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The popularity of collage form was passionately continued by artists during the Pop Art Movement, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art's 'The Independent Group'. As opposed to many academic views at the time artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton approached commercial culture of the 1950s positively; understanding it to be an important avenue into analysing society and mass culture of the mid 20th century. Above, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi can be seen to create intricate compositions by collaging together brand logos and commercial advertising imagery.

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The origins of the term 'Dada' stemmed from a move towards irrationality, nonsense, and intuition in art, amongst the rise of fascism and the horrors of World War One. Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' has become one of the most prominent artworks of the Dada movement for its controversial reception in the art world. The urinal, which was displayed by Duchamp in the Society of Independent Artists exhibit of 1917 perfectly encapsulates the 'anti-art' ideas of Dadaism with its indecent connotations and form as a found object - far flung from traditional definitions of Fine Art. Today, it holds legendary status for its ability to question the belief-systems surrounding art.

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is one of Duchamp's most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is lost, consisted of a standard urinal, usually presented on its back for exhibition purposes rather than upright, and was signed and dated 'R. Mutt 1917'. Tate's work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain has been seen as a quintessential example, along with Duchamp's Bottle Rack 1914, of what he called a ' readymade ', an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art (and, in Duchamp's case, interpreted in some way).

Duchamp later recalled that the idea for Fountain arose from a discussion with the collector Walter Arensberg (1878-1954) and the artist Joseph Stella (1877-1946) in New York. He purchased a urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and submitted it - or arranged for it to be submitted - as an artwork by 'R. Mutt' to the newly established Society of Independent Artists that Duchamp himself had helped found and promote on the lines of the Parisian Salon des Indépendants (Duchamp had moved from Paris to New York in 1915). The society's board of directors, who were bound by the Society's constitution to accept all members' submissions, took exception to Fountain, believing that a piece of sanitary ware - and one associated with bodily waste - could not be considered a work of art and furthermore was indecent (presumably, although this was not said, if displayed to women). Following a discussion and a vote, the directors present during the installation of the show at the Grand Central Palace (about ten of them according to a report in the New York Herald) narrowly decided on behalf of the board to exclude the submission from the Society's inaugural exhibition that opened to the public on 10 April 1917. Arensberg and Duchamp resigned in protest against the board taking it upon itself to veto and effectively censor an artist's work.

This was no small matter. The idea of having a jury-free exhibition of contemporary art had become invested with the aspirations of many in the art world for New York to become a dynamic artistic centre that would rival and even outstrip Paris. Duchamp, as head of the hanging committee, had already signaled the democratic ethos of the new Society by proposing that works should be hung by the artists' last names (in alphabetical order) rather than according to the subjective views and preferences of one or more individuals. With the support of some backers, he and his close friends Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959) and Beatrice Wood (1892-1998) produced the first dada periodical in New York, titled pointedly the Blindman, on the first day of the show in part to celebrate (and in part to observe and comment upon) 'the birth of the Independence of Art in America' (Henri-Pierre Roché, 'The Blind Man', Blindman, no.1, 10 April 1917, p.3). There was therefore a good deal at stake in the decision of the board to defend a particular conception of art at the expense of departing from its own much advertised policy of 'no jury - no prizes'. Responding to press interest in the affair, the board issued a statement defending its position: 'The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.' (Naumann 2012, p.72.)

Duchamp never explicitly commented on why he wanted to test the principles of his fellow board members but it may well have sprung from his own experience at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1912 he had submitted his important painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 to the Salon, and, even though the work was listed in the catalogue, the organisers, increasingly unhappy at the subject and title of the painting and how this reflected upon them, asked Duchamp's brothers, who were also artists, to ask him to withdraw it a few days before the show opened. He quietly did so, but he experienced this as an extraordinary betrayal and later described it as a turning-point in his life. The creation and submission of Fountain can thus be seen as in part as an experiment by Duchamp to replay this event, testing the commitment of the new American Society to freedom of expression and its tolerance of new conceptions of art.

Within a day or so of the exhibition opening, Duchamp located the work, which had been stored in the exhibition space behind a partition, and took it to be photographed by the leading photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1877-1946). (A diary entry of Beatrice Wood for 13 April 1917 recorded that she went with Duchamp to 'see Stieglitz about "Fountain"', while a letter written by Stieglitz dated 19 April 1917 noted that he had been asked to take the photograph 'at the request of Roché, Covert, Miss Wood, Duchamp & Co'. See Naumann 2012, p.72.) As the work of art was lost thereafter (and had been seen by very few people), Stieglitz's photograph, which according to a letter had been taken by 19 April 1917, became a key document in recording the work's existence. Stieglitz was proud of the image, writing in a letter dated 23 April 1917, 'The "Urinal" photograph is really quite a wonder - Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful - And it's true - it is. It has an oriental look about it - a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman' (Naumann 2012, p.74).

A slightly cropped version of the photograph was published in the Blind Man to illustrate an anonymous editorial that defended the urinal in clear - and, in their implications, revolutionary - terms: 'Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.' (Anon., 'The Richard Mutt Case', Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5; note that the second issue formulated the journal's title as separate words.) Duchamp later said that he shared and approved of the views expressed in the article, which Beatrice Wood claimed in her 1992 autobiography to have written.

Importantly, Duchamp was not publicly known as the creator of Fountain at the time, although some of his closest friends (such as Walter Arensberg) must have known of, and many others suspected, his involvement. Stieglitz, for example, wrote on 19 April 1917, 'a young Woman (probably at Duchamp's instigation) sent a large porcelain Urinal on a pedestal to the Independent[s]' (Naumann 2012, p.74.) Duchamp later explained that he had not made his identity known because of his position on the Society's board: if his fellow board members had known he had submitted Fountain, their response might well have been different, and he would have been shown to have put friends and colleagues in a potentially difficult position (which, indeed, was the case). The fact that 'R. Mutt' was an unknown artist meant that Duchamp could test the openness of the society to artworks that did not conform to conventional aesthetic and moral standards without compromising the outcome or his relationships with board members, though at the expense of being able to avow that the work was his own.

'R. Mutt', however, was an unusual name, with comic overtones, and this might have given people a clue as to its falseness. Later in life, when asked whether 'R. Mutt' was a pun on the German word Armut meaning poverty, Duchamp was quoted as explaining:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip "Mutt and Jeff" which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.
(Camfield 1989, p.23.)

In fact, Mutt was the tall thin man in the cartoon duo but Duchamp's point about having wanted essentially 'any old name' remains. On other occasions Duchamp recalled that he bought the urinal at J.L. Mott Iron Works Company. Surviving records for the sanitary ware firm are incomplete but show models similar, if not entirely identical, to Fountain (see Camfield 1989, p.24, note 23).

Duchamp never commented - or was asked to comment - upon the rotation of the urinal by ninety degrees, but this was perhaps dealt with in the anonymous Blind Man article as a matter of 'placing' it 'so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view'. Duchamp was fascinated by the problems of representing spatially a fourth dimension, often demonstrated in mathematical texts through diagrams showing the rotation of solids. It is possible that the rotation of the urinal was linked to his broader interest in seeing things quite literally in a new perspective. The intimate nature of the function of the urinal, and its highly gendered character, also resonated strongly with the complex psycho-physical themes of the masterpiece he was working on at the time, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even 1915-23 (also known as The Large Glass; see Tate ), although relatively few at the time knew of the unfinished work and, therefore, were able to make this association.

Several photographs believed to have been taken in 1918 show Fountain hanging in the doorway of Duchamp's studio (there is no reason to believe that Duchamp owned a second or different urinal), but what happened to the artwork thereafter is a mystery. It was possibly thrown out when Duchamp went to Buenos Aires in 1918, the year that the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote an article on the Richard Mutt affair for the Mercure de France. Focusing on the issues involved in the case (and not mentioning Duchamp by name), Apollinaire concluded, 'The viewpoint of the Society of Independent Artists is evidently absurd for it arises from the untenable point of view that art cannot enoble an object' (Naumann 2012, p.75).

In the early 1920s Duchamp travelled frequently between America and France. He was thought to have abandoned making art, focusing instead on playing chess competitively even while remaining part of artistic circles. Fountain was not publicly commented upon again until 1934 when the leader of the surrealist movement and poet André Breton wrote a pioneering article that reviewed Duchamp's career to date and placed the Fountain firmly in the context of Duchamp's readymades (André Breton, 'La Phare de la mariée', Minotaure, vol.2, no.6, 1935, pp.45-9). Since so little was published on Duchamp, the article seems to have been based on in-depth conversations with the artist. It was in this period that Duchamp felt the need to consolidate and make more accessible his otherwise dispersed (and already partly lost) oeuvre. He published a facsimile edition of his notes relating to the Large Glass, and produced a portable museum of his key works in an editioned box, titled Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy) 1935-41 (Rrose Sélavy was the name of Duchamp's female alter ego). In this he included a miniature Fountain arranged next to an equally miniature Large Glass, the lower half of which is known as the 'bachelors' domain'.

Duchamp's profile in art circles rose dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s, not least as a new generation of artists identified his dada-period works as precedents for their own. In 1963 the Pasadena Art Museum organised the first retrospective of Duchamp's work. Addressing the growing number of requests from gallerists and museums for works to show, Duchamp authorised a number of replicas of his original readymades, many of which had been lost. He authorised replicas of Fountain in 1950 and 1963. In 1964 the Galleria Schwarz reproduced Fountain, along with other dada-period works by Duchamp, in an edition of eight, fabricating the objects on the basis on the Stieglitz photograph and working closely with Duchamp. Four further examples were also made at this time, one each for Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz, and two for museum exhibition. Duchamp signed each of these replicas on the back of the left flange 'Marcel Duchamp 1964'. There is also a copperplate on the base of each work etched with Duchamp's signature, the dates of the original and the replica, the title, the edition number and the publisher's name, 'Galleria Schwarz, Milan'. For some, such replicas seemed to undermine cardinal qualities of readymades, namely, that they should be mass-produced items and ones chosen by an artist at a particular moment and time. Duchamp, however, was happy to remove the aura of uniqueness surrounding the original readymades, while the production of replicas ensured that more people would see the works and increased the likelihood that the ideas they represented would survive.

Tate's replica was included in the inaugural displays of Tate Modern in 2000, and in 2004 Fountain topped a poll of 500 British art experts as the single most influential artwork of the twentieth century, ahead of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych 1962. Simple in form but rich in metaphor, the work has generated many interpretations over the years, and continues to be seen as a work that challenges - or, at the least, complicates - conventional definitions of art. In his introduction to his 1989 book-length study of the work William Camfield acknowledged the 'staggering' quantity of material written about the piece but noted that, despite the wealth of scholarship,

an examination of this literature reveals that our knowledge of this readymade sculpture and its history is riddled with gaps and extraordinary conflicts of memory, interpretation, and criticism. We are not even able to consult the object itself, since it disappeared early on, and we have no idea what happened to it ... We do not even known with absolute certainty that Duchamp was the artist - he once attributed it to a female friend - and some of his comments raise fundamental questions regarding his intentions in this readymade.
(Camfield 1989, p.13.)

Camfield's reference to a female friend here was based on a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne, who lived in Paris, on 11 April 1917. It included the following comment: 'One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; it was not at all indecent - no reason for refusing it. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York.' (Camfield 1989, p.28.) Camfield commented on this reference to a woman:

Even if we grant that he did not want his test of the Independents compromised by knowledge that Fountain had been submitted by a director of the organization, why did he mislead his sister in Paris? Was the account given to Suzanne merely a 'white lie' to conceal his authorship, or might we have here an early appearance of Duchamp's female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, or might he have been telling the truth? Was Fountain actually submitted by a female friend? And if, indeed, a female friend sent Fountain to the Independents, must that mean that she and not Duchamp was the artist who conceived, selected, and altered the urinal - or might she have acted merely as the shipping agent whose participation kept Duchamp out of sight? The last possibility seems most plausible, but this point remains a mystery.

As Camfield noted, there are several potential explanations for Duchamp's comment to his sister. Unfortunately, the records of the Society of Independent Artists are of no help here, as most were lost in a fire. It is important to note, however, that Duchamp wrote 'sent' not 'made', and his words do not indicate that he was implying that someone else was the work's creator.

In 2002 literary historian Irene Gammel claimed that, if a woman was involved in the submission of Fountain, that woman might have Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), an eccentric German poet and artist who loved Duchamp and was in turn jealous of him and mildly contemptuous of what she saw as his absorption in fashionable circles (see Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. A Cultural Biography, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002). Gammel explored the possibility that the Baroness was the creator of Fountain, claiming close affinities between the use of new sanitary ware in Fountain and of an old piece of plumbing (a plumbing trap), mounted on a carpenter's mitre box in a sculpture titled God that has been attributed to the Baroness. This unsigned work, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was originally thought to be by the painter Morton Schamberg on the basis of his photograph of it, but was reattributed by the scholar Francis M. Naumann to von Freytag-Loringhoven 'with' Schamberg, on the grounds that the assemblage of extraneous elements and unusual title probably fitted her artistic practice better than his, although he may have helped her with aspects of it (for a discussion of the documentary evidence supporting this reattribution see Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915-23, New York 1994, p.128 note 9, p.234 and p.171.) The work's aesthetic, however, is far removed from the mass-produced aspect of Fountain, and there is nothing in von Freytag-Loringhoven's other works to suggest a lineage for the thinking expressed in Fountain.Gammel noted that von Freytag-Loringhoven was in Philadelphia in spring 1917, linking this to some unsourced press reports at the time of the scandal of the work having originated in Philadelphia, and concluded, 'there emerges the question of whether the rabble-rousing Baroness may have had a hand in the mysterious Fountain ... While final evidence of the Baroness's involvement may be missing, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to her artistic fingerprint' (Gammel 2002, p.225).

As Gammel acknowledged, however, there is no contemporary documentary evidence or testimony that points to the involvement of von Freytag-Loringhoven in Fountain. The Baroness, who was certainly not shy of controversy, seems never to have claimed to have been involved, even when she returned to New York and mixed in the same circles as Duchamp (she later modelled nude for a film he attempted to make with Man Ray), and it seems improbable that she would have not have vaunted her creation of a work that had caused such a flurry of press interest, particularly if it was associated in many people's minds with Duchamp. It perhaps should be noted that Duchamp spent much of his life quietly helping many other artists, and any suggestion that he would claim the work of another as his own runs completely counter to the high esteem in which he was held by artist friends. When he discussed his work with Breton in 1935, it seems improbable that he would have risked claiming Fountain to be part of his oeuvre at a time when so many who had been in New York in 1917 (and who also knew von Freytag-Loringhoven) would have been able to contradict him, had his authorship been in doubt in any way.

One such person was Man Ray, who had been on the organising committee of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 and knew von Freytag-Loringhoven. In 1945, however, Man Ray referred in print to the story of Fountain without any qualification in an article he published in View magazine about his long friendship with Duchamp. Remembering how in 1917 Duchamp recovered Fountain from the Grand Central Palace where it had been temporarily stored behind a partition, he wrote: 'Grand Central: The very independent Richard Mutt robbed the vestals of their vespasienne in broad daylight and called it another day.' (Man Ray, 'Bilingual Biography', View, vol.5, no.1, March 1945, p.32.) To reflect the playful, transatlantic nature of their friendship, Man Ray used enigmatic phrasing that mixed French and English throughout the text. Here he used the French word vespasienne, meaning a structure or partition surrounding a urinal, for Fountain and talked alliteratively about 'vestals' (in classical times the guardians of the temple) to refer to those who were meant to guard the contents of the exhibition from such incursions. Having found where the piece was hidden, Duchamp had presumably been able to walk out of the Grand Central Palace with Fountain because none of the guards thought it an artwork.

As for the possible role of a woman in the work's submission, it is known from a careful decipherment of the address label that hangs from the urinal in Stieglitz's photograph that a woman was indeed implicated, though not as the creator of the piece. The details were those of Louise Norton (1890-1989), one of Duchamp's closest friends at the time and the author of a discursive article about the Fountain called '"Buddha of the Bathroom"' that appeared in the second issue of the Blind Man. ('To those who say Mr. Mutt's exhibit may be Art, but is the art of Mr. Mutt since a plumber made it? I reply simply that the Fountain was not made by a plumber but by the force of an imagination; and of imagination it has been said, "All men are shocked by it and some overthrown by it."' She added, 'there are those who anxiously ask, "Is he serious or is he joking?" Perhaps he is both! Is it not possible? ... there is among us to-day a spirit of blague [joke] arising out of the artist's bitter vision of an over-institutionalized world of stagnant statistics and antique axioms.' Louise Norton, '"Buddha of the Bathroom"', Blind Man, no.2, May 1917, p.6.) Significantly, in the days that followed the decision not to exhibit the Fountain the artist Charles Demuth wrote to Henry McBride, the art critic of the Sun, saying that the piece had been submitted 'by one of our friends' and asking if McBride would consider writing about the affair to give it more publicity. He added: 'P.S. If you wish any more information please phone, Marcel Duchamp, 4225 Columbus, or, Richard Mutte, 9255 Schuyler' (Camfield 1989, p.30). The telephone number given for the misspelt Richard Mutt was again that of Louise Norton. Although interviewed about Fountain late in her life, Louise Norton (or Louise Varèse, as she became) did not provide any new information about her involvement, and today nothing is known why her address appears on the label attached to Fountain or why her number was given to a journalist where information about Richard Mutt might be had. The gaps in knowledge about the details of her involvement in the submission of the piece to the society and its defence to the press do not materially affect Fountain 's status or meaning, but her role is a reminder of how in New York in spring 1917 Duchamp was not alone in seeking changes in how art was then thought of and practised.

Fountain tested beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world. Interviewed in 1964, Duchamp said he had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked (although many at the time did find it aesthetically pleasing). He continued: 'I was drawing people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don't die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.' (Otto Hahn, 'Entretien Marcel Duchamp', Paris-Express, 23 July 1964, p.22.) Extensively studied and the subject of various interpretations, Fountain has continued to exert an extraordinary power over narratives of twentieth-century art in large part because of its piercing - if also humorous - questioning of the structures of belief and value associated with the concept of art.

Further reading
William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, Houston 1989.
Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, revised and expanded edition, New York 1997, pp.648-50.
Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, New York 2012, pp.70-81.

Sophie Howarth
April 2000
Revised Jennifer Mundy
August 2015
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Fountain', Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964 | Tate

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'Fountain', Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964 on display at Tate Modern.

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Royal Academy life model Dominic Blake recently delivered a talk at the University of Leeds that aimed to legitimise life modelling as a form of art in itself. By placing the life model in equal status to the artist, Blake's concept can be seen to further the idea that as fine artists, we have historically been encouraged to copy or sample the work of others in order to create original pieces of artwork.

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Dominic Blake:
Are Life Models Artists?
with Dominic Blake

We are delighted to present an online lecture and Q&A with Dominic Blake.

