This essay will be my attempt to explain in detail why JOSH KLINE: CLIMATE CHANGE is the worst museum exhibition of art ever, and will underscore that a thoughtful counter-argument would require one to align oneself with sub-intelligence or at least aesthetic incompetence.
TLDR: Josh Kline: Climate Change is the worst art museum exhibition I have ever seen.
Trigger Warning: Nasty words and critical analysis absent artspeak ahead.
Full Transparency: This essay’s mockery of the exhibit entitled Climate Change is in no way a denial of the real danger in climate change. Art exhibitions that masturbate over “genius” analytics and presentations do NOTHING to advance solutions to the growing problem and may in fact contribute to it by comforting diddlewads that they have done their part in “fighting the good fight” while things just keep getting warmer.
And now for the review…
The ultimate goal of this essay is to assist in a castration of the reputation and career of Josh Kline and the curatorial directorship of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. If I am the lone voice in the wilderness, so be it, don’t invite me to your boring parties celebrating bad art and the cons that pump and dump it, I’m happier with the wilderness. But by all means go see this exhibit and understand that it is up to each of us to prevent the art audience at large from being spoonfed intellectual poison. In other words, fuck everyone associated with this exhibition, I am going to be fair but I am not going to be nice.
I have been going to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art since their Grand Avenue facility opened in November of 1986. I have seen probably nine out of ten shows presented there, consistently, in these subsequent 37 plus years. This exhibit is the worst. I’ve seen hundreds of museum shows around the world. This exhibit is the worst. Its only standout feature is that it is clearly the worst, that no other show comes to mind to even compete with it.
I saw the press release for JOSH KLINE: CLIMATE CHANGE a month before the artist’s solo show at MOCA Los Angeles opened and thought it was the most insipidly slick collection of paragraphs I had ever read. I read it again. Its own hype existed to create an alluring provocation that words alone, that nodding in agreement, sufficed as greatness. Then I saw that the Winklevoss Twins were the underwriters of the coming exhibition and thought “Oh, well this is going to be dogshit.” And left it at that. There was no way I was going to make any time to see a pile of dogshit.
Then last Monday my wife said we hadn’t used our MOCA membership this year, why don’t we go to the members’ party on Saturday. “Okay,” I said. When she informed me that it was the Kline show I actually got excited. If your wife told you there was a party to celebrate a dog turd on the sidewalk you might wince at attending but if your wife told you there was a party – and MOCA throws good parties – for what you already heard a rumor was the ugliest pile of dogshit in the history of canine bowel movements, you’d put on your good pair of Nikes and summon an Uber.
Well… the subtext of that slick press release did not lie. And I want the prose of this essay to counter it’s noxious pretense, hence the fecal deference. Die, prudes. Now onward.
We ate a big dinner across the street so you cannot blame this one on low blood sugar. We decided instead of mingling at the party that we would see the show first. We entered MOCA. I will devote a few paragraphs to the curatorial incompetence of the exhibit layout later in this essay, suffice to say it was simply, sadly retarded (oh dear, a word you are not supposed to say but one that means intellectual retrogradation, and hence is apt. There isn’t a more apt word for it in the English language to describe the exhibition’s fundamentals). So let’s jump ahead to the exhibit itself.
There was a MOCA permanent collection on the North Side of the museum and the Josh Kline show on the south side. I insisted we see the Kline show first as we would need some good art to wash out our eyeballs after. Again, bad omens all because of that overslick press release.
Consider the title of the exhibit. Climate Change. There is no poetry here and there is absolutely none in the exhibit. Like the title, the exhibition is a dry, didactic exercise in glorifying wall text. The show is a pendulum swinging from a droll mess of visual objects practicing a studious avoidance of semblance to a cacaphonic haranguing of emotions for no other reason than to exalt Josh Kline as a sort of “Told Ya So” guru of what every mainstream news outlet on earth underscores with regularity. Yes there is a climate crisis… but no… Josh Kline hasn’t done shit about it except to use it as a play to get museum real estate for his name, his brand, his global art empire. And it is a decidedly mainstream brand, absent any edge, any sense a revelation is coming. The genius of the artist is in being dull enough to only rock the boats that have been rocked for two decades in earnest, to offer nothing new but to get world class P.R. for doing it.
