The Work of Risk: Guerilla Art for Surviving the Carceral Present
As laws governing the freedom of expression and right to occupy space continue to change, artists continue to anticipate the presence of police and the consequences of arrest, especially when creating confrontational or participatory performance and conceptual work beyond art-sanctioned spaces. How has the anticipation of punitive encounter taken shape materially and temporally in art? Relatedly, in what ways has the mis- or under-recognition of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions of artists’ differing vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence contributed to the normalizing of carceral relations in the stories told most often about riskiness and resourcefulness in art practice? Art historian and cultural theorist Dr. Faye Gleisser addresses these questions and their political implications for the present in her new book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In this talk, Gleisser draws upon Black feminist and queer of color theories of spatialized power and argues that artists’ calculation of citation and arrest is a form of knowledge—punitive literacy—that reveals salient insights into the ways carceral violence shapes the history of contemporary art.
Faye Gleisser (she/her) is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and American Studies. Gleisser is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in the history and theory of political violence in the U.S., and expressions of gendered and sexualized raciality in visual art and material culture. Her research has appeared in a number of exhibition catalogues, as well as in Art Journal, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Women & Performance, and Aperture, and is forthcoming in October and ASAP/J. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) analyzes the relationship of policing, state power, and guerrilla art practice in the United States. In her current book project, "The Color of Hormones," Gleisser is tracing the entanglements of contemporary art, state surveillance, hormonal management, and somatic abolitionist praxis.
