Hi, everyone, and welcome to the
Hammer Museum, I'm Claudia Bestor,
I'm the director of public programs
here at The Hammer, and I'm really
excited to hear tonight's
conversation between artist Buck
Ellison and sociologist
Shamus Khan, who are going to talk
about privilege and power
and how the image of whiteness and
privilege are sustained and
broadcast by elites.
Buck Ellison is one of the artists
featured in the Hammer Museum
current biennial Made in L.A..
This is the fifth iteration of Made
in L.A. and it's on exhibition until
August 1st at both the Hammer Museum
and at the Huntington in Pasadena.
So you have 10 more days to see it.
Buck Ellison was born in San
Francisco. He received a B.A.
in German literature from Columbia
University and an MFA
from the state Sulla in Frankfurt,
Germany.
He creates meticulously detailed
images that examine white American
wealth.
His large format photographs
portraying Ivy League students,
dynasties and affluent homes
are inspired by 17th century Dutch
paintings, specifically family
portraits that display an intricate
set of coded signifiers and a
particular attention to detail.
This process involves thorough
research into the lives of his
subjects, some fictional and some
real and plants, clues
that signal status and affiliations
like a lapel pin or a hymnal book
or bumper sticker.
Overall, his tableaus showcase the
mechanisms that quietly obscure
inequality in America.
Ellison has exhibited his work at
the police hurling gallery in Paris.
Carol Costello in Malmo,
the Sun Painter Gallery in London,
Kunst Television in Austria
Index. The Swedish Contemporary Art
Foundation in Stockholm,
the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio
and the Museum for Modern Art
in Frankfurt.
Shamus Khan is a professor of
sociology and American Studies at
Princeton University.
His research is primarily, primarily
in the areas of cultural sociology
and stratification, with a strong
focus on elites.
He's the author of Privilege: The
Making of an Adolescent Elite at
St. Paul's School, published in
2011.
And he's currently working on a new
book called Exceptional: The Astor's
Elite New York and the Story
of American Inequality.
He's also the director of a Russell
Sage Foundation working group on the
political influence of economic
elites.
Khan has also co-written two
sociology textbooks with Oxford
University Press, the practice
of research and social scientists
answer their questions with Dana
Fisher and approaches
to ethnography with Colin Jerolmack.
More recently, he's been working on
a major research initiative to
understand sexual health and sexual
violence in university settings.
And in the past year, he posts the
results of that research in a new
book, Sexual Citizens
A Landmark Study of Sex, Power
and Assault on Campus, with
coauthor Jennifer Hirsch
and an addition to his scholarly
work, Khan writes regularly about
sociology in the popular press.
So Ellison and Khan will be taking
audience questions for at the end
of tonight's programs.
So you're welcome to type your
questions into the Q&A window in
your zoom screen.
And now, without further ado,
please join me in welcoming Shamus
Khan and Buck Ellison.
It's been a really wonderful
event. I think my mic was off there,
so you'll have to excuse me.
So I was saying thank you to
Claudia, to the Hammer Museum
everyone there for facilitating
this. And it's a pleasure to be
in conversation with you, Buck.
Yeah. Thank you for agreeing to do
this. I know that I emailed
you like four years ago,
just thanking you for
being alive.
Your work has really
helped me orient myself
in terms of stuff I can't
always understand.
So I'm super excited
to talk tonight.
And thank you for joining and
Claudia for setting this up and then
Hammer Forum hosting this.
So I'd love it if we just dove into
the first work, the
untitled cufflinks, and.
Want to make sure.
But can you see the image?
No, I can't.
Yeah, okay, great.
So this is the initial image I
thought we might begin our
conversation with as a sort
of way to bring
in a range of themes of your work
from space and place
to activities like sport
and leisure, questions of
masculinity and wealth and
privilege.
First, I wanted to talk
about the composition of the
work and sort
of how you thought about putting
this together, both in
its totality, the different elements
of it. But then also, I think at
some point will sort of zoom in
on some parts of it and look at
the composition of things like
gym shorts and tennis balls and
marriage announcements from The New
York Times.
So.
Short,
should we go to the next slide,
actually?
I mean, yes, this is the
whole work.
This is a bit longer than I normally
work and still loves.
And I was thinking a lot about
reading because I was
submitting
I submitted these New York
Times wedding announcement
submissions for
my ex boyfriends.
And I was very heartbroken
at the time that I made this.
And so I was thinking about reading.
So left to right now
as Western Westerner's,
we might approach an image.
So that was sort of.
The impetus for this
composition.
And I'm curious, like, what was
it about a wedding announcement that
sort of I mean,
what it doesn't seem like the kind
of thing that helps you deal with
heartbreak. But
I also wondered, like,
what was it that sort of inspired
you to think about either the
institution of marriage or what went
into these wedding announcements?
Because, I mean, The Times has a
very particular
kind of format for what
qualifies you for
a wedding announcement.
