Kline talked to Art in America about his experience of the show over time, what he learned from its reception, and what he’s thinking for the future.
So much of your work is rooted very specifically in the time it was made, to the extent that some of it can be called “dated.” While seeing your show I thought a lot about how the notion of art that is dated, though it sometimes gets cast with a dismissive or negative connotation, can in fact be very valuable—and maybe even more valuable—for being so. Do you have any thoughts on this?
All art is a product of the time in which it’s made. Everything becomes dated eventually. I try to work with this instead of against it. For me, time-specificity is just as interesting as site-specificity. You can deliberately connect a work to a time in the same way that you can connect it to a place. It doesn’t make sense to me to describe 2023 using slang from 1971.
The earliest works in my Whitney show were basically period pieces set in the present. Formally, I was looking at what aspects of the time I was working in were specific to that moment. For instance, what made 2008 or 2011 or 2013—the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession that followed—different from all other times? Design, architecture, fashion—an era’s surfaces—can tell you a lot about that time’s economics and culture. The fact that today the interiors of so many houses and restaurants are being painted in gray institutional colors speaks volumes.
Related Articles
What have you taken away from the ways the exhibition has been received? Have any reactions surprised you, or recast anything about your own work for you personally?
The biggest surprise for me was how much people have responded to the video interviews with blue-collar workers. I didn’t expect those interviews to be the most popular videos in the show. Every time I walk into that gallery, there’s a big crowd listening to people who worked at FedEx or in chain restaurants or as cleaners of hotel rooms talk about their lives. Middle-class people see these workers a lot in the background but very rarely hear their voices. It makes me think that if more of these stories could make it out into the wider culture, maybe it would be harder for politicians and voters to dismiss working people and their concerns.
The show included a discussion event titled “A Century of Displacement: Climate & Mass Migration,” organized in collaboration with artist and conservationist Haley Mellin and featuring scientist Benjamin Strauss, human-rights advocate Amali Tower, and writer David Wallace-Wells. What did you glean from that?
The most frequent questions that came up were about what people can do, and the answer again and again came down to voting for candidates who take climate seriously. Yes, if you can avoid flying, gasoline-powered cars, and red meat, this will help. But the impact of personal actions like that is dwarfed by the consequences of actions and policies of governments and corporations.
The media does a really poor job of communicating with the general public about what the climate crisis will look like in our own lives and how soon we can expect things to get bad. They also don’t do a good job at explaining what’s still possible in terms of mitigation—and the difference that can still be made today. Finding ways to make this personal and understandable is vital while there’s still a possibility of doing something. Amali Tower’s talk brought home the real human consequences in the Global South of the rich world’s policies.
You also moderated a panel titled “Beyond Art: Artists Making Movies,” with Makayla Bailey, Aria Dean, Catharine Czudej, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Andrew Norman Wilson. What was your experience of that?
As the art industry in the US becomes both more conservative and unaffordable because of the cost of living and renting studios in cities like New York and LA, it makes sense that artists who aren’t interested in making paintings will try to take their ideas and ambition elsewhere. For a lot of American artists working with video, the art world feels increasingly untenable.
In his catalogue essay, Christopher Y. Lew mentions you having referred to the sculptures in your Blue Collars series—3D prints of parts of various workers’ bodies—as “solid videos,” and in a recent Instagram post you emphasized the importance of the video work in the show. Is the role that video plays in your practice in any way different than it was at the start? What kind of role might it play in what comes next?
Everything I do comes out of working with and thinking about the moving image. I went to film school, not art school. Those works made with photogrammetry—photographic 3D scanning—go through a post-production process in the computer that amounts to sculpting in real-time video space. It makes sense to me to think about those sculptures as a kind of solidified video. There aren’t hard boundaries for me between the sculptures, videos, and installations that I make—or between media in general.
Over the last few years, narrative and storytelling have been creeping into my video work. Originally, as part of my Personal Responsibility installation, I planned to make a long narrative film that was going to be split up between the tent sculptures. As I worked on the screenplay during the pandemic, I realized that my story couldn’t be broken up or experienced in a non-linear way, and I made fictional interviews with future climate refugees instead. I’m hoping to shoot that other script in the next couple years as a feature-length film.
Your new Personal Responsibility works—sculptural installations set in the aftermath of imaginary climate disasters, with videos of people recounting tales of horror and forced migration—have been disturbingly on-point in recent weeks, with ongoing fires, flooding, and so forth. How has it been for you to see reality match your imaginings of such catastrophes in real time?
The Personal Responsibility works are all based on extensive research into firsthand accounts from survivors of climate disasters in the US over the last two decades, most especially hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, and the California wildfires. Sandy was a very personal wake-up call for me. Seeing the lights go out in Lower Manhattan for two weeks in 2012—in supposedly the richest, most-powerful nation on Earth—revealed just how fragile our society is. The pandemic was another, much larger, lesson in disruption. I’ve come to see Covid as a dry run for the kind of disruption and dislocation we will experience as the climate crisis accelerates. Intellectually I know things are going to get really strange, but I was still totally shocked when the sky over New York turned yellow in June.
Has anything about your experience of this exhibition changed or otherwise figured in the way you now think about making new work in the future? Have your priorities evolved? Are there any new kinds of questions you might like to ask and answer?
I’m approaching a turning point in the cycle of installations about the 21st century that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years. I’ll complete the cycle’s fourth chapter—my project about the Climate Crisis—for a solo exhibition at MOCA in LA in June 2024. After that, when the space and funding is available, I’ll move on to the final two chapters that I have planned, which are utopian. As important as it is to understand how bad things could get, it’s also important to make images of a future that people want to live in—to have something to work towards beyond mitigation and austerity, even in the context of climate catastrophe.