Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era

by Julia Bryan-Wilson

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as “art workers.” In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period—American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard—Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that “art works.” She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the “art worker” identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition—a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights—and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics.

A Best Book of 2009, Artforum Magazine

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction

282 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best academic books I've read this summer. Art Workers is concerned with a specific moment in the 1960s and 70s, when politically-concerned artists began to define themselves as workers. This moniker ushered in a series of contradictions: that their art, conceptual/minimalist/dematerial, appeared as the abandonment of traditional labor; their uncertain class position; America’s economic transition to a postindustrial/managerial economy; their tactic of withholding production and participation; and their ambivalent, even hostile, views on the working class, in comparison to their affinity towards the student movements. Julia Bryan-Wilson highlights four artists involved in the Artists Workers Coalition-- Carle Andre, Robert Morris, Lucy Lippard, and Hans Haacke-- to illustrate the origins of this identity, the variations of art workers, and the different political embedded in the identity of the art worker.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

If what you're looking for is a theoretical analysis o the moves to refine "art" as "work" during the late 60s and early 70s, add a star. Very much New York-centered after an early section ( a good one) on the Peace Tower in LA.

[Mary Emily O'Hara]

This is really helping me prepare for my upcoming presentation at Portland Art Museum, on the history of artists' labor economics struggle!