Early on in her brilliant book, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Julia Bryan-Wilson sets out an argument that she proceeds to both reconfirm and complicate, in the ambivalent push-pull that is the signature of her approach: “For artists such as [Carl] Andre activism was an alibi for not making explicitly political art. Perhaps, [Karl] Beveridge and [Ian] Burn suggest, these artists asserted themselves as workers precisely because their labor was no longer evident in their objects. Their politics were displaced onto their personal identities, enacted on the level of personal style rather than artistic content” (56). As her title implies, Bryan-Wilson is investigating the category of “art workers,” a term that both points to the vaguely socialist ambitions held by many artists of the era and illuminates the ambitions of the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), a loose group that included the subjects of each of Bryan-Wilson’s chapters: the critic and curator Lucy Lippard and the artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke.

Though some of these workers (such as Haacke) do make explicitly political art, the anxiety over the line dividing the personal author from her or his production, or “style” from “content,” is replayed in one fascinating episode after another in Bryan-Wilson’s book. Thus, Andre’s metals emerge not only as emblems of America’s quickly obsolescing industrial culture, but as actual “content” supplied by the very real Dow Chemical—the American corporation inscribed in the 1960s American “war machine” that was a target of boycotts by activists such as Andre himself. And Morris’s advertisement for the procedures of construction in a 1970 mid-career survey at the Whitney unintentionally rehearses the ambiguous position of the construction worker at the time: the “hard hat [pro-war] riots” of the same year took place only a few weeks later, in the same city, hypostatizing the fraught class dynamics that characterized the antiwar movement. Haacke’s often excessive research projects into institutions of authorship, information, and participation also submit to Bryan-Wilson’s unusually rigorous look. But it is when the reader reaches Bryan-Wilson’s treatment of Lippard’s criticism, structurally dependent on the kind of private/public reversals that the feminist movement would come to insist upon, that we come to the mechanism that drives the author’s own work. With an unerring sensitivity not only to historical detail but to the often-overlooked or unspoken operations of the works she discusses, Bryan-Wilson reveals the new appeal of classic social art history: that it resituates the historical subjects it treats while providing completely fresh understandings of art objects often shopworn from other treatments.

If Art Workers brings new readers to the works of T. J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, it will have done more for the field of art history than many interventions of recent years. Recasting her historical sources as not purely archival—but indeed, as the Andre chapter demonstrates most fully, including her own very physical act of viewing—Bryan-Wilson reminds readers that social art history is an effort to rethink the categories and conclusions of social history through works of art and their complex operations. Such work does not suggest an “end” to the period of theoretical speculativeness that currently characterizes so much contemporary art history and criticism, but a recasting of its investments in a new and important light. As Bryan-Wilson performs a kind of art history that is done less and less frequently and well, and especially infrequently on objects added to the Western canon only relatively recently, readers are reminded of the flashes of actual historical insight of which art objects, astutely discussed, are capable. For too long—much too long—art historians have circled around the same questions about Minimalist art without new information, let alone new prisms through which the art can be viewed.

In two successive chapters Bryan-Wilson displaces the coordinates of that discourse with breathtaking efficiency. In the first of these, she turns over one of Andre’s tablets—a gesture that should be as exemplary for young students of art history as it is illicit. (Though Andre vaunts the form of “participation” in his work that is performed by its installers and the “completion” that is brought to his work by his spectators, he explicitly prohibits just such gestures.) The revelation that Andre ordered his Styrofoam billets and magnesium plates from Dow Chemical is meaningful in the carefully honed context that Bryan-Wilson provides. After examining the notion that Minimalists work with “readymade” materials and airing out its dissemblances, she then proceeds to examine her own gesture of turning over a tablet: imagining the work it would take to lift, separate, and handle the tablets and billets that simultaneously evoke industrial manufacturing and revoke its terms. By implicitly referring both to Taylorized labor and heavy lifting, and by placing his tablets too carefully for a machine to replicate but too regularly to obviate such machine-like regularity, Andre, Bryan-Wilson argues, delivers the thin line that the postwar American economy is presently in the midst of dissolving, as its once concentrated mining industries globalize, its refining plants liquidate, and its work force dissipates. Slowly, viewers’ eagerness to ally Minimalist art with the bland attitudes toward labor that the “readymade” paradigm implies gives way to an understanding of the prickly, uncomfortable realities about labor that art and artists faced in the 1960s.

