Josh Kline's Future Aftermath

Considering Josh Kline's Adaptation

Josh Kline, film still from Adaptation, 2022, Whitney Museum

Dear Friends,

I was deep in this strange state of future aftermath when I heard about the wildfires in Lahaina. Astonished and stricken, I thought back to my adolescence in Hawai’i and the abundant and generous rainfall of those years.

The first real essay I wrote for this newsletter was titled “Hawai'i is Burning (Even Though it's Not).” I talked about the strange sensation of seeing animated flames on the island of Hawai’i in Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz’s piece The Breath Eaters. Those flames, which were fed by live data streams, didn’t represent wildfires, but instead registered the heat of volcanic eruptions.

Still, I remember a sharp pang in the gallery when I looked at the burning island. Now that image has taken on another kind of reality, one that maps the devastating effects of climate change, heightened by the aftereffects of colonization. Beloved people and places are lost, rebuilding lives will be precarious and slow.

To help the people of Lahaina, you can make a donation to Maui Strong.

—Sal

Future Aftermath

I’m living in Josh Kline’s future. That’s what I keep saying to myself as I move through my ordinary days. I’m living in two New Yorks, one superimposed on the other. In one I’m sitting in a cafe drinking a cup of coffee and typing on my laptop. In another I’m in a boat, passing through a drowned city, waters up to the first few stories of the buildings. In one, I meet Jeff for dinner in the cellar of Saint Mazie and talk about poetry, about the history of labor strikes, militias, and armories, about the way groups and movements form in heat and fracture as they cool. In the other I’m waking up in the temporary housing of a refugee camp outside the city wondering what happened to the life I once knew.

Maybe there’s a bit of a danger in seeing too much art. Or in sitting to watch a film loop over and over. Usually the feeling of an exhibition shakes off right away, as I’m leaving the building. It’s been a few weeks now, and I’ve started to wonder if I’ll ever come all the way back from this.

But of course, that’s what I want, to be moved, to feel myself altered. As an artist I want to believe it is possible to shift someone in the way I’ve been shifted by this. As a human on this planet I want to believe it is possible to shift our collective relation to the crisis we’re in. I read, and study, and talk, and write, and make art, and all of it changes me a little, changes me cumulatively. And then there’s another fire, another flood, another heatwave, another report about the ocean currents, another story about the ice sheets in Antarctica.

Personal Responsibility

Antarctica is where Josh Kline’s catastrophe begins. If you spend enough time in his installation Personal Responsibility you will gradually piece together what might or may have happened to the people who speak to the camera on various screens. It seems a large piece of the Antarctic ice sheet broke off, and the seas rose, flooding all of the coasts and coastal cities under thirty feet of water that never recedes. Extreme heat and drought have made other parts of the country permanently unlivable.

Personal Responsibility was the centerpiece of the big survey of Josh Kline’s work, Project for a New American Century, which was on view at the Whitney through August 13. You might think of Personal Responsibility as a hall of learning, a representation of a slightly sci-fi near future, an array of tent-like structures which gestured towards the temporary housing you might find in a refugee camp. In each, videos played, among them fictional interviews with survivors of environmental disaster.

After I passed through that hall of learning into the next room, I found myself in another atmosphere. I walked in to a scene of a miniature plastic boat churning its way across glassy still waters between model high-rises. The continuous ticking of a projector filled the darkened space. The seating consisted of plastic crates.

A voice was talking about the sun setting through the buildings, and about the people who were no longer there looking at each other through the windows. This turned out to be the end of the film. I wait for it to start again. I was in Adaptation, a 16-millimeter film installation that Kline first debuted in 2022.

Adaptation

The film depicts a future in which Manhattan is flooded. Flooded high, and flooded permanently. The waters seem to reach up many stories.  You watch a group of underwater divers pull themselves onto the boat, one by one, where they are rinsed carefully with a hose—decontamination. After they clean and stow their gear, they break out food and drink. Popping the cap off of a soda makes a distinct and familiar sound. They eat and drink together as the boat carries them. Their conversation is indistinct, sometimes barely miked, but it seems they have only a couple more weeks of this job. They are doing some kind of cleanup, though they acknowledge that they will never get it clean. Their faces are joyful and tender as they talk to one another, the relief of days end, the camaraderie of working together under difficult conditions..

Their ease, affection, and pleasure in each other is almost shocking, set, as it is, in the midst of disaster. After a while they are silent, each looking thoughtfully out from the boat at the water and the city and the setting sun. They take in the beauty and they take in the circumstances of that beauty.

It does not seem to me that the Manhattan they are passing through will ever be saved, will ever be habitable again. There are no birds, no fish, no people, no one else on the waters. The buildings are intact but without life.

The film is persuasive. By which I mean that I see its future and it seems likely. Not just the drowning of the city, but the ongoingness of the workers, of the "efforts."  The ordinary aftermath of disasters, relief, and cleanup, of human life amidst catastrophe and ruin.

They look out at the disaster, and we look at them.

There was much more to Project for a New American Century, but the room I kept returning to was this one. It is this film that overlays my daily life in the city. In my mind, I keep calling it Aftermath, but if it is an aftermath, it is one that we are already inhabiting. There’s a line attributed to William Gibson: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Which is to say, that there’s something powerfully present-tense about Josh Kline’s future. What he imagines and depicts is already happening somewhere, to someone.

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Josh Kline

The exhibition Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century was on view at the Whitney Museum April 19 - August 13, 2023.

You can listen to portions of the soundtrack by Galcher Lustwerk here.

Josh Kline’s website.

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara