Commissioned Paintings: John Baldessari
In conversation with Jessica Morgan, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, artist John Baldessari described the process of making of his Commissioned Paintings:
"I felt that art didn't have to be about the touch of the artist, you could be an art director, or strategist--so why not just commission some of these amateur artists to paint my work? ... I went to the Sunday painters with a dozen or so slides and said: 'Listen, I'll pay you X amount of dollars to paint this. I don't want you to make art out of it, just render the slide as faithfully as you know how on the canvas.' I would give them the canvas with the area masked out and they painted it."
The Sign Painting Project
Francis Alÿs' work often addresses social issues and labor inequality by using subtle and poetic gestures. For a series called The Sign Painting Project Alÿs hired professional sign painters to copy his own small-scale oil paintings. The sign painters enlarged Alÿs' original image, reproducing it with enamel paint on sheet metal--a method traditionally used for commercial advertisement. Alÿs designated the sign painting 'copies' as unlimited editions, and paid the sign painters half of the profit from the sale of the work. In this arrangement, Alÿs maintained a low the market value for this series and fairly compensated the sign painters for their labor.
- John Baldessari. John Baldessari: Pure Beauty. Los Angeles : Munich ; New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2009.
- Catherine Lampert. The Prophet and the Fly: Francis Alÿs. Madrid: Turner, 2003.
- Francis Alÿs and Galería Ramis Barquet (Garza García, Mexico). Francis Alÿs: The Liar: The Copy of the Liar. Guadalajara, Jalisco, México: Arena, 1991.