Paperwork: Conceptual Art and the Pink-Collar Worker

Abstract

This article charts an alternative history of Conceptual art via the work of three artists who imported aspects of the administrative “paperwork” they employed in their day jobs into their artistic practices. Despite Conceptual art’s much-discussed “aesthetic of administration,” the movement has not been extensively analyzed in relation to the changing conditions of clerical work in the United States during the postwar period. By the 1960s, administrative work had shifted from a white-collar to a “pink-collar” profession, confounding previous categorizations of labor and social class. This restructuring meant that women artists, and increasingly women of color, were far more likely to have firsthand experience of low-level administrative work than their male counterparts. The work of Rosemarie Castoro, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper foregrounds issues of labor, materiality, and embodiment often overlooked in Conceptual art and its critical reception. This article argues for the particularity of the Conceptual strategies adopted by these women artists—not on the basis of gender essentialism but owing to the social conditions produced by the dramatic restructuring of administrative labor in which they participated.