© Association of Art Historians 2011 218

Reviews

The Artist as WorkerDominic Rahtz

Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009, 296 pp., 12 col. and 91 b. & w. illus., £27.95

An obvious contradiction haunts this book. On the one

hand, the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), established

spontaneously as a group fi ghting for artists’ rights in

New York in early 1969, was resolutely collective in

its mode of action and ‘non-aesthetic’ (as one of its

participants, Lucy Lippard, put it) in its concerns.1 On

the other hand, the central claim of the book is that

certain participants in the group, such as Carl Andre,

Robert Morris, Lippard and Hans Haacke, incorporated

the identity of the ‘art worker’ into their individual

artistic (and writing) practices. Is this contradiction,

of which Julia Bryan-Wilson is doubtlessly aware,

to be regarded as historically constitutive or is it a

consequence of the art-historical narrative itself?

The series of chapters on individuals that comprises

the book is conventionally academic, but here it is

an approach that contains the danger of concealing

the idea of the ‘art worker’ as the fi gure of a political

impulse to collectivity. And yet the focus on individuals

also reveals experiences of the incommensurability

of art work and political action that are historically

signifi cant and continue to be of relevance, providing

a refl ection from another time on more recent shifts

in the character of art towards collaboration and the

opening out of art to other social practices.

In Art Workers, it is the defi nition of art as a form

of work, or labour, that determines the relationship

between art and politics. Although the historical

moment of the AWC, and the contiguous event of

the 1970 New York Art Strike, was relatively brief

(the coalition was dissolved in 1971), the projection

of the condition of art as work is related to a much

broader historical shift – that from industrial to post-

industrial society, or from material to immaterial

labour. This shift drives the narrative plot of the book.

Both the work and the political attitude of the fi rst

artist that Bryan-Wilson considers, Carl Andre, are

characterized by a nostalgia for the industrial mode

of production that determined the nature of his

materials (especially the fl oor works made from metal

© Association of Art Historians 2011 219

Reviews

plates), as well as for a more traditional Marxism –

Andre was apparently responsible for insisting on

the term ‘worker’ in the AWC – which was at the

time being displaced by the more spontaneous and

individualistic modes of political action associated

with the New Left. The chapter on Robert Morris is

initially concerned with his 1970 exhibition at the

Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in

which large-scale construction materials were kept in

a state of processual change by Morris, working with

a team of construction workers. This work, as Bryan-

Wilson writes, represented a dematerialization of the

commodity-character of the work of art at the same

time that it materialized the labour of the artist. But

the real crux of the chapter comes with the suddenly

compromised identity of artist and worker due to the

event, exactly contemporaneous with the Whitney

exhibition, of the so-called ‘hard-hat riots’, in which

construction workers in Detroit violently broke up

an antiwar demonstration thereby allying themselves

with the conservative, patriotic stance of the Nixon

administration. Subsequent to this event, Morris closed

his exhibition at the Whitney early in a gesture of

support for the spontaneous and widespread strikes

taking place throughout the United States in protest

at the war in Vietnam, a ‘strike’ that led to the more

general action, arising out of the AWC, of the New York

Art Strike against Racism, War and Repression of May

1970. Bryan-Wilson suggests, however, that Morris’s

‘art strike’ was also a matter of political expediency,

the consequence of an encounter between two

incompatible fi gures of the worker, one reactionary in

a political register and the other radical in an artistic

register.

In the case of Lucy Lippard, her relationship to

the epithet ‘worker’ was complicated by the nature of

her activities as an art critic and curator, which were

seen by her as instances of the ‘housework’ of art,

and so as implicitly gendered. Although this chapter

describes Lippard’s gradual move towards a more

explicit feminism, it also points to a narrowness in

the conception of labour in the ‘art worker’ which

was partially responsible for the fragmentation of the

AWC into smaller groups such as the Ad Hoc Women

Artists’ Committee (of which Lippard was a member)

and Women Artists in Revolution. The other main

thread in this chapter, that dealing with the ‘intellectual

labour’ of writing and the relationship between art

and information, is picked up again in relation to art

practice in the discussion of Hans Haacke. By this

last chapter, the material mode of work nostalgically

invoked by Andre has been replaced by the immaterial

or intellectual labour associated with information. It is

here that the direction of infl uence between art work

and political agency also changes. Whereas Andre had

taken a romanticized Marxist conception of the worker

into the AWC, Haacke, according to Bryan-Wilson,

took the political mode of information-as-exposé

practised by the AWC into art works such as his famous

(and censored at the time) Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real-Estate Holdings: A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971

(1971). Bryan-Wilson treats the efforts at research that

went into this canonical work of conceptual art as an

instance of immaterial labour, thereby associating what

Herbert Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation (1969), called

the ‘dematerialization of labour’ with what Lippard

called, in relation to process and conceptual art, the

‘dematerialization of the art object’.2

The reference to Marcuse is apposite here since

it is from him that the phrase ‘radical practice’ in

the title of the book derives, and yet the relationship

established between Marcuse and art in the late 1960s

is ambiguous in revealing ways. The encounter between

German critical theory and American post-minimalism

in the New York art world (registered directly from

Marcuse’s side in the lectures he gave at the School of

Visual Arts in New York and the Guggenheim Museum

in the late 1960s) 3 is a remarkable episode that

deserves more attention than it has been given hitherto

in the fi eld of contemporary art history. Marcuse

expressed pessimism regarding the political claims

associated with art of the late 1960s that aimed at a

negation of artistic form, arguing that form constituted

the only realm in which a reality different from existing

reality could take shape. In a way that does not support

the thesis of Art Workers particularly well, the chapter on

art in Marcuse’s Counterrevolution and Revolt from which

Bryan-Wilson draws her defi nition of ‘radical practice’

is essentially an argument for the autonomy of art.4 The

only way that art can be defi ned as a ‘radical practice’ is

within the bounds of art. Thus the claims to ‘reality’ in

art, in both materials and action, by Andre, Morris and

Haacke would have been judged too literal by Marcuse,

and hence self-defeating in political terms. Bryan-

Wilson’s appropriation of the phrase ‘radical practice’

to describe the more heteronomous performative realm

in which the ‘art worker’ constituted a rehearsal of the

possible relationships between art work and political

action sits very uneasily with Marcuse’s views on art

during this period. The extent to which Art Workers

© Association of Art Historians 2011 220

Reviews

achieves historical distance from such contradictions

is open to question, but that they are raised in the

treatment of the historical material makes the book one

of the fi rst sustained attempts to describe the social and

political character of the art of the 1960s.

Notes1 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Art Workers’ Coalition: Not a history’, Studio

International, 180: 927, November 1970, 174.

2 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, London, 1969, 49; Lucy Lippard

and John Chandler, ‘The dematerialization of art’, Art International, 12: 2,

February 1968, 31–6.

3 See Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art in the one-dimensional society’, Arts Magazine, 41: 7, May 1967, 26–31 and Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art as form of reality’,

New Left Review, 74, July–August 1972, 51–8.

4 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, London, 1972, 79–128.