The entrance to the painfully droll and unpoetic Climate Change exhibit is a room with text. Lots of text. From it we learn a few things. The aforementioned Winklevoss association is present. We learn that MOCA has an “Environmental Council” which means we are likely going to be getting served this green shit sandwich again and again in the coming decades. If you had the slightest impulse of democracy in your DNA over the years you probably at some point thought that fabricators and studio assistants should be credited alongside the “big art names”™ for whom they toil. They are indeed, in what I believe is a first, named here on the wall and on wall text throughout the exhibit. Well, your longstanding impulse was wrong. It does not come across as inclusive at all. The listing of Kline’s “assembly crew” is at best a pretentious gesture and, at the most cynical, a way for him to spread the blame should reviews like this garner too negative attention. We learn that the show came together during the pandemic even though much of it is dated in the years prior to 2020. Nothing about the “work” on display here makes me feel guilty for all the Netflix I watched in the lockdown months.
We learn that the exhibit was “organized’ by MOCA’s associate curator, Rebecca Lowery. NOT curated, no, organized. If ever there was a weaseling out of responsibility, it is in that word ORGANIZED stuck on the entrance wall. More blame to go around is given to Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, billed as a curatorial assistant.
But wait, there’s art! Or at least a pathetic simulation of it.
The exhibition starts with two blandly-decorated doors. They are the only way to enter the exhibition. You might think they are presenting you with a binary choice: to see one exhibition or another; a manifestation of a philosophical weight, the eternal “what if”, a meditation on the choices we make, so many possibilities… but that would let imagination and perhaps poetry creep into this dumb exhibit. Both doors just lead to the room housing the exhibit. That’s it. No rhyme. No reason. Just an excuse to have the artist’s clunkily named “sculptures of doors” lead off the show.
So now we are in the show. What are we looking at? We are looking at a few vitrines. They have a high centerline, short people will not get the same impression of the art than tall people and since the only non-bribery/pay-to-play logic for MOCA to host the show would appear to be the getting of grants for “educating” grade school field trips in art and ecology, the height of the vitrines is a major issue. I’ve never met Josh Kline or his wall-credited studio assistants. Perhaps Josh is 6-foot-five and that explains the non-inclusiveness of these art things in clear plastic boxes.
So the vitrines have water and ice in them. The ice is in shapes… of what exactly was indecipherable but they were kind of artistic shapes, right? There are mounted city maps in them, the maps create shores between the ice and water and on these maps sculpted piles of sand. The wall text tells us the sand is collected from specific regions around the world. Wow, look, it is the talentless realism of the lifeless.
Beneath the vitrines are some tubes and a canister. It is unclear if they make the ice melt, add or remove the water, refrigerate the vitrine encasement or are just there as a clunky prop to ensure that not even the metal structures holding the vitrines will be allowed a modicum of elegance.
So these vitrines would not get a ribbon in a high school science fair. That is the highest level of intellectual engagement that Kline could hope to reach. This work is not dumbed down for mass consumption, it is just dumb. Dumbness is the highest level of engagement with which it could hope to connect. They have no visual appeal after the initial curiosity about “What is in the box”… there is water, there is ice, there is a map, there are sculpted piles of dirt. There is not a thoughtful composition or narrative. The ice is not presented as icebergs or glaciers, the water does not seem to be threatening the mounted map and sculpted soil. There is just stuff, in a high vitrine with other stuff (perhaps engineering, perhaps props) underneath the vitrines. There is nothing to deconstruct. But since it is a show called Climate Change this all must be about climate change. There is ice, there is water (melted ice), the walls are painted green, the wall text assures us that the objects are meaningful and the museum assures us they are art, but I meaningfully assure you that Josh Kline just made – or had his credited studio make – stuff. It’s a room with “Sculptures of Doors” sparsely filled with stuff.
