Barbara London: My guest today is the artist, Josh Kline. Born in 1979, Josh studied film at Temple University in Philadelphia before he relocated to New York in 2002. Still based in New York, Josh is well known for creating immersive installations using video, sculpture, photography, and design to question how emerging technologies are changing human life in the 21st century. His art has been shown at the Whitney; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; and at many other museums and galleries around the world. Josh, thank you for joining me.

Josh Kline: Glad to be here.

Barbara London: We met when you were working as a curator at Electronic Arts Intermix. Founded in 1971, EAI is renowned for supporting the distribution, preservation, and study of artists’ independent video. You said that pioneering artists with work at EAI, Dan Graham and Dara Birnbaum, had an impact on your practice. Could you tell me what you learned from them?

Josh Kline: With Dan, I learned a lot from his pavilion works, about using contemporary corporate design and architecture critically. In his pavilions he was using forms and materials from corporate architecture from the 1970s. But I understood that his approach to absorbing and appropriating and deploying that aesthetic, and those materials and forms, could be just as valid when using 21st-century computer-generated architecture and design in order to critique neoliberal capitalism and what was then a new gilded age.

With Dara Birnbaum, I learned a lot about editing, but also about using an era’s cutting-edge technology. I was thinking a lot about Dara’s work when I started working with face-replacement software—what would later become deepfakes. I started using that software in 2013, before AI. When I started experimenting with that face replacement software, I was thinking about Dara’s early experiments with video editing in the early ’80s and where that went. How much of the video on YouTube and social media at the time was, in some way, a descendant of what Dara was doing. What happens when these tools—that are exclusive, or difficult to access, or just in the hands of corporations. What happens when they spread widely? I was thinking about what could happen when face-replacement software becomes or would become widespread. Sorry, I’m getting confused with the tenses, because it’s already happened. Deepfakes are a real phenomenon and a growing problem in our world. So, I was both thinking about where it could go, but also thinking about what it might mean at that time.

I don’t want to make it seem like those were the only artists that I learned from at EAI. I worked with so many artists there and learned from so many of them: Michael Smith, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Carolee Schneemann, Mike Kelley, Shigeko Kubota, as well as so many of the younger artists. In so many ways, working at EAI was my art school.

Barbara London: What did you learn from Nam June Paik? I love Nam June for his humor.

Josh Kline: Me, too. I think he’s hilarious. There’s something about his prescience in relationship to the internet. He basically predicted YouTube in his video Global Groove (1973), where he talks about a TV Guide (the magazine founded in 1953) the size of the New York Yellow Pages. Both of those metaphors are obsolete. I feel that people born after a certain point won’t even recognize those references, but it’s all come true, just not on cable television, but also on YouTube and TikTok.

Barbara London: In 2006, you found a studio space and turned very seriously to making your own art. Then a year later, it was with the artists Anicka Yi and Jon Santos that you formed a collective called Circular File. I love that metaphor of a wastebasket. At that time, a lot of artwork was not being shown. What was going on with the collective? 

Josh Kline: I had known Anicka for maybe a year or a year and a half before we formed the collective in late 2007. She wanted to start a video collective. I told her that I had this dream of having a cable-access show and being a talk show host, and then we started just riffing on that. Then together with Jon, we got really obsessed with what was going on at Comedy Central at that time, and shows like “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and a lot of the Adult Swim projects that were being made by people who had a background in art. 

At that time, it seemed like contemporary art didn’t really have a space for artists like us. Anicka didn’t finish undergrad. Jon was a graphic designer. I didn’t have a prestigious grad degree. My degree wasn’t even in art. It was in film. So, we became obsessed with the idea of creating a TV pilot and making a comedy show for Comedy Central or Adult Swim, but it then ended up going somewhere else. That work ended up informing our art practices.

Barbara London: So there never were videos, or you never did a cable thing?

Josh Kline: Well, actually, we did. The very first project that we were commissioned to do was a project for Performa in 2010. The last project that Circular File did as a collective. Performa commissioned us to make a three-episode show for New York cable-access, which was called “Circular File Channel”, and Anicka, Jon, and I produced it. We roped in all our friends, and bunch of other people. We got a temporary studio on Canal Street that we painted chroma key green, and we shot content in the studio. 

