Josh Kline: “My audience shouldn’t need a press release to understand what they’re looking at”

In June, I visited Josh Kline’s solo exhibition, Project for a New American Century, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. I found, to my surprise, my own name on one of the wall labels. I worked as a production and editing assistant on one of his video projects in early 2015. Kline was making art and I, though certainly interested in his art, was making money. I couldn’t have imagined that my name would end up alongside his work. Who among us knows the names of the workshop assistants who made dogs out of stainless-steel balloons? Like most of the art world, I accepted my role as invisible labor within a larger hierarchy.

Acknowledging the people behind his art is only one aspect of how Kline investigates the contemporary art world and, by extension, the role of labor in our world at large. The often paradoxical layers of meaning in Josh’s work make it difficult to define and fascinating to talk about. He brings blue-collar workers into gallery spaces that traditionally exclude them. He experiments with new technologies while remaining skeptical and critical of their promise. He embraces dark, dystopian visions while believing in the power of rational optimism and utopian imagination.

Project for a New American Century displays videos, sculptural works, and multimedia installations from the past decade of Kline’s career. Many of these works incorporate twenty-first-century technologies, such as 3D printing and image manipulation, to explore changes in labor and capital in the U.S. and beyond. I spoke to Kline about how he envisions humanity in these inhuman contexts and what sort of future these inquiries lead him to imagine.

— Mengyin Lin for Guernica

: Can we start by talking a bit about the title of the show? The word “project” has become synonymous with “work,” which your art explores. How do you intend this title to be