Art Workers Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era [Paperback]

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 periodAmerican artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy LippardBryan-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' Coalitiona short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rightsand 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

Julia Bryan-Wilsonis Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.

It stands to reason that art works are made by art workers, but in this searching account of artistic labor in the 1960s and 1970s, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows us that reason is supplanted by ambivalence and ambiguity as artists grappled with the massive upheavals wrought by feminism, the student movement, and the Vietnam War. The art made in the wake of these social transformations toggles between reform and revolution, and the definition of 'artist' has not been the same since.Helen Molesworth, Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museum

In this engaging history of the Art Workers' Coalition, Julia Bryan-Wilsonlã7