Low Risk, High Reward

Back-to-school season in an election year and the girlies are shopping at Brandy Melville for fashion week. I decide now is the time to check out Buck Ellison, the token white guy of identity politics art. Is this a weird way to start my column with the artist’s book about Ivy League WASPs called Risk? I don’t understand why it is because Ellison seems to have minimized liabilities in packaging his study of American exclusion, including an interview with Vishal Jugdeo that discusses how the whiteness of Ellison’s images is inherently violent. Their dialogue also makes a solid argument that what Ellison is doing is institutional critique, collectors and museum board members being part of the one percent he targets (and a detailed list of everyone who owns his works is included near the book’s end). Domenick Ammirati has written about how annoying he finds what he calls Ellison’s “schtick,” and part of that frustration is how well received it’s been. Like, as much as Ellison intends (I think earnestly) to get us to consider these structures, he’s still palatable to them. The same elitist institutions the artist is asking us to think critically about have opened their arms to him. It’s instructive to watch how power nullifies its own critique by hoovering it up.

Still, I think the photos are great. “Disgusting” was the first word that Isaiah Davis used when I showed him (he took these pics where I’m holding the book). He said it in an excited way. And then added, his tone shifting, “They make me feel a little envy.” The images succeed in provoking ambivalence. They’re also hard to place temporally, a digital sharpness (contrasted by very blurry shots and subjects) upsets what I’m nostalgic for from the Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch ads of my youth. There’s another layer, too, of oil paintings of elites from the past hanging on museum walls. This compression makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s concept of homogenous empty time. Remember, the more uniform they make its passing seem, the more those in power can maintain their control. Published by IDEA Books, the cloth-bound hardcover—with a preppy blue seersucker stripe—is available at Dover Street.

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RISK by Buck Ellison is available via IDEA books online now.