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Labor has been at the center of political and philosophical analyses from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Simone Weil. While uncovering essential stages in the conceptualization of labor--is labor work? How does it differ from process?--this course reframes the question of the nature of labor and artmaking in relation to invisibility. How come entire stages of production have disappeared from history? How have patrons, builders, and artists managed to erase their presence from their artifacts? To what extent do art historical narratives still pursue ideologies of exclusion or, at least, of carelessness when they get to who did what? By pairing specific case studies from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries with select passages from A-list thinkers of labor (Agamben, Arendt, Aristotle), this course offers both a history of a troublesome concept and a series of opportunities to rethink the agendas of a discipline that has often turned a blind eye to specific aspects of making. Interdisciplinary in spirit--we focus on select groups of paintings, buildings, organizations, and co-operations--the course also serves as an occasion for introspective analyses, thus helping future researchers to re-think the ways they work and the political motives of their investigations.