It was a merciless production. I was still working full-time at EAI, a 45- to 50-hour a week job. So for three months, after work, I would go to the studio and shoot and edit, and then shoot on the weekends. We made the show, and that was the end of the collective. But the video projects that we had been working on led directly into the video that I ended up making on my own and, in many ways, into the sculpture that I was making. 

Barbara London: I love the titles you come up with.

Josh Kline: Thanks.

Barbara London: In May 2009, you organized “Nobodies New York”, a group show at the artist-run space 179 Canal. You included your own 25 Tylenol Paintings from 2008 and 2009, works on paper that you hung in a grid, with the drug’s logo clumsily hand-drawn in oil pastel. It was very funny. You also featured the work of Anicka Yi, Margaret Lee, Trevor Shimizu—your friend at EAI—Antoine Catala, and Alisa Baremboym. In the show’s announcement, you wrote, “Some of my friends and some of their friends are making really confusing and strange art with painting and sculpture, and no one’s seen it. And everything they’re making, on and off jobs with computers, and cameras, and souped-up cellphones.” They were holding other jobs, like artist assistants, stylists, administrators, and were using credit cards to stretch their salaries to fund their studio practice. So, the show seems like it was really part of what you were doing yourself.

Josh Kline: Now looking back, I think that was the first show that I curated as an artist, rather than as a curator, which is how I was making a living. In every way, I think it violated most of what I had been taught were the professional standards of a curator at that time. Beyond including myself, I just included all my friends. It was an exercise in community, bringing together these artists who nobody would show at that time. The title was a joke about the No New York (1978) compilation “no wave” record that Brian Eno produced in the late ’70s, but it also was a real title. We were all total nobodies at the time, and it was just this weekend show at this very raw project space that wasn’t even a project space. It was just this space where Margaret Lee was throwing parties, and I convinced her to let me curate a three-day group show there. 

The criteria for being in the show was that the artists in the show were people who I had traded studio visits with in the run-up to the show. People who has said yes to trading visits. It was really a project that was both a response to the moment and also to the opportunity that the financial crisis and the great recession presented for artists like my peers and me. Prior to the crash, most artists in the early 2000s had to attend these extremely expensive MFA programs—that you really had to be rich to attend—in order to get a foot in the door. Either rich or you had to be willing to put yourself in a crushing debt of $100,000 for an MFA.

None of the curators or gallerists would see your work if it didn’t first appear in a studio or a thesis show at Columbia, Yale, or Bard. That’s where people would go to see work, and that’s how you would end up in Greater New York or the Whitney Biennial as a young artist, or in a summer group show at a gallery in Chelsea. When the financial crisis hit, all the younger galleries became super conservative. They stopped having these experimental group shows in the summer. They stopped looking for new artists, but it relieved all of us of this requirement to pass through this filter. Suddenly, an artist-run space was no longer a joke. In the 2000s, if you told somebody you were showing at an artist-run space, people would turn their nose up at you and imagine some shitty space in Bushwick, but this totally changed after Lehman Brothers.

And so, the work that we were all making was really nascent. It was still in a very early and experimental phase, but it was an opportunity for us to show work on our own terms in our own space. This incredible community came out of that moment.

Barbara London: The term you used, “On your own terms,” is a lot about how I see you and your practice. You moved forward.

Josh Kline: It’s interesting to think about that generation from the ’70s—the canonical artists from the ’60s and the ’70s—who we both worked closely with. You much more than me. They were doing things on their own terms, in a way that I think a lot of artists lost the ability to afterwards. They gave themselves permission to strike out in completely new directions and reinvent what art could be. I think for me and a lot of my peers coming after the 2000s, which were also a very conservative time for contemporary art, we wanted to claim that same ability. But we were rooted in the present, in our own present.

Barbara London: That’s so interesting. I want to go on to a work of yours that I saw at the gallery 47 Canal in 2011, and was called Creative Hands. I love the fact that you created these hands out of silicone, and you installed them on a shelf as if for sale at a Duane Reade drugstore. Each hand clutches a contemporary token of a profession: a re-toucher holding an Apple mouse, a studio manager holding a bottle of Advil. In your own hand, that of a curator, you hold a Purell hand sanitizer. What were you mass-producing here? 

