07/01/2023
At the Whitney Museum of American Art’s opening of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century,” a friend introduced me to a guy about my age. We got to talking, and he told me that he was an artist (no surprise) but that he was also an art handler. His most recent job had been installing Kline’s exhibition. The guy gestured down toward the floor we were standing on, which was plastered with T-shirts and denim, suggesting that he’d had a hand in placing them there.
For a minute I considered asking him whether he was actually part of the exhibition, which showcases over a decade of Josh Kline’s sculptures, videos, and installations, all rife with references to labor and class. Across two floors of the Whitney, viewers will find 11 exhibition spaces with names like “Blue Collars” and “Unemployment.” Kline, who’s been living in New York for most of the 21st century, has long deployed, combined, and mutated the aesthetics of the fashion show and the FEMA tent, the cop car and the corporate uniform, the iPhone and the surveillance drone—showing the ways in which cultural and political forces intertwine to produce the class conditions of daily life.
Patricia Dillon Photography