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

Artists in the US started using guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art in the 1960s to challenge policing, racism, and surveillance. Faye Raquel Gleisser's book "Risk Work" explores the gendered, sexualized, and racial politics of risk-taking that are often overlooked in narratives of American art. It 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 17 October 2023
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

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.

Weight: 936g
Dimension: 185 x 226 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226826462