Josh Kline: These works aren’t really about mass production. They’re about social media and the self-trafficking that creative workers engage in as they promote themselves and turn themselves into brands. Maybe it’s less about mass production and more about mass distribution. The shelves are literally the same kind of shelves that Duane Reade pharmacies in New York use. At that time, Duane Reade had rebranded their stores, taking on the aesthetics of luxury airport malls or the Apple Store, lit by cold bright white LED lighting, and designed by the kind of creator workers who appear in Creative Hands. 

Barbara London: Similar in approach, you made Sleep is for the Weak (2011), which was presented in your “Dignity and Self-Respect” exhibition at 47 Canal. On a shelf, sit three Bodum French press coffee makers filled not with coffee, but with Red Bull, DayQuil, Coke Zero, Vivarin, Dentyne Ice chewing gum, and ibuprofen. Does this work address desire, or trying to keep up with New York’s exhausting 24-hour work cycle?

Josh Kline: People do desire these substances. The work is about the “always on” economy, not just in New York, but everywhere, about that economy and about the demands that it places on workers in it. When I worked at EAI, full-time employees were given healthcare, but there were always copays when you went to the doctor or had to pay for medicine. I got really interested in the copay, which is so pervasive in our economy. In Sleep Is for the Weak, I was thinking about what I call the coffee copay. Vivarin means caffeine pills. Coffee is a productivity enhancing drug that most workers rely on to get through their workday. And yet in many workplaces, even though the employer depends on coffee to keep workers productive and delivering, the employee must cover the cost. There are so many copays like this in our society—cold medicine that allows sick workers to go into work, expensive professional clothing that helps keep up appearances at the company, et cetera.

Sleep Is for the Weak is also about the lengths that people will go to, to both excel for their employer, but also to keep a job, like transforming their own biology and their own biochemistry for the benefit of their place of employment. The French press coffee makers—they’re not filled with coffee. They’re filled with these other substances. For instance, the Dayquil replaces water, and it’s brewing Dentyne Ice. The Coke Zero is brewing Advil pills, and the Red Bull energy drink is brewing caffeine pills, doubling down on caffeine. What’s the next step beyond coffee? For some people, it’s Red Bull. For other people, it’s Adderall.

Barbara London: You’ve done a lot of work that revolves around “the worker”. In 2014, your practice took off. That year, you made Living Wages. I was very startled when I first saw a FedEx worker’s head lying on Styrofoam peanuts in a cardboard packing box. Is this a next step from the work we just discussed?

Josh Kline: Not really. 2014 was the year when I was finally able to pursue art full-time. It allowed me to make a lot more art, and part of this was developing new bodies of work. This is another place where my background in film and media has informed the shape of my practice as an artist. I don’t have this iterative linear studio practice where one thing leads to another, which leads to another. I have these different and very separate bodies of work that are almost like separate groups of novels or separate groups of films that have a set of characters within them, and a set of issues within them that are different from the other bodies of work.

In 2014, I created this new body of work called Blue Collars that was explicitly about working people—people in these lower paid, lower prospects jobs. This is a term that was used in the media at that time. Lower paid, lower prospects jobs that were replacing the better paid, middle-class, working-class jobs that had been outsourced to lower paid workers overseas, and also to robots in this earlier industrial phase of workplace automation. When I left my job at EAI, I had been making this body of work about creative labor, about people like me. I was setting up a new studio and ordering things from this new service called Amazon Prime, ordering all the accoutrements of an office,all delivered by FedEx and DHL at that time. I started wondering about the realities of being a worker for FedEx or for DHL. “What was it like for these people? Were they in a union? Did they have better benefits than I had had as a nonprofit arts worker?” I wanted to know more.

I talked to these people. I interviewed them. I started making these portraits based on 3D-scans of FedEx delivery workers. And what I learned was that no, they were not in unions. They were being horribly exploited by FedEx. The company had a way of hiring these people through a third-party contractor that allowed them to avoid providing any benefits to them, whatsoever.

These works are about the objectification of workers, of people becoming their jobs, of the erasure or the boundaries between a job and a person’s identity. They are admittedly very brutal works, these brutal portraits of blue collar workers. You described being startled when you first saw a FedEx worker’s head lying in a bed of Styrofoam packing peanuts, which were also based on a scan of the FedEx worker’s head. Startling the audience was really the point.

