Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987

Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987

How artists in the US starting in the 1960s came to use guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art, maneuvering policing, racism, and surveillance.   As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing.   Focusing on instances of arrest or potential arrest in art by Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Jean Toche, Tehching Hsieh, Pope.L, the Guerrilla Girls, Asco, and PESTS, Faye Raquel Gleisser analyzes the gendered, sexualized, and racial politics of risk-taking that are overlooked in prevailing, white-centered narratives of American art. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.   "Organized around a diverse cast of Conceptual and performance artists and collectives, [ Risk Work ] tells the riveting story of how US-based practitioners working in the shadow of the third-world guerrilla adapted themselves and their tactics to a nation increasingly reliant upon the prison-industrial complex, among other modes of racialized enclosure." ― Artforum "[Addresses] the highly understudied area of guerilla, legally risky, and often iconoclastic art practices in the US during the latter half of the twentieth century. [Its] release could hardly be more timely. . . . [Gleisser] deftly evades expectations of an indexical or genealogical approach to ‘guerilla art’, and surveys a set of artists, individuals and groups, which have been labelled ‘guerilla’ by critics or journalists, alongside those who embraced the term directly . . . . Gleisser’s methodology, though rooted in art history, is thoroughly interdisciplinary. The volume’s key contribution is a reflection on the labour of guerilla art, specifically ‘how artists anticipate and negotiate the prosect of punitive encounters and consequences . . . . Through comparative pairs, Gleisser starkly illustrates the different forms and levels of intersecting risk and privilege involved in the artworks of, for example, Chris Burden and Asco, or The Guerilla Girls and PESTS. . . . highly attentive not just to gaps and complexities in the historical narrative, but to the risks and complexities for the institutional spaces of art history and museums in recording and discussing this work, and, even more importantly, what all this might mean for future generations of militant and guerilla artists." ― Art History "The text is rigorous and rewarding, and will find enthusiastic readers in academic, museum, and even law libraries. . . Contemporary resonance is found between the subject of the book and ongoing political demonstrations in arts spaces, reminding of the international, anticolonial origins of 'guerilla' tactics." ― ARLIS/NA “ Risk Work  is a masterful rethinking of US contemporary art since the 1960s, revealing how ‘guerrilla tactics’ constituted an interface between conceptual and performance-based art and the state’s intensified expansion of racialized policing. Gleisser offers a complex and theoretically rigorous model for historical research wherein state documents speak of the arts, just as the history of state-sanctioned violence can be found in artists’ archival papers.” -- Chon Noriega, editor, A Ver: Revisioning Art History book series “An accomplished work with surprising interdisciplinary insights. Gleisser has provided us with a much-needed study of the proliferative use of ‘guerrilla tactics’ in contemporary American art and performance. Drawing art history and performance studies into conversation with critical legal studies of race, this necessary text brilliantly illuminates the complex networks that flow between contemporary tactics in art and performance and the power effects of a state and legal structure that has increasingly invested in and expanded the racialized dynamics of police and carceral power.” -- Joshua Chambers-Letson, author of "After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life" “A seminal account of carceral governance’s effects in the art world. Situating guerrilla art’s rise within transnational movements against state violence,  Risk Work  shines new light on the nexus between artistic practice, political knowledge production, and resistance.” -- Brian Jordan Jefferson, author of "Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age" “ Risk Work  promises to be an imp