Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century

Blue Collars (2014–20) is a series of stand-alone sculptural portraits and video interviews of working people in the United States. Kline began the series in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession as a way of exploring what blue-collar labor—the lower-paid, lower-prospect jobs available to those without college degrees—looks like in the twenty-first century. He hired deliverers, restaurant waitstaff, and hotel room cleaners to have 3D scans made of their heads, arms, and legs, from which full-color 3D-printed sculptures were created. In the video interviews, the same workers are asked about their jobs, aspirations, political views, and feelings about the conditions of their lives in general. Together, the interviews and sculptures present an unsettling picture of how precarity dominates the lives of so many workers in service industries. 

Kline sees photographic 3D scanning as a way of digitizing the human body, directly connecting the process of producing these works with both the ongoing automation of labor and the monitoring of productivity and biometrics that increasing numbers of people are subject to in their workplaces. The sculptures suggest that not only can one’s identity be subsumed by one’s job, as demonstrated by the body parts overlaid with corporate logos and branding, but that work turns human bodies and human lives into products.