This is the discussion that Bryan-Wilson has reframed so lucidly. Bringing in such anxiety-provoking elements as the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, the political leanings of America’s blue-collar work force, and the relationship of that apparently unified force to the disruptive emergence of other identities—women’s and African Americans’, in this account—Bryan-Wilson exhumes not only some of the tortuously contrived attempts to achieve politically correct alliances in the 1960s and 1970s, but unveils awkward, even unholy presuppositions about labor, art, authorship, and activism. The same Carl Ogelsby (then president of the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS]) who admitted the importance of the question, “who precisely are [the workers]?” also wrote that, “Students and workers are from now one and the same.” No more evidence is needed that those who ask the right questions still get the answers wrong, all the time. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the very question that has been most preoccupying to so many original and careful thinkers (i.e., artists) is that question which has yielded the most problematic, even erroneous conclusions. What could have led artists to articulate the same myopic, self-important, utopian, wishful assertion made by SDS—that they were “the same” as the hard hats and factory-line workers? What social naiveté is hidden in such statements, and what further presumptions—about the value of labor, of artistic labor or speech, about individual or collective “showing up” or striking—are operating in the works that one way or another slide into such easy fantasies? Bryan-Wilson opens up these questions that have lurked somewhere just beneath the reception of this work, and like all repressions come newly to light, they embarrass as readily as they enlighten. It would appear that the age of hiding behind broad, wishful ideological assertions might finally be coming to a close, thanks in part to scholars like Bryan-Wilson, who present such compelling examples of a counter-tactic.

If her chapters on Andre and Morris were, for this reader, the most exciting, it is because Bryan-Wilson’s analyses of the artists’ works yield such conflictual, ambivalent, and fascinating problems. One criticism that could be offered would be that her focus on the AWC narrowed the book’s scope, precluding, for example, an analysis of the work of someone like Eva Hesse, whose Postminimalist works complicate the categories of “craft” and “women’s work” and the attendant problems raised in the chapter on Lippard. Even the art of Lee Lozano, another AWC member, could have furnished Bryan-Wilson with a complex response to the work of Morris and Andre that introduced “conceptual” notions of language, edged into masculinist violence, and that presumed an end to painting which itself seems crucial to the notion of “art work” at play in the volume. Lozano’s resurrection of facture and indeed painting, her use of text in a post-Pop (and insistently not “dematerializing”) mode, and her turn to a kind of post-Fluxus performance (the “General Strike” piece, in which she offered to stop attending any art world event, as she wrote it, in all caps to further emphasize the point, “IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATIONS OF TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION”—and then, seemingly, made good on her promise) might have complicated the trajectory that Bryan-Wilson has presented so compellingly. Such an investigation might also have presented a more persuasive argument for the stakes that one senses are at the very center of the book: the feminist politics that complicated notions of work just as male artists, finding such notions too unstable in the “real” world, backed off of them. Whereas Lippard comes off as slightly unhinged (perhaps by the incredible pace of her output), Lozano is explicitly and skillfully “mad,” in all senses of the term, and Hesse only more subtly so. One wishes that Bryan-Wilson’s exquisite sense of how far to push the analysis of an artwork could have been applied to more artworks that contain the actual unraveling of the questions that occupy this book.

But it is her presentation of those questions—of artists who wish to be taken as workers; art that presents itself as an homage to work; and the ideas of work, activism, and spectatorship that become embedded in these slippages—that is already content enough for one book. We are lucky to have it, and to be able to look forward to its successor.