I mean, I think maybe you should
take this one. I feel like every
sociology textbook where I'm
reading about elites, like it starts
with New York Times wedding
announcement. So maybe
you might want to explain why I
might be interested in that.
Well, I mean, you know, so I've I've
not filled one of these out before,
so I'm not exactly sure.
But if you look through the
announcements, it's really
I mean, it's quite Nick Barlow.
They say things like who
the parents were, where they
went to school,
you know, whether or not people
would be maintaining their names,
the particular place and church
where the ceremony
is going to be held.
And all of these things are pretty
heavily coded.
Right. So
if you went to a prep school, it
will almost certainly mention
that. And then it
gives an account of sort of where
the meeting happened.
And it it is
it's it's like just a tiny
step away from the social register,
which was this
document that elite New Yorkers
produced sort of in the Gilded
Age when elite New York became
too big to fully know, like
when the elite group was basically
so large that you couldn't possibly
know everyone.
They used to publish this book,
which was nicknamed the Stud Book,
because it was meant to help you
find like an eligible man
for your daughter,
that that articulated sort of
people's pedigrees.
And so these announcements,
my assumption is, is that you're
basically filling in an
idea of pedigree and
pedigree and breeding are sort
of implicit in what
those announcements are.
Right.
They're also just
one of thing I noticed when filling
them out, I think,
can we go to the Zoom's and them?
The next slide.
Thank you.
So let's go all the way to the left.
They'll ask a few of notable
descendants, I think by that they
mean Mayflower.
And then I also heard a friend of
mine works there and he told me the
least competitive monster, January
and February.
So you'll notice I submitted for
that.
And that says, Babe, is this right?
Questionmark and
the church.
Yes. Also being important.
I was also in terms of myself,
I think all this work
is borne out of, you know,
it's personal.
And what I love about art making and
why I'm making art and not writing
essays or doing research is that I
can put a lot
of stuff into one image so I can ask
questions. I can do things that
don't make sense.
I can play around a little bit.
My heartbreak can be sublimated
into things that are silly.
So in this case, I was sort of
interrogating my own desires.
So if we keep going over.
Let's zoom in on the one above the
guys with the sticks.
Yeah, those are questions for myself
in terms of what is it that
attracts me to
other people and
is that actually real desire
or is that a
product of this sort of dominant
caste culture of being
handed down to me?
And I don't have an answer for that,
but I know that.
Go ahead.
And it's interesting to see the sort
of Phillips Andover Academy that's
a very elite prep school that
the Bushes went to and then going
to Yale College, you sort
of did you make up these details?
Were these actual details of the
I
legally cannot tell you about this
person.
Oh, OK.
Very well.
Well, they perhaps went to
Yale through 2006 and then got a
Harvard Law degree and now work at
a firm in Los Angeles of Gibson,
Dunn and something else.
So also this image
is, are these
tennis balls right?
These like and
which is an
extremely old elite sport,
if you like, in
Henry the Fifth, there's a
scene where they talk about
something that's sort of the
equivalent of tennis.
Caravaggio was a big tennis player
or that was like playing
real tennis.
So I'm curious about, you know, what
the role of sport leisure
activities is.
And we'll see this in future works
that we discuss.
Sure.
I mean, mostly these are
compositional, where
a little bit of the history of
tennis, not quite like you, I think
I was mostly interested in tennis
because there's also what
I had read is it has a long history
of.
This is now changing and the sport
is contemporary, tennis
is super exciting in terms
of its diversity, inclusion, but
we're talking about tennis from a
while back.
This question of having to wear
white clothing was also it was
very hard to maintain white clothing
without like a
pretty significant staff at your
disposal to bleach and clean
and press all the clothes.
So that was
and even the rules of the scoring,
I think, can be sort of prohibitive.
They're a little bit confusing.
And
and but yeah, here it
mostly was interested in using the
balls to move the eye around,
along with these posts,
the caps from a fresh tennis
balls sort of that
does point to they
are fresh, not using used
ones.
The roses here, like a very
particular shade of they're not
quite pink.
I think those kind of questions of
not being too garish taste,
certain kind of taste that
comes up again and again in the
work.
And then the gym shorts are from
This is Your New World,
Shamus Cap and Gown
Club, as described by F.
Scott Fitzgerald as broad shouldered
and athletic.
It's I guess the jockey
is the the eating clubs of
Princeton.
So those were obtained
by the artists and
these cuff links
with the legal scales,
better hand embroidered.
It also seems like bits of clothing
tossed, yeah,
as if they've been removed at some
point.
Yeah, so, um,
also within the imagery, ah, is
this sort of these two
classical things that are happening
or the sort of classical
imagery these two
young men, boys,
and I'm curious who they are,
how you chose them and
what they're doing for you.
Yeah.
So this painting
is right. Can we go to the next
slide is the Allen
Brothers portrait of James
and John Lee Allen by Henry
Raeburn, who's a Scottish painter.
Coming along.
This isn't the Kimbal collection,
Fort Worth
and I
was this was painted in the late
70s, 90s, and these are all from
when I was in grad school, the state
museum, which was the school I
went to, had a museum attached to
it, did this exhibition of British
children's portraiture from the
Enlightenment era.
