At Lisson Gallery, Josh Kline Presents the Spoils of a Social Media Ransacked World

When Josh Kline premiered his breakthrough exhibit “Dignity and Self Respect” at downtown gallery 47 Canal in 2011, the world hadn’t yet experienced the visual content glut we live with today. Instagram had just graduated from a fledgling company to a photo database steered by a couple of million monthly active users, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel was still defending his app’s short-term content premise and pre-TikTok ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming was still noodling around with news aggregators.

Kline’s most recent exhibition, “Social Media,” which opened at Chelsea’s Lisson Gallery in New York this September, considers life in the oversaturated world of social media; specifically, the stream of free, generative A.I. content and the continuing algorithm warp. “Social Media” positions the Philadelphia-based artist as a sociologist of the visual glut zeitgeist and its most significant genesis: our era’s actors’ insistence on endlessly vending humans as capital across digital spaces. Kline’s 3D models scattered across four rooms are not subtle in their aims.

Silicon hands, one of Kline’s earlier artistic fixations, come back here. Like their predecessors, the forms come neatly lined up on sterile, gray cabinets and cling to various objects: a mouse, an 8-ball, mouthwash, a pill bottle. More disembodied body parts in mock office spaces, like spoils of a social-media-ransacked world, make up much of the rest of the exhibit. On a metal table, a 3D-printed leg—thigh down—wrapped in FedEx labels is positioned next to office implements, a keyboard and mouse wrapped in the Amazon logo. In the same room, a 3D-printed head has been deposited on an Ikea chair, its mouth bound by Amazon wrapping tape. An arm with hand frozen mid-scroll rests near 3D-printed iPhones. A hand wrapped in Visa statements. Body and brand becoming one.

For Kline, this is what digital labor looks like writ aesthetically. The internet, particularly social media, insists that you implicate yourself in its project. As long as social currency is king, sharing a steady stream of content, commenting, liking, sending and especially artificial self-marketing are all requisites of usership. Kline is haunted by these cues of our time. In a 2023 New York Times article, the artist noted, “I’m not a person who believes in this myth of timeless art,” adding, “I think that’s propaganda.”

Both the timeliness and literality of “Social Media” are unnerving—it doesn’t get much more literal than FedEx and Amazon labels pasted onto body parts. In “Social Media,” Kline leans far out of the doomsday preparation-esque art that dominated his career, like “Surround Audience” at the New Museum triennial featuring Kline’s riot-geared Teletubbies or the installation “Unemployment” at 47 Canal in which 3D printed automatons have taken over office work or his short film Adaptation, in which essential workers steer a boat through a flooded Midtown Manhattan. Instead he turns his attention to the present selfish, scroll-obsessed, and regurgitative world we know to be true.

There is little aesthetic reappraisal of this world, but literality has always been part of Kline’s artistic oeuvre. In a Guernica interview, the artist says, “My audiences shouldn’t need a press release to understand what they’re looking at, especially if it’s in their own country.” Kline’s rhetoric of literality and resistance to obfuscating the viewer won’t explain away the obviousness of “Social Media,” but they’re not meant to. Kline’s “Social Media” is meant to expose, not obscure, the newest algorithmic artifices. 

The anemic exhibit comes to a close with the most literal performance of all: a 3D printed photopolymer resin sculpture of a balled-up “mid-career artist” (so the label tells us) wrapped in a polyethylene bag. Said mid-career artist is Josh Kline himself. Kline imagines he has packaged and sold his body to the gods of the algorithm, a sickly, self-obsessed art world, or both. Whatever the beneficiary, the forces that prompt his peddling are all too familiar. 

“Josh Kline: Social Media” is on view at Lisson Gallery through October 19.