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 period--American artists Carl Andre, Robert
Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard--Bryan-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' Coalition--a short-lived organization
founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights--and
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