Risk Work

More about the book

"This book tells the story of US performance artists who adopted guerrilla tactics during the 1970s and 1980s in response to the "cultural domestication of militancy" in the United States. In the 1960s, as US news was covering anti-colonialist resistance in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, they fashioned the persona of the "guerrilla fighter" as the embodiment of a "foreign" agent of threat. A key example was Che Guevara, resplendent in his beret and camouflage garb. It wasn't long before the nation was consuming endless images of militant protestors donning berets and carrying guns in gestures conjuring Che. As the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Young Lords, and Weathermen adopted the uniforms and the tactics of armed and psychological interference, artists across the country began to use sabotage, hijacking, deception, and other "risk work" to wage conceptual war on both art and society. They fabricated Chicano gang wars, held TV talk shows hosts hostage, and posed as hijackers in the garb of guerrilla-terrorists made iconic by the news"--