What Is Commissioning, Anyway?

by Ruth Barker, 26 Oct 2009

Commissioning, commissioning commissioning, from the humble invitation to the contractual obligation: when the reach is so broad, what does ‘commissioning’ even mean?

The question may seem to be redundant – after all, we know what it means, don’t we? It means, well… I guess at a fundamental level, I’d suggest that to commission a piece of work may be to act as catalyst for that work. But that itself is an interesting – perhaps flawed – chemical analogy, suggesting as it does a substance that initiates or accelerates a reaction without itself being affected. How true is this of the figure of the commissioner? Significantly, I think that many commissioners are changed by the processes they set in motion, whether they end up wiser, poorer, more cynical, more enthused, or more exhausted.

And yet there is a softer, more poetic (perhaps read ‘less accurate’) idea of the catalyst that may help us here. The poetic catalyst initiates a change that they are then indivisible from – as some have argued that a free press may catalyse an informed electorate, or that belief may be a catalyst for intention. And just as the press may be changed, informed, and evolved by the electorate it has catalysed, so may the commissioner grow, diminish, or change as a result of the process they engage in.

It seems to me that commissioning is an essentially human gesture because it is at base an invitation for another to act. Where that invitation leads is surely multiple, but the desire that underlies it is in some ways a gesture of its own making.

More later, hope you enjoy the new season,

R.