Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century

Civil War (2016–17), a chapter from Kline’s ongoing cycle of installations, imagines the American middle class a decade or two in the future, in the violent aftermath of massive layoffs as white-collar workers are replaced en masse by intelligent software. In this gallery, elements from the chapter’s first two parts are brought together. One group of monochrome sculptures resembles a field of concrete rubble—furniture and objects that have been broken apart like the middle-class dreams they represent. The other group, titled Class Division, conjoins luxury and generic appliances—a metaphor for an increasingly inequitable America. 

Informed by the history of the 1920s and 1930s, when mass unemployment in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash destabilized many democratic nations, as well as by that of the 1990s and 2000s, when a wave of factory automation and offshoring hit the United States, Civil War draws connections between those eras and the present. Kline conceived of Civil War during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, anticipating the Republican Party’s descent into openly authoritarian politics and the violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.