Dominic Blake is a London based art writer and performance artist whose work is located at the core of an emerging art historical debate concerning the role of the life model. While not claiming in an absolute sense that life modelling is an artistic practice, he advocates a new way of understanding modelling according to which it might become one given particular motivations on the part of the practitioner and the contexts within which they locate themselves.

Borne out of his experiences working as a life model at the Royal Academy and numerous other art schools, Blake's ongoing lecture series 'Are Life Models Artists?' has appeared at venues including The National Gallery, Mall Galleries and HSoA, receiving press coverage at the national level.

He is a contributing writer for Aesthetica Magazine and The Charleston Press and is currently completing work on a book sharing the same title as his lecture series, due for publication in the summer of 2023. Blake is co-organiser with Aurélie Debaene and CA York of 'Revaluing the Life Model in Art Practice', a symposium dealing with associated issues at the University of Kent's Aesthetics Research Centre in May 2022.

www.dominicblake.co.uk

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Dominic Blake: Are Life Models Artists? - RCA Drawing

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Dominic Blake: Are Life Models Artists? with Dominic Blake We are delighted to present an online lecture and Q&A with Dominic Blake. Dominic Blake is a London based art writer and performance artist whose work is located at the core of an emerging art historical debate concerning the role of the life model.

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Raphael - 'David' after Michelangelo (1505)

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Raphael - 'David' after Michelangelo (1505)

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The act of copying the work of other artists is nothing new to fine art practice. As early as the renaissance period, and up until the present day, fine art students have been encouraged to draw from the sculptures of those before them in order to better understand the human anatomy.

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Description

'David' after Michelangelo; nude male standing, seen from behind Pen and brown ink, over traces of leadpoint

Curator's comments

Watermark: scala (ladder). A drawing after Michelangelo's colossal marble 'David' which was completed c. 1503 and set up in front of the Palazzo della Signoria in May 1504 (for recent information on the dating of the sculpture, see M. Hirst, 'Michelangelo in Florence: 'David' in 1503 and 'Hercules' in 1506', 'The Burlington Magazine', CXLII (August 2000), pp. 487-492). Raphael probably arrived in Florence in 1505 and thus would have seen the 'David' once it was settled on the ringheria of the Palazzo della Signoria. It has been pointed out that the viewpoint of the drawing is not exactly like the viewpoint of a man standing behind the sculpture. It is drawn from the back left corner of the base, although the neck and shoulders are viewed as from above, which would have been impossible from the perspective of a man standing next to this gigantic sculpture. Scholars have attempted to explain this by pointing out that Raphael could have sketched the sculpture from more than one viewpoint and incorporated the various views into one drawing, but considering Raphael's extraordinary perception of three dimensionality, it should not be discounted that he could have imagined the top of the sculpture as he stood at its base. While in Florence, Raphael took great interest in the Florentine masters, often copying figures and then interpreting them in his own style. For example, he made a copy of Leonardo's 'Leda and the Swan' in a drawing now in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (inv. no. 12759, Joannides, cat. no. 98). Michelangelo must have made a big impression on the young Raphael because many of the works of this period are dependent on figures inspired by his sculptures Some of these copies such as the 'Saint Matthew' (BM no. 1855-2-14-1) and the present sheet are fairly literal copies of Michelangelo, albeit infused with Raphael's own style, while others such as Pp 01-65 consider the prototype and adapt it into a new figure based on the original, yet re-invented by Raphael. Paul Joannides published a copy, perhaps after a lost Bandinelli, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan after this drawing and a Raphael nude Hercules (his fig. 12). Another example that shows how this drawing, or a copy of it, must have circulated among artists can be seen in an Italian maiolica plaque (British Museum,1885,0420.1). There, the David appears also seen from its back, but in reverse; see D.Thornton and T.Wilson, 'Italian Renaissance Ceramics: a Catalogue of the British Museum Collection,' vol.I, London, 2009, pp. 246-249, cat. no.150). Lit.: P. Pouncey and J.A. Gere, 'Italian Drawings in the BM: Raphael and his Circle', London, 1962, no. 15 (with previous literature); J.A. Gere and N. Turner in exh. cat. BM, 'Drawings by Raphael', 1983, no. 39; P. Joannides, 'The Drawings of Raphael', Oxford, 1983, no. 97; E. Knab, E. Mitsch and K. Oberhuber, 'Raphael Die Zeichnungen', Stuttgart, 1983, no. 226; F. Ames-Lewis, 'The Draftsman Raphael', New Haven and London, 1986, pp. 41-43, fig. 43; N. Turner in exh. cat. BM 'Florentine Drawings of the Sixteenth Century', London, 1986, no. 15; D. Cordellier and B. Py in exh. cat. Villa Medici, 'Raphael: Autour des dessins du Louvre', Rome, 1992, p. 84; A. Weston-Lewis in exh. cat. National Galleries of Scotland, 'Raphael: The Pursuit of Perfection', Edinburgh, 1994, no. 15, pp. 50-1; J. Meyer zur Capellen, 'Raphael in Florence', London, 1996, pp. 120-126, no. 66; H. Chapman, in exh. cat. (by H. Chapman, T. Henry. C. Plazzotta et al), London, National Gallery, 'Raphael: from Urbino to Rome', 2004, no. 58; Paul Joannides, 'On, around, and after a new drawing by Raphael', "Master Drawings", XLIII, Fall 2005, p. 361, fig. 10

Exhibition history

1962-1963 Nov-Sep, BM, Raphael and his Circle (P+G) 1986, BM, Florentine Drawings 16thC, no.15 1994 May-July, Edinburgh, NG Scot., Raphael pursuit of perfection, no.15 1983, BM, 'Drawings by Raphael', no.39 1992 Oct-Dec, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre,UEA, 'Florentine Drawings', (no cat.) 1999-2000 Nov-Feb, Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, 'Drawing the Figure' 2004-2005 Oct-Jan, London, National Gallery, 'Raphael: From Urbino to Rome' 2015 Feb-May, Bonn, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 'After Michelangelo: Michelangelo's Influence on European Art' 2017 01 Jun -03 Sept, Oxford, Ashmolean, Raphael: The Drawings 2022 2 Feb - 15 May London, BM, G90a, 'Raphael and his Circle'

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Description 'David' after Michelangelo; nude male standing, seen from behind Pen and brown ink, over traces of leadpoint Curator's comments Watermark: scala (ladder). A drawing after Michelangelo's colossal marble 'David' which was completed c. 1503 and set up in front of the Palazzo della Signoria in May 1504 (for recent information on the dating of the sculpture, see M.

