Los Angeles Art Shows- “Post Human” at Jeffrey Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Jan 162025
 

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993, and Ashley Bickerton “F.O.B.:Tied (White)”, 1993/2018

Charles Ray “Family Romance”, 1993

Maurizio Cattelan “WE”, 2010

Tishan Hsu, “mammal-screen-green-2”, 2024

Work by Josh Kline

“Untitled”, 2008-9, and “Two Breasts”, 1990, by Robert Gober

Mike Kelley, “Brown Star”, 1991 (left) and “The Judge”, 2018, by Jana Euler (painting on right)

Wanghechi Mutu, “One Cut”, 2018, (center sculpture); photographs by Cindy Sherman, 2010/2023

“Pep Talk”, 2024, by Cajsa von Zeipel and Jamian Juliano-Villani, “Women”, 2024, (painting on right)

Post Human, the current group exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles location, continues an artistic investigation of humanity that began with the 1992 exhibition of the same name. Some of the over forty artists (and even some of the works) were in the previous iteration, but now their work is placed alongside others made more recently. Seeing them together offers viewers a chance to  contemplate the shifts and continuations in culture, technology, and what it means to be human.

From the gallery-

“Post Human was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human,” wrote the art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum discussing the impact of the exhibition in the October 2004 issue of Artforum.

In 1992, Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, brought together the work of thirty-six young artists interested in technological advancement, social and aesthetic pluralism, and new frontiers of body and identity transformation. Through their art, these artists were exploring the same questioning of traditional notions of gender, sexuality and self-identity that was—and still is—taking place in the world at large. Capturing a developing social and scientific phenomenon, Post Human theorized a new approach to the construction of the self and interpretation of what defines being human. The exhibition set the agenda for the 1990s, and its influence on artists and philosophers led to a new field of academic study.

In her book Posthuman Feminism (2022), the philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti credits Deitch for capturing “the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans.” She adds, “Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”

The catalogue of the 1992 exhibition, with its visual essay and innovative design by the late Dan Friedman, also proved lasting relevance. Deitch’s influential essay predicted many of the scientific and sociological shifts that have since shaped our cultural and social environment, even the pandemic.

More than thirty years later, Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, revisits the theme of the exhibition, bringing the discourse into the present. The show includes several of the key figures who participated in the 1992 exhibition in dialogue with some of the most interesting artists continuing the exploration of these themes today. In keeping with the social and technological trends that inspired it, the interest in figuration of the original artists and the younger generations presented in the show is conceptual rather than formal.

Much of the then-new figurative work was descriptive of the “real” world but cannot, in fact, be called “realistic” in the conventional sense. That is because so much of the “real” world the artists were reacting to had become artificial. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and the embrace of artificiality, Realism as it was once known was no longer possible. This new figurative art may have actually marked the end of Realism rather than its revival.

Fully integrated into our pop psychology, the term “posthuman” is now used in everyday conversations and has come to primarily identify with the trope of the cyborg. This exhibition, like the 1992 show, however, examines multiple declinations and aspects of the postmodern construction of personality and the engineering and transcendence of the human body. The artists in the exhibition embrace notions of plurality, metamorphosis and multi-beingness. Cyber-futuristic, surgically improved, commodified, stereotyped, and politicized, the “cultured body” lends itself to reflect on a variety of concerns that define our age.

Several works in the exhibition will embrace the biometrical aestheticization of the human body to address the decay paranoia, the social conflict over genetic engineering and the use of biotechnologies, and the conversation around the limits of “natural” life.” Artists have long engaged with the threats of biometric surveillance, the possibility of virtual reality overtaking our physical one, the accelerating real-time consumption of experience, and the automation of the workforce. As AI’s ability to fulfill our creative and specialized needs has reached mass fruition, artists are confronting the impact of what was once considered speculative science fiction, an everyday reality.

Post Human was first presented at FAE, Musée D’art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne (June 14–September 13, 1992) and traveled to Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli/Turin (October 1–November 22, 1992), Deste Foundation, House of Cyprus, Athens (December 3, 1992–February 14, 1993), Deichtorhallen Hamburg (March 12–May 9, 1993), Israel Museum, Jerusalem (June 23–October 10, 1993). A number of the works shown in 1992-1993 are now in international museum collections. Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991) is now in the collection of LACMA, where it was on view in 2023. Posthumanism has since been the subject of countless books, movies and high-profile exhibitions.

Artists in the exhibition: Isabelle Albuquerque, 
Matthew Barney
, Ivana Bašić
, Frank Benson, 
Ashley Bickerton, 
Maurizio Cattelan
, Chris Cunningham
, John Currin, 
Alex Da Corte, 
Olivia Erlanger
, Jana Euler
, Rachel Feinstein, 
Urs Fischer, 
Pippa Garner
, Robert Gober
, Hugh Hayden, 
Damien Hirst
, Tishan Hsu, 
Pierre Huyghe, 
Anne Imhof
, Alex Israel, 
Arthur Jafa, 
Jamian Juliano-Villani
, Mike Kelley, 
Josh Kline, 
Jeff Koons
, Paul McCarthy
, Sam McKinniss, 
Mariko Mori
, Takashi Murakami
, Wangechi Mutu
, Cady Noland, 
Charles Ray
, Cindy Sherman, 
Kiki Smith
, Hajime Sorayama, 
Anna Uddenberg, 
Cajsa von Zeipel
, Jeff Wall
, Jordan Wolfson, and 
Anicka Yi

This show closes Saturday, 1/18/25.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Josh Kline: Climate Change” at MOCA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Jan 032025
 

Josh Kline’s installations for Climate Change at MOCA use a variety of different mediums to explore the environmental issues of today while focusing on a potential dystopian future.

