This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The second article in this series highlights the work of American artist Josh Kline.
The first exhibition by Josh Kline I visited was seven years ago at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. This city is historically significant for various reasons. It was the first capital of Italy from 1861 to 1865 hosts the world’s oldest Egyptian museum (founded in 1824) devoted entirely to ancient Egyptian culture; and in 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Turin to write three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo. The socio-political history of Turin, combined with a prominent school of continental philosophy where Umberto Eco, Mario Perniola, and Gianni Vattimo were educated, also inspired the rise of “arte povera,” “poor art.” Art critic Germano Celant developed this notion to describe the works of Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, and Giulio Paolini, among other renowned artists based in this beautiful city of northern Italy. Although Kline’s exhibition and oeuvre have more to do with “great emergencies” than “poor art,” both are often misunderstood. Just as “arte povera” does not principally refer to “poor” art material–it’s more about making art without the restraints of the commercialized gallery system–Kline’s “great emergencies” do not concern single or exclusive emergencies. But what are “great emergencies” for the American artist?
The great emergencies that interest Kline, as I explained a few months later in an article about him in E-flux, are the absent ones, that is, those left unattended, such as climate change, police surveillance, and widespread unemployment. COVID-19 was an “absent” or “great” emergency for many years–as international organizations warned us it could spread–that suddenly became an emergency. The more absent an emergency is from our spiritual predicament, the greater it is. This is why Kline, discussing with filmmaker Laura Poitras, explained he wants to “focus on issues that were certain to define the century ahead but that were still nascent or ignored.” These, he continued, are “massive dislocations that will be caused by anthropogenic climate change: the coming loss of all the world’s coasts and coastal cities, flows of refugees on an unprecedented scale… Automation and AI and the looking of disemployment of the world’s professional class, likely followed by the destabilization of the world’s advanced economies, the weakening of democracy, and the rise of authoritarian regimes.” [1]
Kline’s goal—similar to that of other contemporary artists such as Beverly Fishman and Diane Burko, among others—is not to “rescue us from” these great emergencies as much as “rescue us into” them. To achieve this, his oeuvre is divided into projects that concern absent emergencies and their consequences. This is probably why the survey of his installations, 3D sculptures, and videos at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art last year was titled Project for a New American Century and the ongoing show in MOCA Los Angeles, Climate Change. In these exhibitions, Kline “pro-jects” our lives once the great emergency of unemployment, surveillance, and climate change have become an emergency. The floating ice sculptures of a cityscape slowly melting and short films of climate-change refugees adapting to an emergency they did not create are attempts to rescue us into these emergencies. Although Kline projects concern different great emergencies, which are all interconnected, we will briefly focus on Contagious Unemployment, which was exposed in Turin, and Blue Collars, as one of its videos will be shown at The Greatest Emergency exhibition in Madrid this fall.
The sculptures composing Contagious Unemployment were completed in 2016, several years after the subprime mortgage crisis and before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Although the viruses these works convey are not viral but rather economical, their aim is to rescue us into the great emergency of unemployment caused by financial crises and automation. The giant-size virus made of clear plastic contains cardboard filed boxes similar to the ones we saw in many photographs of workers leaving Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York in 2008. These boxes are filled with office accessories such as framed vacation photos, plants, and cups, among other intimate objects. Each one is illuminated from within in a darkened room, which conveys a sense of drama, crisis, and emergency. These sculptures are accompanied by real-size 3D scanned sculptural portraits of office workers curled in the fetal position and wrapped in clear plastic. Both sculptures are situated in 2030 or 2040, when automation will most likely have replaced these workers, rendering them obsolete discarded features of our past instead of human beings.
Blue Collars, probably more than any other project, conveys Kline’s anti-capitalist stance as it rescues viewers into the precarious conditions of employees in the service sector–from waitresses to delivery workers–which have become a symptom of neoliberalism’s structural failure and a sign of an existential struggle characteristic of the 21st century. The interview with Jenn, a 22-year-old waitress at Applebee’s, reveals the challenges of earning a living with a meager hourly wage, heavily reliant on unpredictable tips to cover her living expenses, and a sense of hopelessness as other options seem perpetually out of reach. To convey this sense of hopelessness, Kline also created 3D models of various parts of these workers’ bodies accompanied by their employer’s branding. These “solid videos,” as he described them, are meant to disclose the emergency these blue-collar employees experience as their identities are subsumed by their companies. But as Kline writes in the first pages of the Whitney’s exhibition catalog, “Capitalism doesn’t care about you… You are not your job. You are not your career. You are a human being.”[2]
As we can see, Kline and other artists concerned with rescuing us into our greatest emergencies believe salvation is still possible. But salvation does not simply consist in being warned – as Christopher Knight implies in his recent review of Kline’s exhibition in Los Angeles[3] – but rather in experiencing our greatest emergencies. This is only possible through those artists who manage to rescue into these experiences independently of how remote, exceptional, and apocalyptic they seem now. Josh Kline is one of them.
All photos are courtesy of Josh Kline unless otherwise indicated.
About the writer: Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of many books, including Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (forthcoming in 2025). His opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, E-Flux, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other international media outlets.
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Josh Kline, “Extinction Story and Other Possibilities.” A Conversation between Josh Kline and Laura Poitras. Josh Kline, Project for a New American Century, edited by Christopher Y. Lew. (New York: Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2023), 196. ↑
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Josh Kline, Project for a New American Century, edited by Christopher Y. Lew. (New York: Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2023), xii. ↑
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Christopher Knight writes that in Kline’s exhibition “apparently, we’re being warned that, here in the present, we could stop it. No kidding.” (Christopher Knight, “At MOCA, ice sculptures comment on climate change. It’s art that drowns in good intentions,” in The Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2024 ↑