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...