And there is a catalog and I
remember really liking this catalog
and I kept the catalog
in this every series
of still lives that I made for Made
in L.A..
They all feature a page from this
catalog.
And also, I should say they all
the wall colors in the back of all
this. Still lives are based on the
Huntington wall colors
with these guys.
This was commissioned by their
father. And we don't know anything
about their father other than that
he went to Jamaica and returned
with a large fortune.
So
you tell me what that means.
But I was interested in this artist
because he was commissioned to
show these boys in a way that sort
of embodied these enlightenment
ideals that were kicking around at
the time so that this was a, I
guess, a newer idea at the time.
Children should be children.
They should explore.
They should be outside.
They were innocent.
So we see that they're wealthy, but
we also see them sort of they're
not sitting like little statues.
And I was particularly interested in
this gesture of the stick is tearing
the lining out of this hat.
And I guess that reading in
the catalog was
a sign from the French
Revolution of these
sentiments of liberation.
So I thought,
oh, that feels familiar.
There's this tension between the
artwork and the legwork that it's
doing and then the patron
that's commissioning it and the
means that he may have had
for
being able to commission paintings.
So.
That feels very familiar
to me as an artist working today,
different situation, but
that's the reason for the painting.
Yeah, I mean, it does seem to evoke
this.
You know that the back story
I didn't know about the
Jamaican, I mean, I'm just going to
assume it was a
slave sugar plantation.
I mean, I can't imagine the other
conditions under which someone would
come back from Jamaica with a lot of
money and that
innocence and sort of
beauty and childhood that these kids
can enjoy
the sort of built on that.
Right. I mean, there's a there's a
way that and
that that is completely
hidden even in the natural landscape
behind them.
It doesn't it doesn't reveal
the kind of extractive dimensions
of
of that process.
And so, you know,
the little playful violence of the
hook in the hat
in some ways is is like
nothing in comparison to something
far more brutal.
Right.
I also really wanted it.
I mean, maybe if we could go back to
the the overall image,
I really wanted to start with this
as well, because that
it struck me that the compositional
elements that go into this are
very parallel to your
otherwise heavily peopled
photographs.
And yet
this feels very,
very similar and very different to
me.
And I'm curious about,
you know, the the times where you
think I'm going to have this sort
of composition
of objects,
images, representations
that are people in those times that
they're not.
Yeah, to me, it's very similar,
still loves our.
Governments say they're easier.
It's a similar process of
a lot of the
photographs, some people are pretty
propter. And I'm very interested
in objects in the material world,
these kind of things that.
I just sort of know it when I see
them, but something like these
shorts, like I have that sort of
Push-Pull relationship where
I feel both extremely
attracted to and repulsed by
the same object.
So when I see things like that, I
tend to hold on to them and keep
them in the studio and they they
find their way into work.
The shorts were in like three photos
before they they made it into
a photo that made it into the world.
So.
Well, maybe we should go to the next
the next image,
which is more
people that I wanted to ask
you a
little bit about
your process of casting
and finding.
Oh, I actually wasn't anticipating
this. Who are these brothers?
Yeah, I cast it.
This this is we should go back to
the very first slide.
There's just one other thing.
So in the process of installing
Made in L.A. at the Huntington, the
first year that we got to work at
the Huntington, which is such an
amazing opportunity,
I did a little bit
of research and I said,
this is the Cokely brothers.
This is the Western brothers.
But John Singleton Copley,
who, from what I could research,
was sort of the more commercially
successful
painter compared to Rayburn, who
did the Allen Brothers.
And so this was done.
What year
I want to say was late 70s
and 80s. And then the Allen
brothers, the one in my life was 17
Nyos.
But the compositions are so similar
that we think that Raybon may
have been aware of coquis painting
and may have even copied some of the
compositional elements.
So when that sort of falls
in your lap, I just ask the curators
if we could remove the painting and
put my photo there instead, and
thank you to them for allowing us
to make that conversation possible.
Oh, that's really cool, huh?
I love it.
Um.
So if we could move to
the next image sunset.
Yeah, and he and here
I wanted to talk to you a little bit
about the process of casting and
finding spaces
to represent
these people.
I noticed on the model, on the
right, it seems like he'd been
doing some kind of copying or
something like that
before this.
And I was curious
if that was something you were
excited about in terms of part of
the imagery.
But, you know, for these
two young men and for other people,
like, how do you.
How do you find them and pick people
to represent
these dynamics of wealth and power?
Right.
They use commercial casting agencies
and yeah, I feel a real
responsibility because obviously.
It's I think about
it a lot as a white person
putting more images of powerful
white people into the world, that
that means something and that comes
with responsibility.
And I think one thing I can do here
is work with precision.
And that's always my goal with every
image. So I think we have
plenty of cartoons or Real
Housewives franchises that sort
of.
Mock wealthy people, and
I was more interested in, like, OK,
we have this group of people that
control society, should
we represent them and try to
understand them better?
