Faye Raquel Gleisser

“Guerrilla Tactics” examines the cultural domestication of militancy in North America during the 1970s and 1980s to offer a new historical narrative for U.S.-based artists’ deployment of low-tech tactics of intervention during this period. Through four chapters, I cross-analyze instances of media hijacking, misinformation, hostage-taking, and clandestine practices in conceptualism and performance art staged by Adrian Piper, Chris Burden, Pope.L, Tehching Hsieh, and the art collectives Asco and Guerrilla Art Action Group. My book argues that these artists participated in the wider roster of varied cultural practices that “brought home” the mythology of “Third World” insurgency in the U.S. between 1967 and 1987. During the period that I call the decades of the domestication of the militant—framed by Che Guevara’s death in 1967 and his rise to mythic status, and the development of “guerrilla marketing” in the mid-1980s—the glamorization of a mobile, partially-visible militant in American film, protest culture, and fashion provides an understudied context in which to situate artists’ inculcation of an emergent guerrilla imaginary. Amidst the increasing visibility of militant subjects and the simultaneous containment of militant actions, I contend that the phenomenon of guerrilla tactics in art was forged by shifting ideas of lawlessness and resourcefulness, and by artists’ own awareness of their status in a society ordered by patriarchal whiteness and abelism. Such a history of tactics reveals how racial, gender, and class bias enabled the artworks and shaped their reception; it also makes clearer how the legacies of low-tech intervention, which limn our contemporary assessments of endurance and creativity in art, sustain Cold War­–era notions of citizenship, civility, and personhood in the present. In so doing, the book posits an expanded notion of what constituted the “political” during the 1970s and ’80s, and addresses how coded ideas of risk-taking continue to influence American history and cultural experience today.