John Baldessari's "Commissioned Paintings" series from 1969 represents a pivotal moment in his exploration of authorship, art production, and the conceptual frameworks surrounding artistic creation. This series emerged from a context where Baldessari was deeply engaged with the textual interplay on canvas, moving away from traditional painting towards a more conceptually driven practice. His early major works from the mid-1960s included paintings that were often devoid of imagery, relying instead on text derived from contemporary art theory to challenge and engage the viewer. For example, one of his works simply presented the phrase "A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE" (1967), emphasizing the conceptual over the visual.
The "Commissioned Paintings" took a particularly unique approach by combining photography, painting, and textual annotation to critique and question the notion of artistic originality and the processes of art-making itself. Baldessari hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint from photographs he had taken of a friend pointing at various objects. These photographs were then painted onto canvas, and Baldessari added a caption identifying the work as a painting by the amateur artist, thus removing himself from the direct creation of the image while still orchestrating the overall process.
This act of commissioning others to execute the paintings served multiple conceptual purposes: it directly challenged the traditional valuation of the artist's hand in the creation of art, questioned the role of originality in artistic production, and critiqued the art market's emphasis on authorship. Baldessari's role in the series is often likened to that of a choreographer, who directs the action but does not perform it himself, thereby complicating traditional notions of artistic authorship.
By engaging other artists in the production of his work, Baldessari also made a pointed commentary on the art-making process, suggesting that the conception of an artwork could be as significant, if not more so, than its physical execution. This idea was radical at the time and contributed significantly to the discourse surrounding Conceptual Art, of which Baldessari was a leading figure.
The "Commissioned Paintings" series is emblematic of Baldessari's broader concerns with language, semiotics, and the deconstruction of the artistic process. Throughout his career, he consistently explored how art communicates, the arbitrary nature of the systems that govern artistic value, and the fluid boundaries between art and life. This series, with its emphasis on the conceptual over the manual and the questioning of traditional artistic authorship, encapsulates many of the themes that would continue to inform Baldessari's work throughout his career (Wikipedia) (Moderna Museet i Stockholm) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).