Reviews

The Artist as Worker

Dominic 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 fighting 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 figure 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
significant and continue to be of relevance, providing
a reflection 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 definition 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 first
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 floor works made from metal

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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 figures 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
© Association of Art Historians 2011
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 influence 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 field 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 definition of ‘radical practice’
is essentially an argument for the autonomy of art.4 The
only way that art can be defined 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
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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 first sustained attempts to describe the social and
political character of the art of the 1960s.

Notes
1 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.

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