Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
I tend to think more in prose than I do in visuals, so I draw analogies in my head between artists I like and writers I like. When it comes to Josh Kline, my analog was always the great Ben Lerner, who wrote about Kline in The New Yorker. The two seem to share a similar attitude about institutions and the difficult aesthetics of the ones that seek to do good, unpacking these with wit and kindness. After seeing his newest works at his survey at the Whitney Museum last year, I decided he’s come to remind me also of Kim Stanley Robinson, the sci-fi author with good politics, who seeks to demonstrate the ways humans might survive our various coming environmental crises with a modicum of dignity.
These later works take center stage in “Climate Change,” Kline’s new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles—the first to collect his work on the topic, with works dating from 2019 through to the present day. These use mobilizing sculpture, moving images, photography, ephemeral materials and lighting “to completely transform the galleries of MOCA Grand Avenue” into a “charged Gesamtkunstwerk of our contemporary times.”
I would have doubted that language from the press release had I not seen the heart of this show in New York, where the Whitney was transformed indeed. The multi-media Personal Responsibility (2023-2024) changes the room it fills into a refugee camp from the future. Visitors are invited to explore tents and other temporary homes, inspect the various prepper-adjacent products their inhabitants have purchased from Amazon and pull up a camp chair to listen to stories from the wasteland, told to the camera by actors on flat-screen televisions that live in the tents.
These works can be seen as a merger of his past video pieces, like the ones where he generates deep fake confessions from the Bush Administration or installs monitors into the stomachs of fascist Teletubbies. The survivors in Personal Responsibility are varied and intimate, like those of veterans, making you realize that the apocalypse is not something that will happen suddenly but has already begun.
Hope comes in the form of Adaptation (2019-2022), a film that offers what Kline calls the “science fiction of ordinary life,” as relief workers cruise through skyscrapers in a version of Manhattan that has flooded and become Venice. This feels taken directly from Robinson, whose book New York 2140 tackles a similar vibe, but Kline makes it his own through warm, beautiful and uncanny 16mm cinematography. The futuristic setting feels like it was shot in the 1970s but is otherwise without irony and, therefore, strangely optimistic. Maybe the world will never end as long as New York is still cool.
Josh Kline’s “Climate Change” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles through January 5, 2025.
