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In the post-war period, the emergence of performance and participatory works and the institutionalization of the avant-garde have resulted in a corresponding rise in administrative and legal labor to support the creation and exhibition of temporal, multi-participant works. While visual documentation of these works may be scarce or fragmentary, a dive into the archive might yield objects as diverse and mundane as meeting minutes, emails, research studies, contracts, insurance forms, past-due notices, checks, payments, invoices, grant letters, liability waivers, consent forms, or union documents. What does it mean to examine this minutiae as visual evidence? How do we read questions of risk, embodiment, and authorship through personnel files and legal waivers? What do we make of the increased accumulation and use of these documents by art institutions? This session invites papers attuned to the aesthetic questions yielded by the social and legal systems of support that enable artistic creation.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: participatory art projects and their ephemera, artists' engagement with or employment in labor unions and the legal profession, strikes or other legal actions that impacted artistic production, the use and display of organizing documents in exhibitions, the publication of documents for art historians’ reference, and pedagogical uses of the archive.