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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gleisser, Faye Raquel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and revolutions.

Guerrillas in art.

Performance art--United States.

Performance art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (293 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Intro

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.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226826479

0226826473

OCLC:

1397574327