Josh Kline, “Climate Change”

by Michael Shaw

Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, California

Exhibition continues through January 5, 2025

July 6, 2024

Josh Kline, “Personal Responsibility: Vitali and Mercedes,” 2023, mixed media installation with video, dimensions variable.

All images courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York.

Climate change (formerly known as Global Warming) doesn’t rank as the most-urgent-sociopolitical-issue nearly as often as it should. Although it’s consistently in the top five, maybe even top three, depending on the demographic, people apparently have more pressing concerns that don’t include the survival, or impending doom, of the planet’s ability to support our civilization. New York-based artist Josh Kline’s long-term exploration of the more extreme future of our climate crisis has been as committed to the issue as any artist around. After his retrospective, “Project for a New American Century,” at the Whitney Museum last summer, Kline’s institutional support is wide and getting wider. Producing art that grapples with the various consequences of our unpredictable and highly volatile new weather realities is a noble, if fraught, choice, but there are no guarantees that just because the subject matter is consequential to the point of urgency that the art will be as well.

High-profile museums often seem immune from criticism, as museum validation seems to offer a built-in shield of intellectual gravitas. But as thorough and rigorous as Kline’s “Climate Change” investigation is, I can’t bring myself to sign off on the show’s success.

Josh Kline, (left) “Disinformation” and (right) “Free Trade,” 2023, mixed media installation, dimensions variable

The South Gallery’s installation, “Personal Responsibility,” the largest in the exhibition, is also the lynchpin and presiding conscience of the overall experience. Other galleries feature, among other things, tabletop and cabinet models of eroding cities, submerged offices, and other future relics, tropes of a collapsing if not entirely lost civilization.

A saturated but slightly dimmed red light suffuses the “Personal Responsibility” environment, which features several survivalist tent shelters, each with its own variety of staples and/or beds and/or gear, while also serving as vestiges for our future climate apocalypse. The focal point of each tent is a video interview with one (in one case, a couple) main character, each a nuanced archetype in their respective state of survival. There is “Guy,” “Joe,” “Nora,” “Andy,” “Vitali and Mercedes,” and “Jessica.” The survivalist bedroom enclosure that houses the “Jessica” video, titled “Xenophobia,” is heavily biased towards the ideology you anticipate encountering. But its character is more nuanced than you would imagine: she is struggling to get by with work, and has been pushed just outside of her hometown of Olympia, Washington because of gentrification as well as climate migration.

It’s when it comes to outsiders, which in a climate apocalypse seems contradictory, that she expresses a sort of toned-down “they took our jobs!” sentiment that we tap into, an “Oh, this is our future urban xenophobe” reaction, albeit a much more toned down xenophobe than so many currently out there. Still, a fellow visitor exclaimed of Jessica: “I know that person! … not that actor, that type,” with a clear tone of disapproval.

Josh Kline, “Consumer Fragility Meltdown” (detail), 2019, powder-coated steel, epoxy resin, stainless

steel, heating panels, soy wax, pigment, plastic bucket, and bin liner, 38 1/4 x 34 1/2 x 34 1/2”

Each of these climate warriors of the future are asked questions by an off-screen interviewer, and the actors professionally execute their lines and come off as sympathetic; the stories all seem legitimately complex and plausible. And yet, if you’re able to fully suspend your disbelief as you watch them tell their tales, then you’re a more receptive viewer than me, because the videos, despite their high production values, fail to transcend contrivance. But I cannot get past the recognition that this was a complicated, well-polished production, or that these folks are actors.

In order for “Personal Responsibility” to be taken seriously, or perhaps as it was intended, a more fitting lens is that of science fiction: a perspective that’s more ponderous, more playful, and less obligated to verisimilitude than the illusion of documentary that Kline is chasing. The sci-fi perspective also allows room for us current earth inhabitants, complicit and inactive as we are, to consider what we’ll be willing to do, what we’ll be willing to sacrifice and fight for, indeed just to survive, in a far more hostile future landscape.

Still, there are many small treasures to be found in the margins. An example is the texts printed in red on the outside of the red ripstop polyester housing the TV screens, almost but not quite drowned out by the video installations themselves. One reads:

“Like using a human being to work the cash register

Like using a human being to bag groceries

Like using a human being to deliver dinner

Like using a human being to do all sorts of things

Like using a human being”

Josh Kline, “Adaptation,” 2019-22, still from 16mm film, color, sound, 10:45 minutes, film looper; plastic tarp;

house paint; plastic storage bins; and custom stand (steel, urethane resin, urethane rubber, and urethane dye)

Nearby is a group exchange printed onto the outside of another tent:

Siobhan: I’m moving upstate to start a radical pizza restaurant. When the world ends we can hide out there

Liam: There are straight-up too many people in the world. The world can’t support 10 billion people living like middle-class Americans

Donnie: Can you imagine if everyone in India had a car?

Liam: There are going to be 2.5 billion Africans in 2050. Don’t even ask about Asia’s population.

Bill: We need a degrowth agenda

Liam: The world would seriously be better off with fewer people.

Jenna: I love Japanese food. It’s so clean. So refined.

Siobahn: I am going to plant shiso in the kitchen garden by the outdoor pizza oven and the grill. Just for us.

Donnie: The four horsemen will sort it out like they always do. Time to go off grid.

Josh Kline, still from “Capture and Sequestration: Cigarettes,” 2023, HD video, color, sound, 13:31 minutes

This complex and subtle gallows humor is a welcome respite from the self-seriousness of the survivor videos, and perhaps it takes the scale and ambition of “Personal Responsibility’s” epic scope to allow for, and breathe life into, this marginal textual ephemera. They are too easy to miss.

The strangest inclusion in “Climate Change” is “Adaptation,” a 16mm short film made over the course of the pandemic (2019-22), featuring analog recreations of Manhattan skyscrapers with rivers flowing through them like an urban Grand Canyon. Set to a score that evokes vintage natural-history-style documentaries, coupled with the churning sounds of the film projector, the chasm between its sci-fi futurism and the dated look and feel of the film installation has the uncanny valley effect.

Further departing from the tone of future alarm is the way the characters in the film — a group of essential workers taking a rest and snack break on the roof of a building, amicably chatting and hanging with each other, though their conversations are inaudible — appear so calm and collected. Their relative buoyancy is irreconcilable with the urgency of a future apocalypse. Perhaps that’s exactly the point: our new normal of delay, denial, and procrastination is their future normal of chaos, rescues, and much needed rest. In a soft and circuitous way, this is one version, among many, of what Kline is tapping into, how we as planetary stewards are collectively rolling backwards downhill into the depths of a flooded purgatory, if not a future hell.

Michael Shaw is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was recently included in the exhibition “Meshuganah” at A Very Serious Gallery in Chicago, as well as the exhibitions “Sociality” at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House! at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Culver City Arts grant in 2023, a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA.

Visit Michael Shaw’s website.