Yes.
Are they mostly white?
Yes.
So I try to represent that as
accurately as possible.
Not only are they mostly white, but
I also want to say they're mostly
lean and athletic and have access
to every possible form of medical
care which is pointed to
by the couple. So I paid for him to
go get the cupping before
the photo.
And the casting is,
yeah, I just try to find people that
sort of.
Evoke that, um.
That accuracy that I'm going
for is the real people, but
we've talked about this and sort of
like it's hard to study leads
because we're not given access to
them and not
to equate what we're doing.
And I don't consider this study per
say, but I have
to go out in the world and
create this all again.
Yeah, I mean, the
it just it made me think a little
bit about my own work, which
is, you know, sort of talks about
how
so much of wealth and power
is tied to
experiences in institutions of
wealth and power that then become
embodied.
They become sort of part of who you
are.
And so for
me, as I was sort of looking through
all of these images, I mean, some of
them are, you
know, people on the Crossfield.
And we'll talk about those in a
little bit. But for these two,
I mean, my guess is that these
guys are not from positions of
enormous wealth and power.
And yet somehow
you're able through these images to
get people to evoke
that or to kind
of represent it in a somewhat
powerful way.
And I'm curious,
like, what do you communicate to
them as your,
you know, asking them to do
something? So in this instance,
they're putting on a what what
is this bumper sticker?
This is looks like a
Patagonia logo.
So this one,
it's gotten a little easier as
that making work for longer.
There's more like people can sort of
look up the work and see what I'm up
to.
But yeah, I just sort of said
like I would.
You are going to.
Um.
These two kids all provide the
clothing for me, this one
really reminds me of prep school
more than any of the images.
This was such a
literal construction of identity.
What they're doing, the bumper
stickers are so important in school.
And also, like he's wearing like a
beer tank top and the other kid has
a little striped polo,
but then there's a Tibetan ring
and he's winning
all the little.
Yeah, yeah.
So these these things that
are seem like not a big
deal. But I think at that age,
when you're trying to differentiate
yourself within a pretty homogenous
pool of people, like they take on an
enormous weight.
So.
And then things you maybe as a kid
don't think about, but like
you wouldn't put stickers on a car
that you're leasing, they own
this car
and then the sort of left leaning
politics would be expensive car
that that to me is.
So there's a save to bet.
The Tibetan flag there and then
the image of the gigas as a rising
sun and then the title of the images
that sunset so.
The next image I want to talk about
is Dick, Dan and Doug,
and here we see Dick, Dan
and Doug
and I wanted to talk on this both
about issues of queerness in
your work, but also
sort of status and power.
And as I was looking at this image,
I thought like
one that I
assume I think probably not
incorrectly that Dick, Dan and Doug
are the three guys playing golf
and that the the the
caddy goes unnamed in this image.
So
there are three people who whose
names we get to know and then
there's one person who isn't.
And yet the caddy also is
looking down on these guys
in a kind of
powerful way and then, you know, one
of them.
So the caddy is sort of an unnamed
person looking down at these other
two guys.
And then one of them, maybe
it's Dan, since he's in the middle,
is casually pissing on the golf
course.
And as I as
I looked at this, I thought
there is
a certain queerness to this imagery.
I thought a little bit of like
Wolfgang Tilghman's
sort of famous image of a guy
pissing on a chair.
And yet here he sort of turned
around. We don't get to see him.
There are things that are both
very obviously happening and hidden.
Do you think about sort of
do you think about this work as
something that sort of dealing
with a range of career themes as
well beyond just wealth, privilege
and power?
I know someone said this talk
was lame.
Yeah, well,
I don't know how to turn that
everybody off, OK, so
I do. I think it is a queer person
like.
I grew up in in
a community, suburban community,
where I do things like choices of
clothing really affected, like
your feelings of safety.
So I think you grow to be
extremely.
Attuned to
these symbols and signs and what
they mean and wearing this shirt
may get you
called a fag that day and wearing
the shirt won't.
And now as I've gotten older
than you also have to think about,
yes, I
then have to go back to Stockholm
Syndrome style and be like, okay,
why am I attracted to these guys
that now sort of look like the
people that would have called me
back.
But I also get to this
is also so the guy pissing is
Dick DeVos, that's Betsy DeVos'
husband.
And we did cast for the full
dick, which was really difficult to
do.
And then I ended up not showing it.
But.
Yeah, with the caddy, I sort of
wanted to nod to that there's
this grand, terrible tradition
and painting of not naming the
health and
I wanted.
Both to sort of I think it's also
I've been trying to add that
into the
work, and I think it's super
interesting that these interactions
between these super wealthy people
and the
people that.
Come
and get
out of here.
And yeah, I didn't no thought of it,
that he's literally looking down
on them. He's in this as an
opportunity. But, yeah, his space
was amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, it really captures this sort
of like a degree of
quiet disdain,
but sort of incredible
silence. I mean, the other thing
that really comes through, I think,
both in this image and in others is
like
a commentary on whiteness and,
you know,
thinking about taking whiteness
as your object,
as part of a vision
of like doing commentary
on race within art.
