A useful coincidence: I found myself writing this essay in parallel with a brief review of Project for a New American Century, the mid-career survey of artist Josh Kline currently on view at the Whitney Museum. This utility is one of contrast. As Kline, speaking with Laura Poitras in an interview for the exhibition catalogue, has it, “If the world is burning down and you’re choosing to take pictures of flowers—you know, as much as I enjoy beautiful pictures of the flowers, it’s a little odd?” The world is burning down, yes, and the films under consideration in what follows contain a great number of beautiful pictures of flowers. We’ll return to the matter of oddity.
So far as recent evidence shows, Kline’s position on the problem of content is the dominant one when it comes to the institutional approval of moving-image work, which is as true of the major venues still dedicated to showing films outside the conventions of the narrative feature as it is of the art world proper (the line between the two is, anyway, now vanishingly thin). The goal, it seems, is to reproduce the world as clearly and directly as possible, drawing in and on the common textures of modern life to articulate an inevitable truth of our experience of it, providing annotations as copiously as required to ensure this truth’s admission into some number of existing discourses. The effectiveness of the work in shaping these available discourses to its own requirements and desires—which may or may not be identical with its makers’—is taken to be beside the point; it’s the thought that counts.
It’s less than obvious why a picture of a flower would be unable to meet these demands. Are flowers not the finest of naturally occurring memento mori? I’ll offer that the implication, or at least one potential implication, is that “picture of a flower” refers to an object whose content is not the flower itself, but the artist’s vision of the flower, which is only the latest instance of a tradition of picturing stretching back millennia. The work’s expressive energy is taken to be limited by the bounds of the strange