This was a time when social media had already come fully into its own on Instagram, on Facebook, and wherever. I was thinking about the glut of images—especially in the news—of still images and also moving images, that people are exposed to and how little of that people retain. I wanted to find a way through sculpture to leave an impression withpeople that wouldn’t be so easily discarded or forgotten. If you can forget an image of a worker that you see on the news, maybe it’s harder if it’s a three-dimensional solid photograph of someone. 

Barbara London: In 2014, you also made Skittles. It was exhibited in New York on The High Line and illuminated day and night. The work consisted of a sleek industrial fridge, one you might find at a 7-Eleven, containing what initially appeared to be a normal array of smoothies or juices organized by color and arranged very neatly. However, each bottle contained a very surprising list of ingredients. There’s a purplish-brown slurry called “Supplements”, and it features Rogaine, blueberries, Viagra. “Big Data” contains fragments of Google Glass eyewear, shredded Verizon phone bills, omega-3 fish oil, Purell, and porn. “Minimum Wage” mixes Mr. Clean, money orders, medical scrubs, phone cards, and French fries. Obviously, there’s a little bit of economic leveling there. What were you saying about our lives and the strategies of advertising with this work?

Josh Kline: This is definitely a work about class. When Cecilia Alemani, who is the curator of The High Line, approached me about commissioning something for the park, I wanted to make something that would be site-specific that would respond to what the Meatpacking District neighborhood had become. It was now this luxury retail and luxury nightlife district, and those liquids were directly based on actual consumer products. 

A couple of years earlier, I had this moment walking into a Whole Foods, where there were these juices that had a list of ingredients and a color above them, all printed in Helvetica font on the side of this bottle. One of them was essentially an expensive version of the master cleanse, which was this lemonade with cayenne pepper and honey that people would drink as a cleanse. In other words, people were starving themselves and all they would do is drink this lemonade with cayenne pepper. You could make this at home, but this juice company at Whole Foods was selling this master cleanse lemonade for $12 a bottle. There was another one, a green juice that was $15. I visited L.A. around the same time, and juice culture was really big out there, with places like Moon Juice or Erewhon. You would have these equally, extremely expensive juices and smoothies that people were consuming, paying $20 or $25 for a juice or smoothie. At first, I laughed when I encountered these things, but then I started taking them seriously because of what they say about class, thinking about what it means for someone to drink $25 or drink $20, to drink money in this way and what that tells us about class in the early 21st century. 

There’s also an aspect of this that’s about advertising. The display—the structure that this fridge is in—is based on bank architecture. Again, this came out of a conversation with Dan Graham, although taken into the present. I was working with bank architecture. All of the ATM machines in Citibanks and Chase banks, and all banks, are surrounded by glowing light boxes. I surrounded the fridge in Skittles with the same kind of light boxes to reference bank architecture and to get at that. And , also to think about how these juice companies and places like Duane Reade were displaying soft drinks and also hygiene products under LED lights—a new phenomenon at that time—in stores. Because of how cheap LEDs suddenly were they became ubiquitous. Suddenly you would have all the shampoo and all the Coke Zero at Duane Reade illuminated with these sparkling LED lights. It’s a work about contemporary life at the time. Now, it’s a period piece..

Barbara London: I’m curious. The piece went into an exhibition at MoMA entitled “New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century” in 2019. So, you had to remake Skittles. You and your studio manager, along with the MoMA staff, remade the work and mixed all of those indigestible drinks in the museum’s conservation lab for the exhibition. MoMA had recently acquired the work; ownership and preservation of Skittles is actually quite complex. How does that make you feel that Skittles is going to be preserved into the future, and that MoMA has the formula, the instructions, and everything?

Josh Kline: I’m so happy that it’s not my responsibility. I was overjoyed when MoMA acquired Skittles. This was the first test run for reproducing Skittles—for curator Michelle Kuo’s exhibition before the pandemic. Back around 2016, I rented a temporary studio.  Me, my studio manager Eliza Ryan, and a couple other people were grinding up tennis balls and credit cards, and all sorts of things. It was like a meth lab where we were grinding all this stuff up and putting it in little baggies. And along the way writing up instructions for reproducing the work. I made MoMA a bunch of kits. Beyond that, they’ll have to source these materials and substances, or in the far future, perhaps find ways to reproduce them. We were having what were for them probably outlandish conversations. Something like Red Bull won’t be around forever. Assuming that we don’t blast ourselves back into the Dark Ages or into extinction in the next 100 years, there’s a certain point where it might be easier to fabricate Red Bull from scratch than to try and source it in a landfill or in somebody’s archival storage.

