"Holding a TV talk show host hostage. Staging a faux scene of gang war violence. Loitering. Surviving outdoors for a year. Crawling. Wheat-pasting posters. Occupying a traffic island. These actions served as the basis of experimental artworks, often described as "guerrilla," that were staged for unsuspecting audiences in the US during the 1970s and 1980s--a period when politicians and law enforcement framed anticolonial interventions and urban rebellions waged by "guerrilla fighters" as national security threats, and lawmakers expanded policing budgets while deepening the consequences of anti-riot, anti-loitering, and anti-poverty laws. Focusing on instances of arrest or near-arrest in performance and conceptual art by artists Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, Pope.L, and Jean Toche, and art groups, the Guerrilla Girls, Asco, and PESTS, Gleisser challenges long-standing misconceptions surrounding guerrilla art in American society. Rather than romanticize artists' individual agency, or treat police presence as a given, Gleisser argues that artists' tactical work exposes the racialized, sexualized, and gendered politics of risk-taking mired in the country's punitive turn. Drawing on art history, Black studies, performance studies, and prison studies, Gleisser provides close analyses of art staged in charged urban sites, revealing how artists' "risk work" negotiates differing vulnerabilities to state-sanctioned violence, and exposes the complex relationship between policing, state power, and conttemporary art"--Provided by publisher.
"Holding a TV talk show host hostage. Staging a faux scene of gang war violence. Loitering. Surviving outdoors for a year. Crawling. Wheat-pasting posters. Occupying a traffic island. These actions served as the basis of experimental artworks, often described as "guerrilla," that were staged for unsuspecting audiences in the US during the 1970s and 1980s--a period when politicians and law enforcement framed anticolonial interventions and urban rebellions waged by "guerrilla fighters" as national security threats, and lawmakers expanded policing budgets while deepening the consequences of anti-riot, anti-loitering, and anti-poverty laws. Focusing on instances of arrest or near-arrest in performance and conceptual art by artists Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, Pope.L, and Jean Toche, and art groups, the Guerrilla Girls, Asco, and PESTS, Gleisser challenges long-standing misconceptions surrounding guerrilla art in American society. Rather than romanticize artists' individual agency, or treat police presence as a given, Gleisser argues that artists' tactical work exposes the racialized, sexualized, and gendered politics of risk-taking mired in the country's punitive turn. Drawing on art history, Black studies, performance studies, and prison studies, Gleisser provides close analyses of art staged in charged urban sites, revealing how artists' "risk work" negotiates differing vulnerabilities to state-sanctioned violence, and exposes the complex relationship between policing, state power, and conttemporary art"--Provided by publisher.
Über den Autor
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 Group, Out of Easy Reach, and Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, among others.
