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Emergency Workers
John Haberin New York City
Josh Kline, Stephanie Dinkins, and Suzanne Lacy
I lost power for days after Hurricane Sandy, as New York's East River flooded a Con Ed plant. If climate change means anything, it will not be the last time. But hey, look at the good news: in no time, I may have waterfront property.
Not that everyone is cheering, but New Yorkers are a hardy bunch, and they make do. With Adaptation, Josh Kline shows them coping after an unspoken disaster, and it takes some doing. They make it to work by water, climb out, and hose down. They gather after work for their own impromptu celebration, beers in hand. Kline has no end of threats from which to choose—and of new media to bring them alive. He also has no shortage of heroes and villains, and he cannot stop himself from pointing them out, but such is life in digital art and in a digital era at the Whitney. 
It puts on the spot the promise of political art and digital art now. As a Web critic with analog roots, have I kept up—and have artists? With Stephanie Dinkins and Suzanne Lacy, two versions of political art face off in Queens, and both are all about community and identity. Dinkins is looking for love in all the wrong places. She is hardly alone either, not with so many spellbound by their cell phones. They might be lovers across a crowded room, but within a global space.
How many more take Siri and Alexa as speaking only to them? Still, you might do a double-take when Dinkins looks to artificial intelligence as the path to "free and expansive thought." Can AI really "build a world," free of "race, class, caste, and sustained violence," but with room for you? Suzanne Lacy already has her doubts and an old-fashioned way to make connections. She prefers a comfortable living room and a dinner party, as "The Medium is Not the Only Message" at the Queens Museum. In a time of instant messaging, who knows who has the last word?
This means war
Josh Kline has never seen a worthy cause that he cannot embrace. Climate change, automation, contagion, politics—all for him are immediate threats, and no one with a conscience can turn away. As one work puts it, Climate Change Is Personal Responsibility, and it speaks directly to you. In interviews, men and women face front to address the camera—and to put the unspeakable into words. They speak awkwardly, just as the task ahead of them is hard to explain, even to themselves. They speak out, too, from makeshift shelters, little more than tents with bedding and a monitor, now that the unspeakable has swept everything else away.
If the sheer rush from one threat to the next sounds like woke run wild, this is after all new media, with short attention spans and partisan politics. Kline's basic tool is plain old video, on small-screen TV. Only recently has he moved toward larger projections, like Adaptation, and what he calls immersive environments. It may seem downright quaint, with not a pocket device in sight. As for partisan, the show is "Project for a New Century," a sardonic play on Project for a New American Century—the neocon think tank, a platform for the voices that got us into twenty years of Mideast wars. Kline has deleted only the word American, for the threats are global, and phony patriotism only makes them worse.
If he still moves way too fast, he does have a running theme. Kline sees the issues as economic ones and the threats as coming to workers. They may need to swim to work, and they may find themselves out of a job. He pictures the pandemic as Contagious Unemployment—clear plastic viruses the size of basketballs, enclosing cardboard boxes for a worker's personal effects. They are clearing out their offices, with barely a "thank you for years of service" in a faceless message. Such are "the sounds of severance," texts continue, and they are just "wrapping things up."
Kline got started with interviewing workers, for Creative Labor starting in 2009 and then Blue Collars starting in 2014. The first singles out the white-collar world, sustained by Adderall, Ritalin, Red Bull, and a French coffee press—on view in IV bags and on a shelf. They may see their work as "creative labor," they say, but "sleep is for the weak." Or maybe it is for the hip, dressed like Kline's mannequins in the latest casual clothing. These are high-end environments, with celebrity clippings and pillars of digital light. The second project gets around to deliverers, restaurant waitstaff, and hotel room cleaners.
For workers of any kind, this means war, and guess who are the casualties? Kline cannot stop at interviews when he can add body scans. Small business owners lie in plastic bags, as if preserved after death. Lowly workers leave their bagged body parts to the greater indignity of shopping carts. Digitizing the human body is here a tool of the ruling class, but also a metaphor and a question. Can one's identity be subsumed by one's job?
I guess not, not when one may lose one's job at the drop of a hat. Civil War sees the aftermath of AI as unemployment. The installation includes a blender and an oven held together with packing tape, to the sound of ticking bombs. Plastic bottles and shopping bags set in grey concrete lie in ruins as the debris of urban existence. And the SWAT team is moving in. Kline's Teletubbies in body armor appeared in the 2015 New Museum Triennial of emerging artists, as agents of the police state, and here they are again, along with a cute, wide-eyed robo-dog.
Part of the solution?
At some point, you may cry for mercy—and not from the powers that be. Kline has moved from actual interviews to staged ones, with actors in the lead roles. He has also turned from video to sculpture and assemblage. He sees recent work as "chapters" in an ongoing installation cycle, in an exhibition of immersive environments, much as Harold Cohen sees AI as an invitation to a painter's cognitive processes. But can so many issues blend so easily together, apart from gender, culture, and ideology? What about causes and solutions?
