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Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. By Julia Bryan-Wilson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. x, 282 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25728-3.)
What is "art work?" There is nothing new in asking this question; historicaily the answer has focused on matters of form-painting, sculpture, drama-or social, psychological, political function. In short, to interrogate the concept of art work has been understood as an investigation of the art product itself. In the late 1960s, however, the focus shifted from the aesthetic object to the art worker and to the "artists' collective working conditions, the demolition of the capitalist art market, and even revolution" (p. 1). Julia Bryan-Wilson traces this "polemical redefinition of artistic labor" as it was animated by efforts affiliated with the leftist Art Workers' Coalition (awc), which surfaced in...