ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Faye Raquel Gleisser is assistant professor of contemporary art and critical theory at Indiana University, Bloomington. Gleisser has curated multiple exhibitions, contributed to a range of exhibition catalogs and edited volumes, and published articles and reviews in Art Journal, Artforum, and Journal of Visual Culture, among others.

REVIEWS

“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 important, eye-opening, and potentially field-transforming contribution to the ongoing historicization of progressive, activist art in the US. Gleisser reorganizes the most basic templates for understanding conceptual and performance art, while presenting an insistent appeal to acknowledge and call out whiteness. I am nearly in awe of the text. Its radically original approach demonstrates its hermeneutic value immediately and incontrovertibly.”

— Matthew Jesse Jackson, author of "The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes"

"With Risk Work, Gleisser cleverly frames a compelling discourse around artists' actions in public space as they relate to the politics of the racialized and gendered body, punitive literacy, and risk-taking. By assessing key legislation, political events, city development policies, policing, and media portrayals alongside art historical feedback and reception, Gleisser provides a comprehensive consideration of the privileges and risks inherent in performance art, and their legibility, both within public space and the art world."

— Allison Glenn, curator and writer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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