Barbara London: Now I want to know about Freedom, which you made in 2015 and was presented that year in the New Museum Triennial. Again, a lot of your work takes me aback. That work was sinister and menacing, in terms of the environment that you created. There were four towering Teletubbies dressed in SWAT gear, and they occupied a rather barren gallery space. What led to that work?

Josh Kline: It a sinister and menacing environment. It’s a dystopian work, but these works are a reflection of the dystopia that we’re inhabiting. We’re not inhabiting a utopian moment in history. I’m always a little confused by artists who are making very positive work today, people who are making work that’s whimsical in 2024. People making whimsical work in the middle of the Great Recession also seemed very strange. It’s a bit like people making whimsical work in the 1930s. It just seems out of place and out of time.

Freedom, the installation that we’re talking about, was the first chapter in a group of installations about the 21st century. It’s a science fiction project within art about certain key issues that seemed likely—when I set out making this thing in 2014 to define life in the 21st century. Not just life, but politics, economics, and human existence in the 21st century, and where they could be going, explored within the space of science fiction. Freedom was a starting point. The environment was based on Zuccotti Park, which is the corporate office park in downtown Manhattan, in the Financial District where Occupy Wall Street was encamped in 2011. And the floor is modeled directly after the floor of Zuccotti Park, which is also a gray surface. The real Zucotti Park is made of stone or concrete tiles with these LED panels interspersed that look like they’re from Star Wars. 

The Police Teletubbies in Freedom are based on the NYPD’s militarized riot cops, who were policing all the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, all the early Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and all the other demonstrations. It’s a work about the police, it’s a work about social media, it’s a work about political speech and democracy in an era defined by social media. What happens to political speech and political organizing when it’s all happening on corporate social media? This is something that’s addressed more directly in the videos that play in the stomachs of the Teletubbies, which incorporate actual activists and their social media feeds among other things. There’s also a deepfake of President Obama and a deepfake of the Bush administration in the installation, as well.

Barbara London: In writing, and maybe in some of our conversations, you’ve noted how you’ve thought a lot lately about the purpose of installation in our culture and what use they have. You’ve come to see installation as a very primitive forerunner or a testing ground for virtual reality. Video games are one kind of virtual reality, but installations are another step on the way to immersive augmented reality and virtual reality. Do you see a relationship between sculpting in physical space and sculpting in video space? I think you are a master of both.

Josh Kline: Both of these questions are related. Coming back to curation, I organized a show at PS1 in 2013 called “ProBio.” It’s the last major exhibition that I curated of my peers. In that show, I set out making a show about the post-human condition that contemporary work was creating for workers. But once the show was up—looking at all the work in the show—I understood something formally. All of the artists in the show were taking a new approach—a non-linear approach to production, which is similar to the way that film and television work now. You can go into production. You can shoot. And while you’re shooting, an editor is editing. You then shoot more, and that goes into the edit. After you’ve wrapped your shoot, you realize you’re missing footage. You go back and shoot more, and then that goes into the edit. Things are being changed that you had shot because the script changed later, and you have VFX coming in at different points. VFX, meaning special effects. Visual effects. What I saw among the artists in the show, and myself included, was this approach to making art where you would make art on a kind of reality spectrum with real reality on one end, synthetic virtual reality on the other end, and various degrees of augmented reality in between. Some people would start with a real object that would be scanned, or photographed, or shot on video and then manipulated in the computer. Then output again as video, as an object, as an image, or as a performance. Or people would start at the other end, taking images and then applying them to objects or videos. Making an object, shooting images of that object and overlaying the images of the object on top of the object. So, in a way, the work in that show or the work that I saw my peers making at that point in 2012 and 2013 was this premonition of augmented reality. It’s almost like augmented reality before augmented reality. These people were creating it before it was possible through commercially accessible technology way. It was already happening in the art.

This was certainly true in my own work. I think about the work that I make with 3D scanning and 3D printing as coming out of video space. make full color 3D scans using photogrammetry technology, which is this technology where you use multiple cameras, normally in a rig with 130 to 180 digital cameras that are all connected, synced. You put a person, an object, something in the middle of all those cameras, inside this hemisphere of cameras. You press a button, the cameras all shoot at the same moment, and then you get 180 high-resolution images from the same exact moment that you feed into an algorithm that generates a photographic three-dimensional digital model that you can then manipulate in the computer. And when you work with it in the computer; you’re essentially sculpting, moving this model around in what people in the ’70s would have thought of as video space. You’re sculpting in video space. You’re   manipulating this thing that might look like clay or might look like a three-dimensional photograph in video space, and then you’re printing it out, or potentially using it in a video if you animate it. 