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Studying Fine Art for my BA, I can understand first-hand the value of 'sampling' from the work of other artists. If you were ever to visit an artist's studio it's likely that you would find printouts, magazine cuttings, and other found imagery that inspire and bares some connection to the artist's process. Pinterest is a digital tool that allows you to collect and curate imagery into themed boards in a similar way. Above, I have linked the mood board that I created during my final major project on my art foundation course; an assemblage of the work of different artists which I could take visual elements from and apply to my own practice.

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Artists I Steal From | Curated by Alvaro Barrington and Julia Peyton-Jones

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John Berger on the sampling of European oil painting in publicity imagery

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John Berger on the sampling of European oil painting in publicity imagery

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In the final chapter of the 1972 book ways of seeing, John Berger analyses and explains to readers the many reasons why images from European oil painting are reproduced and reappropriated in publicity images such as advertisements.

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Chapter 7 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger

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Chapter 7 of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing explores the relationship between art and advertising and the ways in which modern day media both extends and subverts the history of art.

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Another way of understanding the connection and translation between audio and visual imagery is by looking into synesthesia. Synesthesia, or more specifically chromesthesia refers to a phenomenon where in which everyday sounds can trigger seeing colours. In the TEDx talk above, composer Devonte Hynes explains his personal experience with this phenomenon and how it has influenced the way he makes and interacts with music.

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Synesthesia & creating your own score | Devonté Hynes | TEDxMarthasVineyard

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Found Objects as a correlative of 'sampling' in the visual arts

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Found Objects as a correlative of 'sampling' in the visual arts

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Similar to the musical process of sampling from wider cultural artefacts in order to produce an original artistic form, many conceptual artists of the 20th century began to source 'readymade' manufactured objects which they would then manipulate in some way and present as a piece of work in fine art contexts such as the gallery.

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DJ Shadow, 'Endtroducing' (1996, Mo' Wax)

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DJ Shadow, 'Endtroducing' (1996, Mo' Wax)

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Whilst the concept of sampling was more commonly implemented by musicians and artists alike in the mid to late 20th century, it did not exist without contention. To traditionalists, for example, sampling might be easily likened to copying and thus branded as lazy or inauthentic. Hip-hop producer and pioneer DJ Shadow's 1996 album 'Endtroducing', however, exemplified the intricacies of archive digging and the assemblage of found audio legitimizing sampling - and the hip-hop genre - as an art form capable of evoking complex emotion, proportionate to that created by an oil painting or piece of classical music.

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To listen to DJ Shadow's Endtroducing is to hear sampling approached as a spiritual practice, an aural document of one man's lifelong reverence for hip-hop and his communion with the history of recorded music. After years of bending over record crates and inhaling dust from decades-old vinyl in the basement of the Sacramento record store, Joshua Davis pulled hundreds of samples together to create a record that reimagined and expanded the possibilities of the art form. Producers had sampled for years, and perhaps the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique rivals the number of sources on , but nothing before Endtroducing had its sonic scope. The fact that Shadow was able to keep every musical fragment in his brain almost makes him seem more like a conduit than a composer.

In the expansive, ethereal, and meditative world that is Endtroducing, The Meters coexist with Tangerine Dream ("Changeling"), Pink Floyd plays on the same bill with Jimmy Smith ("The Number Song"). Hip-hop, electronic, ambient, jazz, rock, classical, and more coalesce. Endtroducing was a hip-hop record that irrevocably blurred the lines between genres, exposing the reality that genre never really existed. It was a construct that DJ Shadow helped deconstruct one sample at a time.

In this article, we'll answer a few questions about why the album remains such a touchstone.
Order the remastered vinyl edition of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing here.
Why is Endtroducing so important?

Endtroducing legitimized sampling as an art form unlike few albums before it. If ever anyone says sampling takes no skill, that's it's lazy theft, you can point to Endtroducing. The seamlessness and shape-shifting of Shadow's sonic collages aren't impossible to recreate, but they would take years of study and innate musical skill to get right.

"By '95, when I was really working on Endtroducing heavily, I was very much trying to make a statement about, 'Why are we all abandoning this artform? What everybody else is doing is great, but I feel like there's a lot of work left to be done in this discipline.' And I wanted to create a record that pushed that conversation forward," Shadow told Westword.

The album gave rise to the notion that hip-hop producers could create a full instrumental album, that they were more than composers for rappers. Without Endtroducing, the world might not have been ready to accept 's Donuts, another brilliant work of sampling bricolage. Somewhere between Shadow's Endtroducing and Dilla's Donuts, you have the roots of the Los Angeles Beat Scene, the hip-hop and electronic music community that spawned Grammy-winning producers like Flying Lotus. There are decades of music that might not have happened if not for Endtroducing.

Where was DJ Shadow in his career?

In 1991, when Shadow was just 18, he was featured in The Source's "Unsigned Hype" column. Hailed for his "beats, fat drum fills, [and] swift cuts," he was already synthesizing disparate sounds, pulling from Jimi Hendrix ("Purple Haze") and The Commodores ("Assembly Line") on a single song. By the time he started recording in 1995, Shadow had graduated from UC Davis, toured Europe as a DJ, and was living in a small Davis, CA apartment that he described as a "little rat hole." Though Endtroducing was his debut, he'd released several Mo' Wax singles, including 1993's "In/Flux," and completed many remixes for labels like Hollywood BASIC. In 2012, Shadow told NPR how his career status in 1995 directly influenced the album title. "The reason it's spelled E-N-D at the beginning was because I saw it as the final chapter in a number of singles that I had done already."

Who influenced Shadow when he was making the album?

By the time he started composing Endtroducing in 1995, Shadow was undoubtedly well-versed in the majority of hip-hop production that had come before him. Though Endtroducing doesn't sound like the records of Shadow's production predecessors, he still pulled from their artistic ethos.

"On Endtroducing..... I was using European prog and a cut from Metallica, Björk, etc.," Shadow told VICE. "To me, that's simply following the same aesthetic as who I consider to be the real pioneers of sampling, whether it be Prince Paul and all the barriers that they broke on Three Feet High & Rising or hearing Large Professor flip something a little bit out of the norm, or using Jean-Jacques Perrey, a French synthesizer pioneer. You see that and you kind of go "oh, there are no boundaries."

How did Shadow source the album's many samples?

