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

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

by Faye Raquel Gleisser
Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987

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

by Faye Raquel Gleisser

Hardcover(First Edition)

$40.00 
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Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226826462
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 10/17/2023
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Faye Raquel Gleisser is associate professor of contemporary art and critical theory and an affiliate of American studies and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, Artforum, ASAP/J, and the Journal of Visual Culture, as well as in catalogues accompanying exhibitions such as, The Propeller GroupOut of Easy Reach, and Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, among others.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction. Punitive Literacy and Risk Work
1 Hit-and-Run Aesthetics: Asco, Chris Burden, and Relational Geographies of Risk, 1971-1976
2  Deputized Discernment: Adrian Piper, Jean Toche, and the Politics of Antiloitering Laws, 1974-1978
3  Rethinking Endurance: Pope.L, Tehching Hsieh, and Surviving Safety, 1978-1983
4  “¿Why Won’t You See Us?”: The Guerrilla Girls, PESTS, and the Limits of Anonymity, 1985-1987
Epilogue. At the Edges of Guerrilla
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index 
 
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