We are now finished with the first green room. Let’s go to the big red room. This is the room with more wall text and then space-fillers (I refuse to call them sculptures) holding sign vinyl siding printed with chain link fence patterns and lots of text. The walls are either painted red or lit red or both. It is really red in here. Like a Target employee masquerade ball Red. Like the Cincinatti Reds playing the Kansas City Chiefs Red. The space fillers are meant to evoke shelters, like if (or when) there is a climate disaster you might be living in one of these shelters. Each space filler shelter has its own giant screen television showing climate refugees discussing their lot in life. The televisions are super high definition. It is as if Josh Kline, allegedly a visual artist, is the visual-equivalent of tone deaf. The high resolution televisions are the stupidest choice to deliver a visual montage of suffering. These tales of woe are ineffective for a few reasons: there is no poetry in the presentations, nor elegance, nor basic respect in the presentation of these people as props – but most of all, no matter how sad their subject and setting, these people look amazing in high-def, like actors, like the Marvel superheroes of ordinary climate victims. These televisions are in these space filler shelters surrounded by supplies you will be living off of when you are a climate refugee. We all know in our hearts that Josh Kline and Rebecca Lowery and even Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo will never suffer this fate. The aristocracy will not be singing “Gimme Shelter” during the coming red alert except maybe at the karaoke afterparty for Josh’s next blue chip gallery exhibit.
Back in the green room there is another choice besides the big red shelter room of gloom and doom. You can enter this next room by, get ready, your choice of one of two “Door Sculptures” (I am dumber for having typed this and you are dumber for having read it and imagine how dumb the dumb door sculptors are for having installed a door as a sculpture). One has visual references to the Chinese flag and one has references to the American flag. They both lead to the same place. A room with the same green paint on it. I could go all-in on bashing the green paint but it would almost be too easy. It might be a pea soup green, maybe an olive, a mint, but it is meant to be “green” instead of …well, since green is virtuous by its association with a thriving natural world, are all other colors bad? And to what degree? So skipping any opinion on it, this other green room is empty in the center but has what appear to be industrial laboratory wall-mounted experiment stations… there are ambiguously industrial-appearing structures with tables built into them. On these tables are clear vessels filled with clear liquid. In the liquid are constructed scenes of, like, a living room, of like, your stuff, or your mom’s den, the mundane world, underwater, but in a lab. Is it a lab like the bad scientist put your mom’s den underwater, or is it that Josh Kline can only advance his career if MOCA is convinced he cares more about your mom’s den than you do and so he has delivered a physical object of the theoretical preserved demise of your mom’s den? I think a question mark goes there. There might have been more wall text. If you make it to this terrible show, take your local grammar police friend and sic them on the wordy wall text.
Now it is time to leave the room with your mom’s den that you don’t care about but Josh Kline put in his laboratory. Wait a minute, maybe it was his dad’s laboratory! A fawning New York Times profile of Josh, the kind that only absurdly-priced publicists can garner for artists, once revealed that Josh’s dad is a biochemist. Josh blames capitalism for his mom not succeeding in business and doesn’t mention his dad’s success in his biochemistry lab with or without capitalism, with or without your mom’s den in there either. Well anyway, that room is both a conceptual and a physical dead-end, so you can go back out of one of the two door sculptures or into the far side of the red room. And from there you enter…
A room with large spare gas cans hanging from the ceiling. This is like a bad grad school classmate’s show. It is cringe-inducing. There is of course wall text. It is about the industrial revolution and colonialism but it doesn’t forgive this resolutely amateurish installation. By now I knew I wasn’t missing anything. Josh Kline is literally this obtuse of a dullard, the biochemist’s son who knows which art world sphincters to lick, made a numbingly bland art installation in his overwhelmingly forgettable exhibition. Ahh, but I have something that MOCA’s curators don’t have… I have institutional memory. I saw a show at MOCA that dealt with the same themes with which Josh Kline is, again, retardedly, dealing. In 1994, British sculptor Richard Wilson presented an installation entitled 20:50 at MOCA. The elegant piece was a large pool of oil that filled a gallery to about four feet in height. A walkway to the middle of the room was the only dry spot. It put the viewer in a dizzying meditative space as the liquid oil perfectly reflected the architecture of the interior space. There was the subtle but unmistakable stink of the oil.
