This post was originally published on artnews.com
Midcareer Artist (2024) is the title of the standout work in Josh Kline’s new show at New York’s Lisson Gallery, which signed with the artist following an acclaimed survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year. The piece is a life-size and lifelike sculpture of the artist himself, curled up in the fetal position and trapped in a plastic bag like a goldfish. His face is blank, frozen.
The sculpture portrays the midcareer stage as lonely and purgatorial. You’ve made a splash, and now, all eyes are on you. What’s next? No pressure, but it better be just as good as your last show, and also recognizably you, while at the same time being different. Otherwise, you’ll get sent back to baristaville or adjuncting.
Kline approached this same-but-different conundrum extremely literally: he remade earlier works that concerned laborers whose lives have been or will be negatively impacted by technology, replacing his blue- and white-collar subjects with himself. Kline’s is the only face in the Lisson show, and Midcareer Artist is based on his 2016 “Unemployment” series, portraits of lawyers, accountants, and other office workers that predicted, with eerie accuracy, the ways their labor might soon become replaced by AI.
The self-portrait-in-a-bag is decent institutional critique. Plus, it’s a funny portrait of an artist not taking himself too seriously. But Midcareer Artist is much more successful than the other self-portraits in the show. Where the Whitney exhibition saw portraits of those delivery workers who pay the bodily cost of online shopping, at Lisson, it is Kline’s own life-size head rendered as if made of Amazon and FedEx packaging.
Why? The press release’s answer is that the show is about our culture’s “obsession with the self,” but is that enough to justify lumping together the precarity of postal workers and artists, via a simple swap? In terms of income, their situations might well be comparable, even despite Kline’s new blue-chip clout, but there are reasons Kline chooses his job over working for Amazon. They’re hiring!
On the flip side, Kline’s concurrent show “Climate Change,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, could have used a little more “obsession with the self,” as it is perhaps the least self-reflective work about the environment I have ever seen. In works new and old, glaciers melt, buildings go down the drain, and visitors are preached at relentlessly. Oil canisters dangle from the ceiling; they are printed with maps of countries involved, as victim or perpetrator, in the oil-colonialism industrial complex, like Iran and Nigeria. Industrial Revolutions Pregame (2024), named for a pastime enjoyed by jocks and frat bros, is accompanied by a wall label explaining that global resource extraction via colonialism propelled the release of greenhouse gases. Kline’s work is better when it speculates and extrapolates rather than when it tells us what we already know.
Besides being obvious in subject and literal in form, the whole show reeks, literally—at MOCA LA, you must inhale noxious fumes from the sheets of plastic covering the gallery floors. Plastic is the least eco material imaginable—and it is employed here excessively, mimicking the preppers saving only themselves.
The material is less hard to square with the message when you accept that the message is just doom: if we’re already screwed, might as well use all the petrochemicals you like. But if nothing can be done, dedicating a show to raising awareness just feel gratuitous. All this made me think of the opera Sun & Sea, by filmmaker Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, writer Vaiva Grainytė, and artist Lina Lapelytė, in which beachgoers sing about their climate-induced anxiety. In internal monologues belted aloud, they name the guilt and confusion that attends trying to have a nice day while the world ends. In looking inward, they invite viewers to relate. Swapping Sun & Sea’s empathy and solidarity for finger-pointing, “Climate Change” just feels like the pot calling the kettle black. To which the pot replies: Duh.