In her new book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Julia Bryan-Wilson, the director of the Ph.D. program in visual studies at the University of California, Irvine, examines artistic labor in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. The book was published this month by the University of California Press and will have a release party at Printed Matter on November 7.
THE MORE INTERESTED I became in the legacies of the Art Workers’ Coalition and the New York Art Strike, the more I became concerned with how artistic labor registers––or doesn’t––within a wider field. It was both inspiring and somewhat vexing to consider how artists and critics attempted to organize as workers and label themselves as such, particularly during the Vietnam War, when debates about the value of artistic production were raging within culture and within protest politics. How does art work? This question challenged me and pushed the project forward.
In my preliminary writings on this subject, I investigated how the eruption of antiwar protests within New York museums was central to institutional critique in the United States. That assertion is still very much alive in Art Workers and informs much of the book. But I also ask larger questions about the flexibility of ideas of artistic labor at this time and how such labor was mobilized or altered by specific artists and groups.
A single book can’t say everything about this moment, and mine certainly does not aim to be comprehensive. People around the globe were thinking about artistic labor, including Fred Lonidier in California and the Rosario Group in Argentina, to name just two. Yet I began to concentrate on influential figures (artists Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, and Robert Morris and writer Lucy Lippard) to think through how their work and their participation in movements like the AWC might tell a new story about the political and artistic milieu of the era around the Vietnam War—which also, crucially, saw the flowering of Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Early on, I received some useful feedback from a reader who asked whether it might be a contradiction to organize the book as a series of case studies of canonical figures, since one somewhat contested aspect of this collective organizing sought to break down such hierarchies. While the book does include more marginal players, I intentionally focus on underexplored aspects of well-known art workers to expand our traditional understanding of this period and to consider the ways in which histories themselves are written.
In addition, I wanted to retain and amplify the contradictions, because in fact the attempt to redefine artists as workers circa 1969 was shot through with ambivalence, uncertainty, and paradox. For instance, a few of the figures I research viewed their activism and their art as constituting completely separate practices. Then there are others, like Lippard, who merged their political work with their art-world involvements. Lippard moved into an advocacy role as a feminist critic through her sense of herself as an art worker because she was interested in reevaluating women’s labor. And from the start, feminist imperatives motivated my project; feminism helped me theorize the uneven valuation of different kinds of work and how different kinds of workers—across lines of gender, race, and class—are compensated.
The word practice in my title is vital; the phrase radical practice is a direct citation of Herbert Marcuse. He, of course, was a major intellectual player in that time, and his theories informed many of these art workers. I know practice has become slightly overused, but it is a very period-specific term. It also indicates that artists and writers were rehearsing or refining various modes of aesthetics and politics.
It’s a brief time span that I’m looking at––just a handful of years. But the incredible amount of organizational energy that was generated––especially how artists came together to effect change within the museum system––is still relevant. And it has been interesting to witness the activities of recently formed groups like Working Artists and the Greater Economy and the “State of the Arts” poster project about contemporary artists’ political and occupational power—or lack thereof. Much has shifted in the intervening decades, but some of the issues that obsessed the art workers of the late 1960s (then, as now, a time of war and economic upheaval) remain pertinent today.
— As told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler