PRESENTATION: Josh Kline-Climate Change
Josh Kline is one of the leading artists of his generation. Kline is best known for creating immersive installations using video, sculpture, photography, and design to question how emergent technologies are changing human life in the twenty-first century. At its core, Kline’s prescient practice is focused on work and class, exploring how today’s most urgent social and political issues—climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy—impact the people who make up the labor force.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo MOCA Archive
The exhibition “Climate Change” brings together for the first time the major works from Josh Kline’s epic saga about the climate crisis, exploring the close-at-hand ramifications of human inaction on global warming and features artworks dating from 2019 to the present and includes the debut of several new sculptures specially commissioned by MOCA. Kline, whose work is steeped in complexity and purposefulness, is known for creating immersive installations using video, sculpture, photography, and architecture. He is distinguished among artists of his generation in his focus on class, labor, and inequity in the contemporary United States. “Climate Change” is both an exhibition and a total work of art—an ambitious, immersive suite of sci-fi installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Originally conceived in 2014 as a chapter in a multipart cycle of installations about political and technological upheaval in the 21st century, “Climate Change” has been made in sections over the last six years. The major elements of Kline’s eponymous project ware brought together for the first time. As the artist said in an interview (guernicamag.com) for his work. “I think a lot about the audience and how to open up the work without dumbing it down. Someone who doesn’t have an education in art history should be able to get most of the meaning. My audience shouldn’t need a press release to understand what they’re looking at, especially if it’s in their own country. It needs to be. I think we see a lot of images of suffering, of people being exploited on the news, and we don’t retain any of it. Those images have lost their ability to affect us, whereas three-dimensional sculptures, I think, still have it. You go into a gallery and there’s this reaction you have, which might no longer be possible with most images because we see so many of them”. Mobilizing sculpture, moving image, photography, ephemeral materials, and lighting in order to completely transform the galleries of the museum, “Climate Change” is a visceral, charged Gesamtkunstwerk of our contemporary times. In this vision, which could be called dystopian but in truth is terrifyingly near, a catastrophic sea-level rise has inundated the world’s coasts, unleashing a flood of hundreds of millions of traumatized refugees. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global political hegemony melt down their own foundations? Kline opens the door to such a future, inviting us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Josh Kline is mixed-race and Filipino-American. Since moving to New York in the aftermath of 9/11, he has developed a highly influential body of work centered on the dynamics between work and class, examining how contemporary social and political issues such as climate change, automation, and the fragility of democracy affect the labor force. He often utilizes the technologies, practices, and forms that he scrutinizes, including digitization, data collection, image manipulation, biometric scanning, 3D printing, commercial and political advertising, productivity-enhancing substances, aiming them back at themselves. Some of his most well-known videos use early deep fake software to speculate on the meaning of truth in a time of post-truth propaganda. Meanwhile, his 16mm film works channel Hollywood’s power to communicate with a broader audience as he searches for a science fiction of ordinary people. Primarily working through the lens of class, with a nuanced take on race that reflects his own multiethnic heritage, Kline’s art demonstrates how technology has widened and reinforced inequity in America while also conveying its untapped, radical potential to build a fairer world.
Photo: Exhibition view “Josh Kline, Climate Change”, 47 Canal, New York, 2019, Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal
Info: Curators: Rebecca Loweryand Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo,The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 23/6/2024-5/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-sun 11:00-18:00, www.moca.org/