I guess what I really see is this relationship between these processes and between the physical space, the digital space, the virtual space. They’re all, in a way, blurring at this point. And installation is an interesting space to deal with these phenomena, at least for me. It really does feel like a primitive form of virtual reality.

Barbara London: Last month at Lisson Gallery in New York, you had a show entitled “Social Media”, and you presented a new series of 3D printed self-portraits, body parts in life-size. It seems that the focus was on the technological tools that you use every day as an artist. This included your keyboard, your phone, the computer mouse, alongside of your arms, your legs, your head; and each sculpture was composed using custom replicas of the studio furniture to conjure your studio. Your body parts were overlaid with corporate logos, credit card transactions. These sculptures were more lifelike than ever. I read somewhere that this new suite of your sculptural works has a connection to the ubiquitous selfie as a critique. I’m wondering, what are you questioning here in this turbulent era’s obsession with the self? 

Josh Kline: I am looking at that. For sure. In some way it’s about the narcissism of social media. But really, it’s a critique of the art industry. The exhibition is installed in in a series of four art fair booths, the “architecture” that I was deploying in the gallery. I hired a company that installs and rents art fair booths and had them install their booths in the Lisson gallery for the show. 

Then I installed these portraits of myself as an artist—standing in for artists today—in this environment of art fair booths. I wanted to talk about what it means to be an artist in an era where the market is so primary. Where at this point, the primary site for seeing art is not the exhibition, but the art fair booth. I was thinking about what is happening to American artists in the wake of the pandemic—American artists who are all forced by the structures of our field to be present in New York City. Which is one of the most expensive cities on earth.What does that do to art? What does it do to American art? The answer right now is that it’s making art extremely conservative and cynical and focused on the market. I made this work that was about these conditions and also about having to sell yourself as an artist in the middle of it. In the middle of this new field that we find ourselves in. 

Those new sculptures are much more lifelike than the other older ones. The technology of 3D scanning and 3D printing has advanced since the earlier work that I made. When I first started doing 3D printing in 2012, the color 3D prints were printing at 72 DPI, which is the resolution of a webpage. In 2018, when I made 3D prints before the pandemic, the printers were printing at 600 or 700 DPI. The new prints are at 1800 DPI. It’s a dramatic jump up in realism. DPI, for people who don’t know, is dots per inch. It’s how much information is packed into an inch on paper or, in this case, on a 3D print.

It’s not just corporate brands and logos that are on the prints I made. Some of the sculptures are literal three-dimensional photographs of my hand. A full-color 3D print of my arm that’s covered with the 3D photographic image of my arm from the scan. You can take that surface off, though, in the computer and replace it with another photographic surface. This was something I started doing in the earlier 3D printed sculptures of working people. I would replace the surface of the body with photographs of tools or uniforms from people’s employment.

Here, I was doing the same thing with myself. With this project, I felt like it was time to put myself in front of the camera. All these things that I had asked other people to do, I felt like I should do them to myself. And I should admit or make clear that not only am I complicit in all of this, but I’m also not divorced from these phenomena that I’m investigating. They’re just as applicable for me as they are for the other workers that I’m dealing with, just in a slightly different way. I experience precarity as an artist. It’s different, very different from the precarity that a FedEx delivery worker has, but we’re both experiencing kinds of precarity under neoliberal capitalism.

The images on the surface of these sculptures are photographs of my own art. So, it’s not just an image of some random Amazon box printed on the surface of my leg, for instance, or on my keyboard. It’s a photograph of the cardboard floor made from Amazon Boxes that’s part of my Unemployment installation, photographed at the Whitney in my survey in 2023. Essentially photographs of that show on my body. Other sculptures are surfaced with photographs of the credit card that I used to pay for that show. It’s on my head, replacing my face. Credit card statements with the production expenses for the Whitney show are on another version of my face or my arm. That’s what that show is about. It’s a very personal show.

Barbara London: Very autobiographical.

Josh Kline: Yeah, for sure.

