Josh Kline’s Exercise in Poverty Porn

Oh, the Whitney. For more than a decade, it has been the subject of (justified) critique of its exploitative labor policies, tokenistic approaches to diversity, elitist biennial practices, White male-heavy collections, and suspect acquisition decisions, as well as foregrounding a White artist whose practice is blackface, and associations with weapons manufacturers causing an exodus of artists from the 2019 Biennial. And it has the distinction of being one of the most expensive museums in New York City. Amid these critiques, the museum has mounted a career survey of works by Josh Kline — one of the artists who did not withdraw from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

The following is a checklist of topics that the busy Kline addresses in Projects for a New American Century, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art:

Inequity: Upscale gadgets merged with cheaper versions — for example, Apple and Dell computers.

Unemployment: Glass balls in the shape of the COVID-19 virus containing the detritus of people’s lives.

The environment: Tents that show how low-income people might live, a movie about rising water levels in future Manhattan, and some models of melting buildings.

Working people: Videos of real-life working-class people talking about work, along with disembodied 3-D prints of workers’ hands and heads.

A new American civil war: Small gray structures in ruins.

The surveillance state: Statues of cops with Teletubbies’s faces and cameras embedded in their uniforms, and a cartoon robot-attack-dog sculpture.

Justice: George W. Bush and Karl Rove rendered in shitty deep fake, crying, and wearing prison uniforms.

Overmedication: IV drip bags with liquid labeled as mixtures of Ritalin, Red Bull, espresso, and other prescription medications and supplements.

The show includes more, lots more, such as representations of Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston alive in the modern era, in bad deep fake (remember when that was the thing?), doing something. It feels less like a museum exhibition than a pop-up gallery show that has somehow swollen to gigantic proportions.

The survey is as tiresome and turgid in person as it sounds from the list above. Nothing about these on-the-nose works is sublime; instead, they teeter into the perverse. One can, after all, interact with real-life low-income and working-class people for free. The (White and elderly, at least during my visit) museum-goers politely gawking at working-class — sometimes dismembered— people seemed like an exercise in poverty pornography.

The problem with the works is not only that they are boring and a little icky; the show encompasses what Guy Debord called commodity fetishism. The products, made by what must be an enormous crew of uncredited artisans under Kline’s direction, are the point rather than any genuine message. (The irony of this in a show that is purportedly about the injustice of anonymizing labor is something to behold.) Eusong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal named this “White Aesthetics” in a critique of another Whitney show: “Where the artist-CEO employs the labor of others […] to realize his unique vision.”

Kline’s work is less a They Live reveal of the underlying realities of capitalist society than a relentless display of banal items made with current technology. The artist presents no solutions, nor does he implicate the assumed museum-goer directly. It is a feel-good feel-bad show.

Except for the vaguely bummer overall message, Kline’s work also checks many of art’s traditional “kitsch” boxes. “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style but remains always the same.” It is strange to feel the need for Clement Greenberg, but here we are.

Kitsch as art can work, but the difference between Kline’s pieces and, say, Komar and Melamid or NSK or the best of Pop Art or even Kehinde Wiley is that these artists are subverting kitsch culture by using the tools of kitsch, and the works can be pretty clever.

It is hard to criticize good intentions and any attempt to advance the conversation amid a bleak landscape of declining civil rights, worsening Gini coefficients, and an imploding environment. But the Barbie movie did a better job than this exhibition of introducing social topics to a broad audience.

A Whitney employee noted, “The exhibit you should be writing about is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map — that is good! Josh Kline is pretty obvious.” Robert Ciro, a Red Hook, New Jersey barber, told me of the exhibition,” I don’t like the idea of rich people using poor working people as entertainment.”

Artists can address all of these issues in a way that is not anodyne and soporific — From Cai Guo-Qiang’s disturbing rafts commenting on extinction to Issa “Joe Ouakam” Samb’s multimedia works on empire and society, Larissa Sansour’s meditations on alternative reality and oppression, or Emmanuel Tussore’s Aleppo soap structures depicting destroyed or partly destroyed Syrian buildings. In Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor in 2021, Mutu’s works were deftly interwoven with the European 19th-century dreck that forms the bulk of the museum’s collection. The result was a show that made all of the work stronger through a conversation between the old and the new.

It is necessary to address histories and social systems that are riddled with missteps. I am glad that the Whitney seems to be moving in that direction, but it would be encouraging to see the museum take more risks that disconcert viewers rather than patting them on the back for paying $30 to register opinions they already hold.

Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan) through August 13. The exhibition was organized by Christopher Y. Lew with McClain Groff.

Nevdon Jamgochian is a teacher, writer, and painter based in South East Asia. [email protected] More by Nevdon Jamgochian