Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century

Creative Labor (2009–14), the earliest body of work in the exhibition, looks at how creative workers—visual artists, musicians, and designers—navigate their fields by branding and marketing themselves in pursuit of self-actualization and success. Made at the moment when smartphones and social media became an unavoidable feature of working in these fields, these works are both a time capsule and a critique of creative life in New York—a hub of the global financial system—in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. 

Kline identifies the creative sector as the origin point for the erasure of boundaries between professional life, social life, and home life. For the artist, a world where workers are never off the clock is the inevitable outcome of what he has described as the “posthuman or nonhuman conditions made possible by always-on communication technology.” By incorporating performance-enhancing substances like Adderall and caffeine into some of his works, Kline reflects on the often-false hope that the limits of the human body can be exceeded in pursuit of greater productivity. This installation was inspired by the early twenty-first- century interior design of high-end drugstores and the lobbies of corporate bank branches to evoke a world designed by big-city creative workers and fueled by lifestyle aspiration and credit-card debt.