Barbara London: When we had a coffee last summer, we were talking about the complexity of working with 3D printing. It isn’t a cakewalk. You work hard, and there’s a lot of skill involved. You manage to push ahead. You were telling me that the colors are very difficult to get exactly the way you want. Do you see a connection between 3D printing and how artists experimented with early consumer video gear in the late ’60s? 

Josh Kline: I absolutely do. I was thinking a lot about that at that time, thinking about the bespoke video processing machines that artists like the Vasulkas would build and how difficult they were to work with, or thinking even about Dara Birnbaum. In order to edit her early videos, she would get favors from friends who worked as commercial video editors. They would sneak her into broadcast studios and give her access to professional video editing equipment. She was making those videos before VCRs were available. I also think about a lot of the artists who I interacted with when I worked at Electronic Arts Intermix, people like Joan Jonas, for instance, or Dan Graham, or Carolee Schneemann, who would come in to edit their videos at EAI. And they were doing this despite the existence of cheap, non-linear video editing software, like Premiere or Final Cut Pro. The reason was because they had come of age as artists before that software and never learned how to use it. 

I remember thinking how strange it was, when I first saw Joan Jonas coming in to edit with Seth Price, who also used to work at EAI, that she didn’t know how to use the tools used to make her own art. It was funny because I became one of these people myself, later on. I don’t know how to use the 3D modeling software either. I know how to use video editing software and I know how to use Photoshop, and obviously, I know how to use word processing software to write, but I never learned how to use the 3D modeling software.  It’s not to say that I couldn’t, but I think it would take years to become as proficient and as fast as the people that I work with

Barbara London: In 2023, your “Project for a New Century” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art was basically a career retrospective. You and curator Chris Lew did an extraordinary job organizing, given that your practice is not simple. There is always a lot that’s going on with each work, and there were so many standouts in the show. I thought it would be good to focus on Personal Responsibility (2023), an installation in eight parts, each part with a tent, a mini environment, and an interview as a video projection. These videos were extraordinarily well produced. You had titles for them—Desperation, Free Trade, Remittance, Isolation. They have a kind of a dark outlook. I wonder if you would like to say something about the exhibition and the work.

Josh Kline: I had this long-running dream to do a survey that would be a survey of installations, and to finally present an exhibition of these installations that I’ve been making over the last 15 years, to present them together. I wanted a viewer to be able to walk through them, moving from installation to installation.

“Personal Responsibility” was the newest one of the installations that I have made. I showed an unfinished version of the installation at the Whitney, and then completed it for the solo exhibition I have up right now at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “Personal Responsibility” is again, dystopian science fiction. It’s part of a larger project about the climate crisis and where it could go, but it’s also a project about mass migration. 

As I was working on “Personal Responsibility” in 2020, 2021, 2022, it became a project about the pandemic. I think it’s dark for that reason. Living in New York during the pandemic in 2020, no one could argue that we were living in a dystopia. Our experiences of that dystopia varied. Some people had a more dystopian experience than others. There were people who had to get on the crowded buses or crowded subways to go to work in 2020 with their masks on, with no vaccine, no real protection; there were the doctors working in the hospitals; these people, and, of course, all of the people who died, who passed away from COVID. These people experienced the harshest dystopia of all.

But all of us who were trapped in our houses, endlessly isolated or struggling with our families or incredibly lonely, were falling apart in all sorts of ways and were experiencing dystopia in real time. I think the results of that have blossomed into the election that we just had. I think there’s no way to understand the second election of Donald Trump, without understanding the pandemic and that experience for most Americans.

All that said, “Personal Responsibility” was still a climate refugee camp, a fictional climate refugee camp with eight tents, each of which took the form of a different kind of shelter that migrants have used somewhere around the world over the last 25 years. And not just in America. There are refugee shelters that the UN has used in France or Berlin and Turkey to house Syrian refugees from the Syrian Civil War in the mid-2010s. There’s a tent that takes the form of a car; thinking about people who lose their jobs and end up living in their cars in places like Los Angeles or even in the suburbs of New York, or everywhere.

These titles are really about these conditions—desperation, isolationism, patriotism, austerity. These are the phenomena that we’re all grappling with right now. I really came to see the pandemic as a kind of dry run for the climate crisis and what so many of us will experience in the middle of the 21st century. It’s really a master class in the disruption of normal life. If you think about how normal life was disrupted in the pandemic for two years, what will it look like when normal life is disrupted for, I don’t know, five years or hundreds of years, when the sea levels rise and wipe out all the world’s coastal cities sometime later in the 21st century?