And I think,
you know, to me, imagining,
like whiteness as an object, as an
important object of analysis
is sort of it's
interesting. And I and I wonder,
like, what are the kinds of
whiteness that you
want to represent and
what do you think that
representation is doing?
Wolf keeps me up at night.
Uh.
Part of me cannot know it's
my job to make these works and ask
questions, and they do go out into
the world and do their own thing,
and most people experience them
not through a
lecture where I'm talking about it,
but just as images.
And that's exciting, but terrifying
with this work also.
But I think it's super
important that we
look at this group of people and
that we look at them
not as monsters or
not as evil
persay, not as
they like absolved of sin.
I mean, these people, I should say
also I was interested in this group
of people, the DeVos
family, for example, because they
only appear to us as the public
through their philanthropic
endeavors, which are fully managed.
Unless they run for office
and I
thought there's got to be sort of
something in between that's more
nuanced and maybe my work can
provide that.
So go ahead.
Oh, no, I was going to say in the
next image, we
get yet another
sort of representation
of sport and leisure in
Hotchkiss versus Taft number four.
And this comes from
in well, for me in my introduction
to it, your book.
And here
we have images of
girls at Hotchkiss in Taft,
which are two New England
prep schools
playing lacrosse, which is sort
of classically associated with
at least an elite circles with sort
of New England boarding schools.
And in the book,
it opens with a chapter, Daughters,
where we see a series
of these images of these high
school girls playing, quote, cross.
And then after the images,
you present us with a book proposal
and the book proposal opens.
And I'm going to quote from your
book.
"This book looks at how a Native
American ritual ended up as a
rule ridden sport
played predominantly by affluent
white New Englanders."
And it was
it was very sort of striking for me
to first see
these images of these girls
at play and
in in other ones, they're like,
you know, there's there's one with a
girl sort of mouth
wide open, as if screaming
in this incredible moment of
competition and this sort
of thing that culturally defines
a lot of New England boarding
schools, this and hockey,
but that you don't use the word
appropriated, but have been largely
appropriated from a Native American
ritual or a set of Native American
rituals.
And so I'm curious,
you know.
Like, first of all, I thought to
myself it was kind of weird that I
never thought of this before,
I was sort of obscured to me.
But in these images of of
lacrosse, if there are ways
that you felt like you were
capturing that tension or that
you like, you actually needed to put
the book proposal in the book so
that people kind of
had the sort of shocking, revelatory
moment that I had that was
like slightly embarrassing,
actually.
Oh, OK.
So I did only just send that
to you. It's not in the book you
get the oh no,
there's an essay, but all
the same that.
Yeah, that's something I love about
artwork's but can also be.
I mean, yeah, I think if I wanted to
talk, there's already people that
have written about the history of
lacrosse, so
the image to me is more exciting
that it can do all these things at
once.
Yeah, I picked the two schools.
I tried to sort of hone in on
this history. So Hotchkiss and Taft
were choices.
Hotchkiss, he manufactured
a lot of things, but one of them was
sort of this revolving cannon that
was decisive that the
massacre at Wounded Knee.
So
the genocide is sort of right there
in the front. And then the Taft
family is that was the brother
of a member of this
political dynasty.
I don't need to tell you about these
schools, but these
two particular choices
and I was interested in women's
lacrosse because apparently that's
closer to the Native
American stickball games that were
played. So there's no padding,
there's no helmet.
And so that
and I also I love that maybe
we can skip a slider to.
Go forward.
I love these ideas
of showing young girls
as violent,
powerful agents, and I think
and this is maybe.
I thought, you know, it's also I was
super impressed by their athleticism
and wanted to capture that, so
sort of a bunch of things going on
at once in the image.
Yeah, I think the next image,
even more so it
seems like a kind of like
a war cry that she's.
Yeah, it's a spooky game.
I mean, it's you know, we
took all this land and these
boarding schools.
I mean, this game was at Taft,
which is on two hundred acres of
what have been.
I'm not sure what people lives
there, but that's in Connecticut
and, you know, there were people
there before it happens there
and there's some images there, not
in the slideshow, but they're back
focus. So we focus just on the
landscape.
And then this is just sort of coming
out in the news, but thinking
also about the boarding school
opportunity opportunities that were
provided to Native Americans by our
government as sort of this chilling
corollary to
these elite schools so that.
The work sort of keeps developing
for me.
Yeah, and there's these ghostly
reminders of a
Native American culture,
at least as we understand
it, in terms of there's the
chanting or sometimes they put
stuff on their face and things like
that. So.
So I wanted to return
to sort of unpopulated images
for a moment, so in the next
photograph, the the fourth
the upper school greenhouse,
Marin County School, this is part
of a series
on college preparatory schools
of which sunset that we saw before
the two young men putting
the sticker on the car was also a
part of.
