The Brooklyn Rail

New York-based artist Josh Kline’s work is often heralded as “prescient,” espousing a foreboding version of the near-future in which America is destroyed by fascism, climate change, or technological dependency—whatever takes hold first. In his 2023 mid-career survey Project for a New American Century at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first victims of his predicted apocalyptic hellscape were working- and middle-class people whose careers will be rendered obsolete by the rise of artificial intelligence and continued predatory outsourcing. Kline’s economic predictions are all but assured, but I left the survey wondering if this future weren’t already a reality for the creative industry, especially as arts workers—including myself and my former coworkers at the Whitney—were subject to layoffs in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic just three years earlier. With Social Media at Lisson Gallery, Josh Kline answers this question, turning his exacting, unsparing critique of American capitalism on himself and the art world with a sense of dark humor and introspection.

For Social Media, Lisson’s gallery space is split into four sections by clinically white, cheap-looking drywall dividers, giving the illusion of four office cubicles. In the first cubicle is a trio of mounted sculptures: “Wellness,” Whatever It Takes 2024, and Artist Fare (all 2024). Cast in an eerily flesh-toned silicone, the sculptures each consist of nine disembodied hands holding various markers of everyday life such as a donut, a Listerine bottle, and other accoutrements. One of these works—Whatever It Takes 2024—is a cheeky allusion to finding success in the art world, symbolizing three potential paths in the industry through hands holding Magic 8 Balls, braced in casts, or those that are lifeless and empty. It is arguably the weakest of the four sculptural groupings, and notably, where Kline’s physical presence is least visible.

In the next two sections of the show, Kline’s dismembered plastic body parts are splayed out on tables and chairs like a broken action figure, with his arms, legs, hands, and head cut off at the socket and arranged to reveal a hollow center—what the press release cheekily positions as approaching the selfie. These fragments are showcased alongside replicas of studio (and business) tools wrapped in the logos of common mega-conglomerates: keyboards, iPhones, and computer mouses all covered in the insignias of Amazon and FedEx. It is within this fucked-up tableau of the Modern Artist at Work that Kline examines his own complicity in the art industry, positioning himself both as a product to be sold and the one selling the product in the first place. One particularly telling detail in Professional Default Swaps (2024): a phone case with a Visa Business credit card printed on it and assigned to both “Josh Kline” and “Josh Kline Corporation.” In the same cubicle, Kline’s 3D-printed head rests on a chair in the piece New York Artist (2024), and with the similar Visa print, the card’s signature covers his eyes, a dual statement of anger at the art world economy and his active participation in it.

The showstopping final cubicle in Social Media consists of a single work, Mid-Career Artist (2024). As in his 2016 installation Unemployment, the work consists of a cast human figure curled up into a fetal position and tied up in a plastic bag. The lifeless figures in Unemployment were those of office and administrative workers whose jobs were rendered unnecessary by increased automation, the clear plastic wrapping signifying trash collection left out for pick-up in a moment of Cronenbergian body horror. Mid-Career Artist, though, suggests hyper-relevancy over obsolescence. With a 3D replica of himself in the same position and plastic wrapping as the figures in Unemployment, Kline packages himself for consumption. As with the other objects in Social Media, the artist walks a fine line, reconciling the dehumanized and commodified role of the artist in the twenty-first century with his personal benefit from the gallery system as we know it. It’s time to stop calling Josh Kline prescient—the futures he has predicted throughout his career are unfolding in front of us.