Josh Kline
it's clean, it's natural, we promise.
2011
"It's Clean, It's Natural, We Promise" consists of commercially branded plastic water bottles that have been boiled in their own water and then refilled with the resulting plastic-infused liquid. The work critically engages with consumer culture and the paradoxes of bottled water marketing, highlighting the toxic irony embedded in industry promises of purity and naturalness. Kline appropriates the bottle's own branding language — including the label's bold declaration "It's clean, it's natural, we promise" — as a sardonic indictment of corporate deception and environmental harm.
- Medium
- "A few years ago my collaborators Jon Santos and Anicka Yi were both obsessed with this idea of water bottles leaching plastic while sitting in hot trucks in the sun. They thought we all needed to get glass or metal water bottles and start drinking tap water because bottled water was full of toxic plastic molecules. So I thought, why not just put the plastic in the water at the get-go? I boil the water bottles in their own water and then refill them with the plastic-infused water. The first boiled water bottles I made were Poland Spring bottles. After that I got really obsessed with these Duane Reade branded three-liter bottles—that were unfortunately discontinued—that look like computer architecture. It’s like drinking out of the Frank Gehry building in Chelsea. Their branding was pretty intense—a barcode Statue of Liberty on the label and the copy on the front which became the work’s title: “It’s clean, it’s natural, we promise.” On the back: “ . . . bottled in New York State for New Yorkers.” Josh Kline ("Josh Kline: New York, Dignity, and Self Respect
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Phillips
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September 20, 2016
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