Cut Chemist once called DJ Shadow "the king of digging." Shadow did most of his crate-digging for the hundreds of samples on Endtroducing at Rare Records in Sacramento, the now-shuttered used record store commemorated on the album cover. After years of sorting through the stacks upstairs, the owner granted Shadow access to the store's basement, a cavernous catacomb of disorganized and otherwise jettisoned vinyl. In Doug Pray's DJing documentary Scratch, Shadow sits among the basement's floor-to-ceiling record stacks and discusses finding the samples for Endtroducing among them.

"In fact, most of [ Endtroducing...] was built off of records pulled from here. So, it has almost a karmic element of, "I was meant to find this on top," or, "I was meant to pull this out because it works so well with this." So it has a lot of meaning for me personally," he says in Scratch. "Just being in here is a humbling experience because you're looking through all these records, and it's sort of like a big pile of broken dreams, in a way. Almost none of these artists still have a career, really, so you kind of respect that. If you're making records and you're a DJ and putting out releases, whether it's mixtapes or whatever, you're adding to this pile, whether you want to admit it or not."

While digging through those mountainous, near-toppling stacks, Shadow was guided by intuition and his ever-growing musical knowledge. Sometimes, he pulled records at random. Just as often, though, he looked at the labels. "You start to develop a sense of [which ones will have] something fruitful within the grooves. You start looking for certain labels; you start looking for certain producers," he told NPR. "One of the first things I realized is that anything prior to 1966 probably wasn't going to have what I was looking for. Once James Brown invented funk and rock 'n' roll began to combine certain jazz aesthetics, then music began to take form and began to settle into a 4-4 groove, which is what hip hop is based on. ... You were going for something that you could nod your head to. Anything before 1966 is going to have just a completely different approach."

Did the samples cost a lot of money?

By the time Mo' Wax released Endtroducing, rappers, and record labels had been sued for millions over sample clearances. Somehow, Mo' Wax cleared as many samples as they needed to release the album and evaded spending a small fortune. In 2012, Shadow discussed the Endtroducing clearances with NPR, as well as the ever-frustrating and complicated process of clearing a single sample.

"I was asked by the parent record company, 'Give us your first 10 [samples] that you think are the most obvious or the biggest usages, and we'll work on those first.' I said, 'Fair enough, here they are.' ... Clearing samples is not a cut-and-dried process. Some people have reasonable expectations of what they think the usage is worth and some people don't. Some people have artistic scruples about it, some people don't. And then the third most common thing is, you can't find the people: The labels don't exist or they've been absorbed into a massive conglomeration who doesn't even know what they have or where the tapes are. These are really common scenarios, and you just have to do your best to navigate them."

What does the album sound like?

Hip-hop. Trip-hop. Electronic. Ambient. None of those broad genres encapsulates the sound of Endtroducing. It is each one of those and more. The album can be as introspective as it is aggressive, as uptempo as it is downtempo. The songs build layer by layer, break down, and turn back on themselves.

The album essentially opens with "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt," Shadow uses ominous classical piano and choral singing to create the haunting bed for a fusillade of damaging drums. It sounds like walking through a bombed-out ancient city, the score playing as more artillery decapitates whatever buildings, statues, and humans are still standing. With "Organ Donor," Shadow turns an obscure Giorgio Moroder song into a hypnotic organ loop, accenting the grinding, mesmerizing, and almost carnivalesque melody with a barrage of drums. "Midnight in a Perfect World" is a swirling, expansive ambient suite that thumps with chugging percussion, the suite made fuller with subterranean scratching, gently plinking piano, violin, and vocals that sound like they're echoing and repeating from another realm. It's both serene and strange, calming and unsettling. The jittery drum and bass of "Napalm Brain / Scatter Brain - Medley" stand in stark opposition to the slow, swaying, and almost spiritual jazz of "What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)." There are movie clips that drift in and out, suggesting a meaning that is endlessly fascinating to consider but forever unknowable.

Yet, each track brilliantly segues into the next. Shadow finds the sonic threads necessary to stitch them together, knows the right track to offer a reprieve. Endtroducing accomplishes the towering feat of sounding like countless things you've heard yet retaining its singularity.

Did hip-hop "suck" in '96?

The Endtroducing track "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96" offers a brief, sampled explanation of its titular assertion ("It's the money"). But the title was written in jest. "To a lot of people I'm the digging guy and I am always in a basement in a record store," DJ Shadow told Bonafide Magazine. "To other people - and I always find this to be strange - I am the person who stood up to hip-hop and this is why hip-hop sucks. I am always, like; 'This was a tongue in cheek, funny title.'"

In any case, 1996 was a landmark year for hip-hop in a decade full of them. The list of undisputed classic albums released that year include Fugees' The Score, 2Pac's All Eyez on Me, Busta Rhymes' The Coming, Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, and UGK's Ridin Dirty. However, as hip-hop rapidly became more popular and commercially viable, people within and outside of the hip-hop community leveled broad criticisms against the genre, pointing to everything from rap artist's perceived glorification of wealth and violence to producers' lack of originality in sampling.

DJ Shadow likely shared some of these sentiments to varying degrees, but he also loved hip-hop. Unlike people who rejected the genre or stole from it without acknowledging their sources, Shadow embraced hip-hop for its flaws while hoping to push the genre forward.

What is the story behind the photo on the album's iconic cover?

The Endtroducing ..... cover will never eclipse DJ Shadow's music, but it's become one of the most recognizable pieces of album art of the last quarter-century. On paper, the image doesn't sound especially remarkable or novel. Two men (technically three men and one cat, if you're looking at the gatefold) stand under dim fluorescent bulbs and dig for records in a used record store. The man turning toward the camera (Latyrx's Lyrics Born) has a motion-blurred face, while the man holding a stack of records (Blackalicious producer Chief Xcel) remains in focus. When you see the image, though, the impact is immediate.

Captured by revered and now-veteran hip-hop photographer Brian Cross (aka B+), the cover photo distills the essence of the album's composition, the countless hours Shadow spent hunched over or squatting in front of dusty crates for samples in that same Sacramento record store (the now-shuttered Rare Records). The image also captures the timeless joy of musical discovery, the solitary moments of face-blurring sonic revelation and the camaraderie fortified when shopping for music with your friends. It doesn't feel contrived or forced like the big-budget, highly stylized, and color-saturated hip-hop covers of the mid-'90s.