And what I found fascinating is that
in this series, you didn't
give us like Gossip Girl
moments portraying these kids.
Instead, it was like it was mostly
plants, flowers,
and frequently
the people that you portray
in in the images that we've seen so
far, at least like they're not
looking at us.
So the two men in sunset are
looking at their car that I
mean, the girls are involved in an
athletic event that
Dick, Dan and Doug are not looking
at us either. They're sort of
paying attention to the golf.
And the caddy isn't either.
And I was curious about this.
You know, there seems to be in
a theme of proximity
and distance within your work,
there's a kind of intimacy of
the portraiture, that of
the portraiture, both of this plant,
for example, this piece of
vegetation.
And but sometimes
sometimes people are looking
directly at us and are highly staged
and are not just conscious of it,
but in some ways they insist
on the presence of the camera,
like almost like they're actors
who hired you rather than
you being an artist that
has brought them into it.
And other times we have
something like this.
And I'm curious, behind what what
was behind the decision when
doing a series of photographs about
college preparatory schools
to present us with something
like a vegetable
here?
Yeah,
so I went to school in Germany
and Germany still has counts
and Dukes and I
was like, oh, that's weird
that like this
country with counts and dukes
running around and still feels like
it has more equality than where
I grew up.
So they came sort of fascinated.
Through this distance, and so I
found myself when I came home on
breaks from school, going back
to I went to one of these schools.
So that's part of our proximity
going in the schools and in the Bay
Area. They have this funny thing
where a lot of them are like
repurposed 19th century mansions
that they turned into schools.
So that initially was documenting
not, by the way,
notice that almost
every one of these schools had these
like professionally maintained
organic vegetable gardens.
And it wasn't just like carrots and
radishes. It was like really like
sort of restaurant menu, hard to
pronounce gatekeeping
kind of foods.
Right. And I thought, oh, that's
interesting. There's something a
little bit like Marie Antoinette
SPAC farm thing going on
here. Like, clearly the student
garden isn't just maintained
by students and
a lot of the.
The titles for these Wall Street
as sort of hints at like the
sort of breadth of offerings
of these schools, so upper school
greenhouse may suggest that there
may be a lower school green house
and a lower school pizza oven
and an East Asian languages
study center and sculpture garden,
all of which are true.
And so this
was my way of just like focusing in
on something really small and never
thought it would photograph plants.
But I thought even something as
innocuous as like gardening
we can all get behind that like that
is also loaded in, there's things
going on there that it is
sort of preparing students for
a certain kind of life.
And there's an expectation there.
Yeah, I mean, I think the other
thing that came out here to me was
the sort of the naturalization
of of this experience
and and
it kind of brings us back to the
first image a little bit.
And those two boys in in
in that moment of
sort of naturalistic representation,
I wanted to move us finally to
Dick and Vecsey,
the
portrait of Dick and Betsy in the
Ritz Carlton in Dallas, Texas.
Nineteen eighty four.
And
you know, the
portraits that you provide us are
frequently of leisure
or of domestic spaces.
And so when I was
looking through your work in
anticipation of the conversation, I
wasn't just trying to think about,
like, what do I see in it?
But I was trying to think about,
like, what don't I see?
What sort of not there.
And, you know, I I
noticed that in addition to these
intimate portraits, there's often an
absence of work.
And I wondered first if that's
right, if you've
thought about it and
why your composition often
features interiors
or people at play.
You know, we have
Dick and Dog or the La Crosse
conversation as an example of this.
Yeah, it was you told me this and I
borrowed money and I get
that, I guess when I think about
it and you also talk about
these kids earlier,
ones playing lacrosse and putting
the stickers on the car like.
I view them as under this enormous
amount of pressure and not having
fun and working, and
Betsy here is canvasing
for. She was chairperson of
the Republican National Committee
this year. So she is laying
into someone on the phone wanted
to show that.
But yeah, I think also when
you reach a certain level of wealth
like you are always working, but
there's also also people working
under you.
And so going back to Gibson Dunn
law firm like Betsie may be doing
this and maybe in this
silly pullets address, but there's
a hundred people at a law firm
working 80 hours a
week on
pieces of legislation or
litigation for the family.
And I think that's sort of like,
yes, there's an absence of work, but
there's also people are very busy.
And that sort of combination of what
you're busy doing, what exactly?
And then the work taking place
out of the frame,
those are all.
It's hard. Yeah, I don't know that I
represent how did you
how did you pick this dress is
really curious about that.
I was just wondering.
I just love Lily Pulitzer.
And I thought she's a really
interesting case where she was sort
of a bad girl, like she wanted to
create these dresses
that you could wear without
underwear and would go around Palm
Beach not wearing shoes.
And then the brand itself, sort of
this funny evolution,
which I'm not
from the South. So I don't fully
understand it. But I've been told
it's sort of like it's what you wear
if you're like a conservative, mean
girl from like the mid-Atlantic
or the South. So I thought, OK,
what week Pulitzer could work for
Betsy?
Yeah,
that yeah.
