"[ Addresses] the highly understudied area of guerilla, legally risky, and often iconoclastic art practices in the US during the latter half of the twentieth century. [ Its] release could hardly be more timely. . . . [ Gleisser] deftly evades expectations of an indexical or genealogical approach to guerilla art, and surveys a set of artists, individuals and groups, which have been labelled guerilla by critics or journalists, alongside those who embraced the term directly . . . . Gleissers methodology, though rooted in art history, is thoroughly interdisciplinary. The volumes key contribution is a reflection on the labour of guerilla art, specifically how artists anticipate and negotiate the prosect of punitive encounters and consequences . . . . Through comparative pairs, Gleisser starkly illustrates the different forms and levels of intersecting risk and privilege involved in the artworks of, for example, Chris Burden and Asco, or The Guerilla Girls and PESTS. . . . highly attentive not just to gaps and complexities in the historical narrative, but to the risks and complexities for the institutional spaces of art history and museums in recording and discussing this work, and, even more importantly, what all this might mean for future generations of militant and guerilla artists." * Art History * "The text is rigorous and rewarding, and will find enthusiastic readers in academic, museum, and even law libraries. . . Contemporary resonance is found between the subject of the book and ongoing political demonstrations in arts spaces, reminding of the international, anticolonial origins of 'guerilla' tactics." * ARLIS/NA * 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 states 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 governances effects in the art world. Situating guerrilla arts 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