While Endtroducing..... represented a musical breakthrough for Shadow, the cover was an equally pivotal moment for Cross. "It was a breakthrough photograph. It was weird and mysterious but from the minute we saw it on the proof sheets, we were like, 'Well, that's the cover anyway.' ... That photo has really stood the test of time - a really bizarre, technically incompetent photograph," Cross told Dazed. "That photo was a recalibration in terms of my photography practice. Evaluating what was important about that image and why it works allowed me to reconsider my ideas and philosophy. Up until that point, those photographs would be considered in the margins, and then suddenly it was like, 'Well, how do I make those kinds of moments the center?'"

How did the album wind up on UK label Mo' Wax?

Mo' Wax was the brainchild of James Lavelle, an Oxford DJ who relocated to London as a teenager and began spinning at club nights like Gilles Peterson's Talkin' Loud. In 1993, Lavelle and Peterson started Monday club night That's How It Is, which coincided with the opening of the Blue Note and club nights like Goldie's infamous drum and bass night Metalheadz. Rooted in this fertile club scene, Mo' Wax sprang up as a post-acid jazz label between 1992 and 1993.

During Mo' Wax's inaugural year, Lavelle heard DJ Shadow's remix of "Doin' Damage in My Native Language" by U.S.-based rap group Zimbabwe Legit. "It was just this amazing version, nothing like the original," Lavelle told High Snobiety. "It had this classical thing about it, almost like Pink Floyd doing hip-hop, and eventually I found out who he was and contacted him - and the rest is history." After Lavelle and Shadow toured together and Mo' Wax released several successful DJ Shadow singles, Mo' Wax gave Shadow an advance for Endtroducing.

What is trip-hop? How did DJ Shadow feel about Endtroducing being classified as such?

The word "trip-hop" first appeared in print in a June 1994 Mixmag feature written by Andy Pemberton, which surveyed an emerging scene of musicians in the UK. Pemberton described it as "a deft fusion of head-nodding beats, supa-phat bass, and an obsessive attention to the kind of other-wordly sounds usually found on acid house records," citing DJ Shadow's "In/Flux" (1993) as trip-hop's germinal record. To add on to Pemberton's description, trip-hop became shorthand for an opiated fusion of breakbeats and downtempo jazz, soul, and funk. Two years before Shadow's Endtroducing, trip-hop went global following the release of Portishead's 1994 debut, Dummy.

Trip-hop's detractors criticized the genre as a softening and rejection of US hip-hop. Shadow didn't initially bristle at being labeled a trip-hop artist, but it began to bother him when trip-hop became a fad divorced from its hip-hop roots, the now global scene populated by opportunistic producers.

"[I know people] that have a problem with that term and find some perverse pleasure of putting me in the bracket even though they know full well I was doing KMEL mixes seven years ago - the first all Hip-Hop mixes, so they know they ain't right," he told Rap Pages in 1996. "I mean, I get frustrated with these bogus ass groups that try and put themselves under this 'trip-hop' umbrella to make a buck, because most of these fools don't know shit about hip-hop. I guess that's why I've never considered myself a 'trip-hop' artist."

How was the album received upon its release?

In the UK and Europe, Endtroducing was a critical and commercial success. The album spent ten weeks on the UK album charts and was certified gold within two years. Apart from a negative review in The Wire, foreign press was extremely positive. Tom Wilkes, who reviewed Endtroducing for British music magazine Melody Maker, couldn't have been more adulatory. "I hear a lot of good records, but very few impossible ones..." Wilkes wrote. "You need this record. You are incomplete without it." NME called Shadow the "Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page of the sampler."

However, after a whirlwind of press and successful gigs abroad, DJ Shadow returned to Davis still virtually unknown. Fans recognized him on UK streets, but sales and critical acclaim were slow to arrive stateside. "The album wasn't getting radio play anywhere, as far as I could tell. Even my own college radio station didn't seem to know who I was, or have any interest in playing my stuff. So, I thought that was it," Shadow told Eliot Wilder for his 33 ⅓ book on Endtroducing. "At that time, Davis was the world to me. [ laughs] Even though I had been a lot of places, it's the only thing that seemed real. And then, all of a sudden, the weekly Sacramento arts and entertainment paper did a cover story on Endtroducing, and I didn't even know about it. That's when it hit home."

What does DJ Shadow think of the album's legacy?

DJ Shadow seems to discuss Endtroducing in every interview. This isn't his fault. Even if the focus of the interview is Shadow's latest album, the interviewer eventually circles back to his debut. In 2016, 20 years after Mo' Wax released Endtroducing, Shadow reflected on the album's legacy in an interview with Rolling Stone Australia.

After expressing his gratitude for the album's continued resonance, Shadow said he hopes Endtroducing was "bought by 100,000 artists." In other words, he wants musicians to return to Endtroducing for inspiration, to use the album to push their art forward. He also realizes the rarity of creating a piece of music of this magnitude.

"Being a student of music and reading about other artists and their aspirations, I know how difficult it is to connect in a meaningful way and have a record that endures for 20 years the way this one has, so I know how lucky I am. I know how grateful I am every day that I managed to achieve that at least once in my lifetime."
Order the remastered vinyl edition of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing here.

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To listen to DJ Shadow 's Endtroducing is to hear sampling approached as a spiritual practice, an aural document of one man's lifelong reverence for hip-hop and his communion with the history of recorded music.

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Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)

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Dadaism and the origins of reappropriating imagery

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Dadaism and the origins of reappropriating imagery

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Whilst early techniques of collage can be traced back to as early as 200 BC in China, our contemporary understanding of 'collage' - cutting up and repasting together found text and imagery - also finds its origins in the Dada movement of the early 20th century. Largely developed in response to World War One, Dada artists such as Hannah Hoch can be seen to use images from newspaper fragments to convey resentment toward elements of capitalist society and far-right politics.

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Defined as "the technique of digitally encoding music or sound and reusing it as part of a composition or recording";
DJ Sameed Rezayan explores the non-musical origins of sampling, in addition to some of the more socio-political and economic related conditions which triggered the technique to be so widely employed by artists. Like many art-related forms and processes, the method of sampling is not only used for aesthetic purposes but can help to insinuate alternative meanings in a piece of music or visual art.

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How sampling permeates art and music

We talk sampling with producer and label boss Sameed Rezayan.

Sampling has been an intrinsic part of art for decades and was born out of the need to express creatively with limited means, reaching as far back as the Dadaist movement in the 1920s in concept, and the 1940s with the audio recordings of Pierre Schaffer and musique concrète in execution.