It's it's it's absolutely
fantastic. I mean, I think that the
other
thing I think about within this and
the other pictures is like.
You know, the
line between sort of critique and
representation,
there's nothing in your your body
of work that I've seen that feels
like it's mocking
or making fun of
these folks.
And at the same time, it never
feels like a straight representation.
And I wonder if
you.
I have a vision of your work
as providing a kind of critique
of these people or of this
kind of power within
American society,
or if that's not really what you
envision for your role as an artist
to be.
I don't love fatigue just
because it's consumable,
and I don't want the people who are
able to buy art to be able to
consume that because they're the
very class that we're looking at.
So that I don't like I don't like
pointing fingers.
I do think the DeVos family merits
further investigation
and that also.
Thinking this is another reason all
the images are sort of shot close
up, like you wouldn't even be able
to do this or not raised
within this context to some degree.
So.
It's a bit of all those things I
feel sort of ambivalent about it,
honestly, not
in the sense of not caring, but
feeling really like repulsed
and attracted at the same time.
So I wondered if we could
pivot a little bit to the Q&A.
I've been sort of ignoring the chat,
but that if people want
questions that we
can discuss, you can
throw them into the Q&A.
And the first one is, did you
purposely structure the picture to
make it look like he was urinating
in the can?
So if we go back to Dick, Dan
and Doug, that one
of the guys on the ground,
I think it's his left hand is
holding a can and it almost looks
like
a dick is
pissing into the can.
Was that part of your
composition?
No, I'm not going to take credit for
that. But I have heard that some
funny beer jokes make the local
ultra, which is sort of scoffing
beer does sort of taste like
this.
So
where the lacrosse
photo's staged?
No, those are the only photos
that aren't staged.
But that was one game.
And I think sort of a game has
is staged.
And I didn't mention this during the
talk, but this photo,
for example, we shot for probably
longer than a game would be shot.
So one way that I try
to attain is naturalistic,
looked at the images just to shoot
for a long time.
So the actors sort of get tired
of me.
We stop.
Acting like we're holding a can of
beer and we just hold a can of beer.
But a DeVosd family aware of these
photos, and if so,
what do they think of them?
They're not, but hopefully they will
be soon.
Now,
what was the decision to pick their
family and specifically.
It's just too good to be true.
There was so much going on there.
I mean, her decisions
as secretary of education really
upset me. And so I was initially
just like, who is this person?
Where did you come from?
And then.
There, yeah,
just some hit with this wall of
information, so there's this really
intense pride in being
Dutch, this part of West
Michigan where she's from
was settled by Dutch
Dutch Calvinists in the
eighteen sixties.
And it sort of remains like
very homogenous.
There's a saying in that part
of Michigan, if you ain't Dutch, you
ain't much
so that her politics
I was interested in, I thought
going back to critique, I was also
sort of alarmed by the amount
of just people were like, this woman
is a monster, she's a witch, she's
an idiot. And it
wasn't not misogynist.
And I also thought this person
has been working for years for the
Republican Party, like she didn't
just show up one day.
And I thought, chances are she's
pretty smart.
And so I just wanted to look at her
with more nuance and try
to do more research and understand
a bit more.
Yeah, I mean, I think
I skipped over one of the images,
which was the AP photo of them
in the early 1980s together
in a in a hotel room
was that image.
So this is the the the
the last image that we sort of
selected for that
unknown photographer
was that image
inspiration for the
the
the Ritz Carlton
one.
Yeah. So what we're
I don't think it's super important,
but what it's sort of left out is
these are all based on.
I think another reason I'm attracted
is that there's not a lot of images
of them.
And so what we do have feels
more precious and sort of the piece
stuck together.
So I know.
Actually, the most I've learned
about them is through there's public
listings for working for their
family online, so you can sort
of learn a little bit about their
life based on sort
of what jobs are available.
So seasonal, that
or seasonal gift assistant.
But yes, these are absolutely used
to try to sort of get an idea, which
is that style wise in the 80s.
So someone asked if you could speak
to how your projects take on form
books, exhibitions, print series,
how do they differ and which of
these do you enjoy the most?
Yeah, I don't know, I just sort of
make the work and then
I know I think about exhibitions,
I don't think I'm
the book thing is sort of new.
I like making books, but
I normally think about putting them
in shows. And I do think that that
is.
They're shocked that way, they're
shocked to be printed and framed and
seen in person.
So
there's a question in there which
actually I had thought about
asking, which is on West
Coast versus East Coast versus
global elites.
And you seem to have interacted with
all of three spheres,
given your US trajectory
and international education.
And if it was, it's
interesting to me to see the sort of
West Coast boarding school imagery
and then the Taft Hotchkiss
and whether or not you think of
these as very distinct cultures
as some often
argue or how
you think about the relationship
between these three.
Yeah, I mean, I've had this question
of like the DeVos work debuted
in London, so it's sort of like, OK,
why would this be relevant for a
British audience?
And I sort of think like.
A, she was a huge fan of Thatcher,
but also this
is a global phenomenon.
