Risk Work: Thinking Through Artists’ “Punitive Literacy”
Art interventions labeled “guerrilla” are commonly understood as ephemeral fugitive actions that temporarily disrupt spatial and social order. While these actions have become a key site for studying how artists deploy agency and resist power, the racial politics of mobility, vulnerability to premature death, and policing central to each work has yet to be conceptualized as an integral part of guerrilla art’s forms, reception, and legacy. In Faye Gleisser’s new book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (University of Chicago Press), she analyzes the complex relationship between guerrilla tactics in art, state power, risk management, and policing that deepened during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States.
Drawing on art history, performance studies, geography, legal studies, and Black feminist theories of mobility and illegibility, the book tracks how artists in the US negotiated and often altered a burgeoning security apparatus amidst the expansion of policing and prisons commonly known as America’s “punitive turn.” Through close readings of artists’ decisions to solicit, evade, or manipulate encounters with the carceral apparatus, Gleisser contends that artists' calculation of punitive encounter not only reveals the deepening (and overlooked) relationship of policing and experimental art, but also exposes the gendered and sexualized racial politics of risk-taking that have remained overlooked in white-centering narrations of American Art. By focusing on the asymmetrical relations of artists to state sanctioned violence as a central form within the making of guerrilla art, the book animates artists' punitive literacy— cumulative knowledge that allows for self-protective mobility in a colonialist, anti-Black penal society.
In conjunction with Risk Work’s 2023 publication, this roundtable brings together artists, scholars, and curators who examine artists’ engagement with policing, coloniality, and abolitionist landscapes of world-making and resistance. In conversation with art historian and curator, Faye Gleisser, artists Dan Paz and alejandro t. acierto will respond to “Risk Work” and gauge the possibilities of discussing artists’ tactical negotiation of near or potential carceral relations—their punitive literacy—as a form of structural knowledge. Moderated by Jasmine Mahmoud, a scholar and curator of art, public policy, and geography, the panelists will also draw out examples in their research and practice, to further consider how the work of survival made materially manifest in guerrilla art, might provide alternative methods for assessing the work of risk, as well as the range of unsafety that risk management policy regulates among people with differently complex relations to the state.
Exact time/day of round table is TBD. More soon!