That’s what this work is about. Inside the tents are fictional video interviews. Each video features a fictional climate refugee who talks about surviving a climate catastrophe in the future. But then underneath it, there’s this conversation about the American myth of personal responsibility. Who is responsible for fixing the climate crisis? Is it the fossil fuel companies and the banks and the politicians that enable them? Is it the U.S. military, which one of the largest carbon emitters on earth? 

What is the individual’s responsibility? Is it really the responsibility of the individual to fix these things? That idea of personal responsibility in American culture is a way to deflect responsibility from the people in power and from the corporations that are shaping everything, and from the politicians. It deflects responsibility onto individuals who have relatively limited power other than a vote, the ability to vote in elections. Then underneath all of that, there’s another layer in the interviews that’s talking about the experience of the pandemic. It’s doing not just double duty, but triple or quadruple duty, tackling a whole range of issues. 

Formally, it was an exciting project to take on because it was a real challenge to think about how to show long-form video in an installation like this. There’s about an hour and a half of video in “Personal Responsibility”. How do you get a museum audience to watch that much video? This is a trick that I learned from Mike Kelley, from his 2006 work Day Is Done. If you break up a long video, and then you hide it in a bunch of different sculptures or stations, you can trick your audience into watching long videos by making them move around. Whereas if you just have one channel on one screen, they’ll leave after five minutes. Ten or twenty minutes if you’re lucky.

Barbara London: Well, it worked because you had chairs.

Josh Kline: Yes, comfortable chairs are also very important.

Barbara London: The entire environment was visually interesting, as was the video. 

Josh Kline: Thanks, Barbara.

Barbara London: I know you are still work with the moving image. I don’t know if you want to tell me what is coming next.

Josh Kline: I think video and the moving image is always at the core of what I’m doing. Even when I’m making installations and sculptures, in some way it all grows out of an interest, and experience, and a history of working with video, and an education in filmmaking, which was my formal training. I have plans for new videos. For a project in 2026, I’m hoping to go back into deepfakes and to make another deepfake video about politics. I’ve been thinking a lot about deepfakes and politics, especially around the recent election in the United States.

At the same time, I’m working towards a feature film. I finished the first draft of a screenplay for the feature a little over a month ago. I’m now in the process of editing and revising that with the help of a producer I’m working with. I think in the long run, I’ve been exploring techniques, and strategies, and forms, and ideas from cinema within video art for a number of years. Now I want to explore them in cinema itself. I want to make a movie. Hopefully make more than one movie! I’m having lots of ideas in that space, in narrative. But at the same time, I think going into that directly is freeing me up as an artist to experiment in video again. 

Barbara London: Knowing you for quite a while, I have to say it’s always very exciting to learn what you’re thinking about, how you’re doing it, and how you approach it. I’m excited for you.

Josh Kline: Thanks, Barbara. It’s so much fun to talk with you about this. So often, when I have conversations about my work, I think a lot of people involved in art don’t understand or aren’t familiar with the history of video art. It’s very difficult to have a conversation about my work rooted in those art historical references without that knowledge. It’s been really fun.

Barbara London: Well, I love talking with you, and I can’t wait to see you again.

Josh Kline: Likewise.

Barbara London: Thank you very, very much.

Josh Kline: Thanks for having me.
 

Support for Barbara London Calling 3.0 comes from the Richard Massey Foundation and from an anonymous donor.

The series is produced by Ryan Leahey, with audio engineer Amar Ibrahim and production assistant Sharifa Moore.

Be sure to like and subscribe to Barbara London Calling 3.0 so you can keep up with all the latest episodes. Follow us on Instagram at @Barbara_London_Calling and check out barbaralondon.net for transcripts of each episode and links to the works discussed.

The series is produced by Ryan Leahey, with production assistant Sharifa Moore. Web design by Sol Skelton and Vivian Selbo.

Special thanks to Masayoshi Fujita and Erased Tapes Music for graciously providing our music, and thanks to Independent Curators International for their help with the series. Additional thanks to Kerosene Jones and Vuk Vuković.

This conversation was recorded December 3, 2024; it has been edited for length and clarity.