LINK TO RICHARD WILSON’S 20:50
There was no commentary, no attempt at “education” and no Environmental Commission around. The show made one think and feel. There you were alone with oil itself, this substance that grew industry, that polluted nature, that started wars, that fueled greed, that reflected the ceiling and made you appreciate the smell of nothing that had inhabited every prior visit to an art museum you had ever made. The show was well-reviewed and nearly thirty years later stands as an imaginative, liberated counter to Josh Kline’s ham-handed attempt to scold and terrify MOCA’s paltry museum attendance in the name of career enhancement while Richard Wilson is remembered as the towering giant of sculpture.
And to end the show there was a film in a large gallery painted black. I skipped it, fuck seeing your entire show Josh Kline, I asked people walking out if it was good, “Fuck no,” said one attendee leaving during the credits. Good enough a review for me.
And now we trash the curators. Sorry, organizers…
In addition to having no institutional memory, the two MOCA curators credited as the exhibition’s organizers have no institutional sensibility. To access the exhibit, one is barred from the logical entrance, to the right as one enters the Grand Avenue MOCA entrance. The gallery there is MOCA’s single signature space. It is the best physical location to view art anywhere in town, maybe in the state, perhaps in the country. It is an elegant, dramatic cube saturated with natural light and additional track lighting. So these two “organizers” have seen to it that the greatest physical space to see art is blocked, turned into an end-of-the-show-trail film screening and relegated the entrance to this anti-art art show to a back hallway by the toilets. Josh Kline is a shit artist so he deserves this treatment but nobody is burnishing their curatorial credentials playing these passive aggressive games with the artist. The exhibit would have been better suited for MOCA’s other space, the Geffen Contemporary, but Josh Kline is here to save the world (by never offering a single solution to Climate Change save for critiquing colonialism’s hegemony or something) and deserves the prestige space of the Grand Avenue MOCA space. What a waste.
The curating/organizing is also to be critiqued for dull wall text and seemingly random placement of laboratory looking clunky boxes. Ah, but these are mere quibbles in an exhibit that proudly wallows in a sensibility of lecturing and fearmongering instead of providing a single fucking solution. There is no resolution, no suggestion of non-polluting nuclear power, of explaining that you can no longer drive your car, of forced sterilization to lower carbon footprints, of coming together like a bunch of hippies and living off the land, of outlawing the Winklevoss Twins Ethereum cryptocurrency to save the power grid. Nothing beyond doom and gloom and cocktails for the MOCA environmental council, patting each other on the back while the whole world and all the art with it sink into the sea or burn in an uncontrolled wildfire. Pass the cheese squares please. A decade of MOCA’s environmental council hasn’t cooled the planet by a degree but it has pumped hot air into the legacies of artists like Josh Kline, the ultimate pseudoscientist. The whole idea of museums impacting and educating on sensitive topics is belied by the embrace of dabblers like Josh Kline.
The antidote to the Josh Kline exhibit is a group show of MOCA’s permanent collection on the other side of the Grand Avenue space. There is a combination of challenge and reward, some masterpieces mixing with undeserving market darlings but enough revelations that you might have your faith in MOCA restored after surviving the sophomoric twaddle of Josh Kline.
And, finally, there are, of course, teeshirts and posters in the gift shop that extend the Josh Kline brand of that genius who is also artistic and fashionable. Another dabble for the Josh Kline studio crew and an easy purchase for everyone who wants to wish away climate change without interrupting their party schedule.