Is Kline himself part of the solution or part of the problem? Digitization, data collection, image manipulation, 3D printing, commercial and political advertising, and productivity-enhancing substances—the list sure sounds scary, but they have been his media all along. (The curators, Christopher Y. Lew with McClain Groff, credit him with an early adoption of deep-fake software.) That adds to their potency, but you can still wonder who is looking at you. An immersive environment has its ambiguities in the surveillance state as well. More power to Kline for reflecting on it, but he is not the type for extended self-reflection.
You may wonder as well at his critique of what another show calls "On the Waterfront." As sea levels rise, workers may indeed face massive unemployment, as entire cities shut down. (Galleries sure did after Hurricane Sandy and again during the Covid-19 lockdown.) They are far less likely to swim to work, and who is supplying beer? Is the focus on white-collar existence a bias in itself, in a show decidedly white? What about the real claims and real biases of those losing their homes in comfortable neighborhoods by the sea?
Yet Kline, too, is asking the hard questions in a no longer analog New York. He also gains by going past the docudrama of live interviews, to the visual arts and fictions. Early on, those blue-collar confessions could easily devolve into lectures, as dogmatic as any. The installations, in contrast, are increasingly funny and compelling, like the relaxed irony of Adaptation. Seen together, as a whole, they also grow more memorable, as old work becomes newly site specific. It matters less and less that the memorabilia in those viruses are hard to see.
The exhibition gets the top floor, the smallest, and shares another with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. I am not sure why she does not get the smaller floor to herself and he the largest, but I shall just trust that it works out for the best. A lack of chronology hardly matters in midcareer for an artist with an obsession. Will the flames of ruin themselves undo carbon sequestration, as another video warns, or will the flicker bring light? I started smiling and fearing with the Teletubbies on the way in (as, ouch, Freedom) and never stopped. Besides, that waterfront property could be mine.
Kline keeps his sense of humor, barely, but he is better off with his fears than his native optimism. Another America Is Possible pictures a "minority majority" country with a perpetual picnic and the burning and shredding of a Confederate flag. Well, fine, and the two-channel projection has a room to itself to enjoy it. The architects of the Iraq war offer their apologies, a nice bit of speech manipulation, through the mouth of a black woman, but do not expect any of these happy futures anytime soon. Is it enough to call them aspirational, even as the right continues to fight the Lost Cause? Tune in for the latest, on your phone or on TV.
Siri, build a world
After so many broken promises, can artificial intelligence offer a sense of release? Dinkins calls her show "On Love and Data," as if to equate the two. She knows better. Just for starters, she asks about "exploring structural bias in AI." Intelligence, real or artificial, is only as good as the data—
and the program that biased humans key in. She speaks of her project as Afro-now-ism, as if to complete the period room for Afrofuturism at the Met.
Then, too, AI is mostly faceless (though not in "Refigured" at the Whitney), like her own Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018 or for Refik Anadol at MoMA, while Dinkins (like so many at the Queens Museum), reaches out to the community. Never mind that groups, too, are an awkward route to love. She invites visitors to duck into something like a photo booth, only updated for video and a Web-centered world. On sees on-screen not a lover but one's very face, with the instructions to answer a question: what do you need to release to move forward? The results go into grids of photos and messages in the show's last room, like high-tech contact sheets.
One volunteer asks for release from "my need to be perfect." (So much for the perfection of AI.) Dinkins is not above boasting herself, as Professor Commander Justice. PCJ watches over the entrance, in bright red with a white wig, the photo's frame a snake coiling back on itself. She appears on video, too, on a full wall, upstaging the community and even you. It will take a lot of gall, a real-life artist, and, perhaps, fewer contradictions to build a world.
If PCJ sounds a little too close PB&J, Lacy has higher aspirations. For decades, she has been serving a full meal. In 1993 she invited such guests as Gloria Steinem and Anita Hill for Diner at Jane's—meaning Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago a century before, to welcome immigrants and to promote radical reform. Soon enough, though, Lacy extended invitations to the wider community, with a feminist message in that alone. Also in 1993 (and again in MoMA's 2021 "fall reveal"), she gave space for women to tell their stories of sexual abuse, in a space of crushed automobiles as the embodiment of violence. Twenty years later, she greeted senior citizens, for Silver Action.
Already in 1982, the scene had shifted to a more intimate space for guests, with Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room. Now she sets out half a dozen living-room sets in the museum's main hall, with tables of documents from fifty years of performances (but no TVs). The sofas seem right out of the 1960s, and so does what people used to call "consciousness raising." Wall text quotes a collaborator, Judy Baca, but also Allan Kaprow, the star back then of "happenings." Performance records include something as obsolete as telegrams.
Still, living rooms have changed. Now, she observes, they are not left to housewives, for perpetual cleaning. "Now you have a computer in the living room." A 1987 performance centered around the creation of a Crystal Quilt, and today's art sees quilt making as empowering women as never before. Are both artists stuck in the past, dated by the very technology that she embraces or disowns? Siri, build a world.
Josh Kline ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through August 13, 2023, Stephanie Dinkins and Suzanne Lacy at the Queens Museum through August 14, 2022.