From the museum-

Looking at our era through a lens of labor and class, Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia) speculates in his art on some of the most urgent issues facing the world in the coming decades. His largest body of work is an as-yet-untitled cycle of immersive installations, organized as chapters, that explores key political, economic, technological, ecological, and biological questions of the twenty-first century. Climate Change, gathered together for the first time at MOCA, is the cycle’s fourth chapter.

Climate Change is both an exhibition and a total work of art—a visceral suite of science-fiction installations that imagines a future sculpted by ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Begun in 2018 and produced in sections over the last six years, the works in Climate Change were largely made during the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by events during those difficult years. In its profound disruption of ordinary life, the pandemic became, for Kline, a cipher for the looming climate catastrophe and unprecedented disruption of our lives that scientists predict will accelerate in the years ahead. Using dystopia as a point of entry rather than a diagnosis, he invites us to place ourselves within it and consider the rear view. What happens in a world where the systems built to sustain and extend capitalist enterprise and global hegemony melt down their own foundations? Is this the future that we want to live in? Can we build a new and more hopeful world from the ruins?

The images above are from Kline’s sculptural installation Personal Responsibility. Although set in the future, the rise of tent cities around the country today in combination with the need for temporary structures after recent destructive storms, make this work feel contemporary.

From the museum-

Personal Responsibility (2023-24), the core of Kline’s project Climate Change, is a sculptural installation set in the future, in the aftermath of climate disaster. Borrowing their forms from the temporary shelters used by refugees and migrants in the United States and around the world, the tentlike structures here serve as both home and workplace for “essential workers” — the individuals who will still have to physically go into work, often at great personal risk, while those in higher-paying jobs can work from home in comfort and safety.

The installation also features two sets of related videos. Capture and Sequestration (2023) centers four iconic commodities made from materials that powered America’s rise as the world’s preeminent military, economic, and cultural power: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and oil. Through these materials, it is possible to trace the lineage of human-made global warming and climate change back through America’s global empire and the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the most painful parts of US history —the enslavement of Africans and the theft of Indigenous land. The other videos are fictional interviews with people living through catastrophic climate change in a future America. Although set decades from now, these videos are informed by extensive research into survivors’ experiences of climate-related disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey and recent California wildfires. In visualizing and making relatable the forecasts of climate scientists, Kline raises questions about whether Americans are willing and able to work together to prepare for, and possibly mitigate, what is to come.

Below are images from Kline’s short film Adaptation (2019-2022).

From the museum about the work-

The short film Adaptation (2019-22) imagines a future Manhattan transformed by climate change and follows a team of relief workers at the end of their shift. Described by the artist as a “science fiction of ordinary life,” the film focuses on what tomorrow could be like for the working people who will clean up the inevitable mess resulting from the political and economic decisions of previous generations. The fictional workers of Adaptation survive by doing the kind of essential but poorly compensated, physically taxing jobs that society takes for granted.

Using primarily analogue special effects — scale models, miniatures, and matte shots-and 16mm color film instead of high-definition digital video, Kline creates an expressionistic science fiction that suggests a nostalgia for the present from the perspective of a future transformed by global warming. Although it was filmed in 2019, the work was completed during the pandemic, and its poetic voiceover and melancholy soundtrack, both added in 2020, quietly evoke the lockdown and quarantine in New York.

This exhibition closes 1/5/25.

Flashback Friday- Josh Kline at Various Small Fires in 2015

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 212023
 

“You’re Fired”, 2015, Concrete, grill, shredded office documents, charcoal

This sculpture by Josh Kline was located in the Various Small Fires Los Angeles courtyard in 2015.

From the press release-

In the warm breeze of Southern California’s endless summer, the 20th Century dream of life in the early evening after work: a large backyard covered in concrete and grass, a hammock or a lawn chair, cold beer, and a blazing grill. Ground meat sizzling above a glowing bed of charcoal soaked in lighter fluid. Underneath the avocado tree. Or the oak tree. Or the whatever tree. Putting the last 8-10 hours of your day out of your mind and enjoying your “free” time. A nuclear family fantasy repeated across hundreds of millions of suburban and semi-suburban homes and half a century of North American lives.

Pattern recognition is the primordial ooze from out of which living consciousness and intelligence crawled into the minds of animals. The ability to recognize repetitive relationships and recurring phenomena. The habits of food, the faces of your loved ones, and the sounds of human language. From automobile factory assembly line and the discount drug store cash register today to the taxi cab’s driver seat and patent lawyer’s office tomorrow: unconscious software is slowly and not-so- slowly aping the abilities of the living mind.

Reading without eyes. Recognizing without consciousness. The outsourcing of understanding. You’re Fired!

The first U.S. museum survey of his work, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in NYC.