We have this condensation of power
towards the top
and.
I think I became fascinated
with it on the West Coast, you maybe
have the most, like, active
obfuscation of it, like people are
really trying to hide things.
And my brief interaction
with boarding school culture, which,
you know, much more, it was it was a
bit more unseemly.
It's a little you could be a little
more honest about what was going on.
So the parents on the sideline
during that game were like,
yeah, she's interning at Goldman
this summer. Like it was really like
and not that wouldn't have happened
in Marin County anything, but.
It's when to ask, there's
a monumental kind of luminous
quality to many historical portraits
of those in power.
Thinking of Sargent here,
were you thinking of those in your
own work?
Yeah, absolutely.
I like his work a lot.
And I mean, go ahead.
No, no, I was going to say that it's
like a kind of clarity and
directness to all of the
imagery that you have.
And it's unflinching, I think.
Thank you.
That's a compliment, right?
Yeah, yeah, it was, absolutely.
Take it, take it.
Yeah.
Um, so,
uh, there's so many
questions here. I don't know if
they're ones that
I don't know
where are they. Q And Eric Foner
Q&A probably got a lot.
And uh,
so did you need permission for the
lacrosse players and families.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
And I don't think
it can surprise, surprise
to the art world, there were a lot
of former boarding school
lacrosse players work in galleries.
Mm hmm.
So and
we did the form one.
I need to sort of clear up a little
bit. And, uh,
so.
There are some, but these
are the imagery that we present
that you represent are somewhat
devoid of technology
as a representation of privilege.
And I guess there's also a kind of
an interesting component of an
L.A., San Francisco
part of that are going to certain
technologically enabled items
like certain mobile phones that
symbolize privilege.
Or is there a way that you
think technology plays a role in
privilege?
I would say almost the opposite,
like at this point, like if you
don't have a phone with you, it's
like, whoa, who is that?
Yeah. So yeah, there's no phones
in the pictures, but the
a good chunk of them now or I mean,
the DeVos ones were made
before there were cellular phones.
So they're historical images.
Yeah.
So, um,
can you talk about how you decide
whether to create an image is a
still photograph or a video to
the immediate media function
differently?
Oh, yes, I made one my first
video last year.
It is.
Yeah, they're very different.
I mean, they're both lens base, but.
The ability to have a duration
and add sound
or music that adds so much more.
It's an enormously overwhelming
to me, but that's something that I
am going to do again.
So there's a really interesting
question here, it says, like, how
much do you want people to have
knowledge? Do you want people to
have before they're viewing
these images?
I don't recognize the names of these
people.
So as you're having this
conversation, it feels sort of
I'm putting these words in the mouth
of the person and I ask the question
like inside or like, do you think
people need to
know the reference
or Hotchkiss Taft
or who Betsy DeVos is
in order to approach your work?
No, I think art is.
In and of itself, I'm not talking
about the structures around, it is
very democratic, like we can all
stand in front of a picture and find
our own way through it.
I think viewers are smart,
but I do yeah.
I really am interested in this
legibility game of things.
So, for example, that we showed
the lacrosse pictures in Basel
and there were very
few people needed to be
educated at the Basel
art fair and needed to learn what
lacrosse was. And I thought, oh,
that's tells us a little bit about
who goes to our affairs.
And I think that's a fun
mirroring game that the work can
play.
So I'm going
to and I know there are a bunch of
more questions, but I'm going to end
with one of them and kind of riff
off of it a little bit.
Do you consider your commercial work
as distinct from your artistic
practice? And I want to follow up a
bit. A little bit.
But yeah, absolutely.
I don't know how people think that
artists survive in America,
but yeah, you have to do commercial
work. I have a dog, so
I have to feed her, OK?
It's like, what does the dog have to
do? Think I like
maybe part of your commercial
practice is like dressing up
your dog and having her like,
oh no.
I just meant I think
it's a I
have a big responsibility.
It's a big responsibility.
But I know I do.
I mean, I work borrowing a little
bit from.
Production model of a
commercial shoot, so I have learned
things doing commercial work,
but yeah, when people ask me
if that's a conceptual choice of
mine, I'm afraid I don't have that
luxury. It's not
OK. Well, I
don't know if there was anything
else you wanted to
say or talk about
back or
not.
This has been great.
Thank you. That with me.
I really enjoyed it.
And you know,
one of the few people I'd stay up
until 11 o'clock for.
Yeah, this guy is in Princeton, New
Jersey. So thank you.
I appreciate that so much.
But I'm really an early to bed
kind of person, so
I really want to thank you for being
in conversation with me.
I got a lot out of it, and it was
really great to kind of dig into
your work.
I want to thank everyone who joined
us ask questions and was part
of the conversation and then
everyone I'd hammer for facilitating
this and getting us all together
here for this
conversation.
Yeah.
Thank you, everyone, for tuning in
for Claudia, especially for setting
this all up.
So, yeah.
Have a good night.
Have a good night, everyone.
Take care.