Abstract
Where does the concept “at risk” come from and what does it do and for whom? This essay critiques the ways that discussion of artists and art workers labeled “at risk” tends to focus primarily on moments of extreme crisis, leaving under-studied the “slow violence” of colonial, anti-Black, and neoliberal funding, promotion, retention, and lawfare deployed by museums and universities, as well as the ways that “at-riskness” is marketed and romanticized in the arts. In response, Faye Gleisser, a curator and art historian based in Bloomington, Indiana, fashions a disorientation guide that questions the geographic imaginaries of risk, normalized “frontlines” of crisis, and risk management practices that maintain asymmetrical relations of vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence.
In so doing, this disorientation guide argues that the artworld is itself a riskocracy: a regulatory structure that privileges and prioritizes racialized, gendered, and classed notions of “responsible” risk as the mark of genius, value, and leadership, and criminalizes, dismisses, and undermines risk-taking deemed “irreverent” by those in positions of institutional power. One way to begin to study and thereby come to know and undo riskocracy is to recognize its structures and processes of governance. This practice requires pushing against prevalent narrations of risk knowledge and responsive aid that focus on valorizing individual acts of agency within comparative registers of imperial violence and censorship. Through the interlacing of the co-constitutive vulnerabilities experienced by artists and curators—Kelli Morgan, Samia Halaby, Javier Cardona Otero, Lauren Pacheco, and Rebecca Fasman—each with different ties to the central, southern, and northern parts of the state of Indiana, this guide puts pressure on legal and rights-oriented solutions to “at-riskness” and demonstrates how the dismantling of the riskocratic regime of contemporary art requires a collectivized reimagining of “at risk” logics of care.