So, what is sampling?If you want a dictionary definition, sampling is 'the action or process of taking samples of something for analysis' and 'the technique of digitally encoding music or sound and reusing it as part of a composition or recording'. Sampling is a method of taking something away and reusing it.

Sameed Rezayan, a producer and DJ hailing from Manchester, has developed an extensive knowledge of hip-hop samples from an early age. From producing his own music to running his own label, ELE Records, Sameed has built his career around his fascination behind the methodology and culture surrounding sampling.

"Hip-hop sampling is not isolated. It came about through oppressive socio-economic conditions in America and technological advancements in affordable musical instruments, which brought about a revolution in art and music," Sameed explains.

"In the words of Lauryn Hill, 'Hip-hop was born through people who didn't necessarily have traditional musical training, the best tools, and in some cases even instruments, but found a way to express themselves despite that. My art exists because it has a will to exist, like hip-hop.' Sampling was anti-bourgeois and a form of protest against oppressive structures."

Acts of resistance are commonplace in music, and with this new means of creative musical experimentation, sampling gave often overlooked communities in music a chance to express themselves.

"Early uses of sampling in popular music came from artists like The Beatles using pre-recorded samples from the Mellotron on Strawberry Fields, and the '70s saw the Fairlight CMI used by Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush," Sameed continues. "In the '80s, artists like Dr Dre, Beastie Boys and Pete Rock started using samplers like the E-Mu Emulator 1 and 2, and others. Today, sampling has evolved exponentially and pretty much anyone can sample using a DAW".

However, this new creative means of making music with existing sound was not met without resistance. "When De La Soul sampled the band The Turtles on seminal debut album '3 Feet and Rising' in 1989," Sameed explains, "a new legal precedent was set. Mark Volman of The Turtles, told the Los Angeles Times: 'Sampling is just a longer term for theft. Anybody who can honestly say sampling is some sort of creativity has never done anything creative.' Volman then sued De La Soul and won the case. Sampling, historically and literally speaking, became known in the industry as theft." In a similar occurrence in 1991, Biz Markie went up against songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan for his use of a sample from O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again (Naturally)' on Markie's own song 'Alone Again'. Going forward, sampling would become more regulated, with legal clearances needed before their usage, and subsequently changing the face of hip-hop forever.

"I employ methods taken from Political-Sociology, predominantly from Michel Foucault and his method of 'Archaeology' as written about in 'Madness and Civilisation'. Examining the traces and orders of the past in order to understand the history of the present. I see sampling in hip-hop as a continuation of a methodology or process what has been used for hundreds of years by countless people."

Sampling in music actively challenges perceptions of its usage in music and now has become common practice across countless genres.

"There is a perception of sample-based music being of a lower class or standard than traditional forms of music, such as instrumental bands. For me, this is rooted in structural and semantic racism that pervades many of our cultural institutions."

Taking this theoretical approach to his music offers him a unique perspective to his music making, unravelling the history of music as he goes. "When I sit in the studio to research, record a show or make beats, I dig as deep as possible. I don't stop at the sample, I look at who produced it, who played on the record, what other records they played on, who else they worked with, who influenced them and I end up in some obscure places. There's no end point. It's not a destination, it's a journey."

Samples from Sameed's history

Part of a bigger story

This musical journey is something that permeates the essence of sampling. Sampling allows us to connect the history of music, weaving familiar sounds in new ways, and becoming part an ever-evolving musical tapestry.

"I didn't have the capital to invest in instruments," he explains. "I started with a free version of Logic and a computer. I had turntables and records handed down to me by family or friends. I worked a minimum wage job and spent my entire day wages on my lunch break record shopping."

These efforts were not made in vain, though.For Sameed, the hours spent honing his craft in sampling helped to forge his musical career."I remember being on a train to a gig, DJing, and showed some tracks I had been working on to a friend who didn't believe I had made them. The next day I picked 10 records out from labels I respected, found their emails online and sent over about 10 tracks. Later that week, I signed with Local Talk. That EP had Angie Stone, Eddie Kendricks and Yussef Latif on them. I still have the records I used to sample."

Although sampling is no longer the "free-for-all" scene it used to be, artists are continuing to stay inspired by sounds and the past and turn them into something new. "If you're looking for samples, go to a record store. If you're looking for history, go to Whosampled or Discogs." For newcomers, sampling might seem like a daunting process to start building up your own sample catalogue and making samples your own. However, the beauty in sampling is its freedom. Find what inspires you and run with it.

"There is no correct way to sample. There's no handbook that will teach you how to do it. The whole essence is DIY, so make mistakes, have fun and experiment. Slow it down, stretch it, mess around with the order. Chop it up, move it around, do whatever you want."

Words: Zainab Hassan

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How sampling permeates art and music We talk sampling with producer and label boss Sameed Rezayan. Sampling has been an intrinsic part of art for decades and was born out of the need to express creatively with limited means, reaching as far back as the Dadaist movement in the 1920s in concept, and the 1940s with the audio recordings of Pierre Schaffer and musique concrète in execution.

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The Avalanches - 'Since I Left You' (2000, Modular Recordings)

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The Avalanches - 'Since I Left You' (2000, Modular Recordings)

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The linked video above gives both a visual and aural breakdown the ingenious use of sampling behind Australian band The Avalanches' highly acclaimed album 'Since I Left You'; a record made entirely of approximately 3500 found samples. The band's unique sound is testimony to the collage-style approach of cutting and placing together different clips of audio - ripped from 1970s television dialogue to 1950s Argentinian folk music. This kind of musical composition can be defined under the genre of 'sound-collage'.

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Every Sample From The Avalanches Since I Left You

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Derived from the French verb 'coller' meaning 'to glue', collage can be understood as a technique employed both in music and the visual arts, of creating an assemblage of different forms in order to create one whole.

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Tate glossary definition for collage: Used to describe both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down to a supporting surface

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'Artists I Steal From' exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac Gallery, 2019

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'Artists I Steal From' exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac Gallery, 2019

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In this conversation panel about the 2019 exhibition in which their work is displayed, painters Alvaro Barrington and Issy Wood discuss with curators the role that influence plays on their individual practice. This allows audiences to access the art from the artists' perspective and understand the exercise of reappropriating or essentially 'sampling' the work of others.

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ARTIST AND CURATOR TALK ON THE OCCASION of the Exhibition ARTISTS I STEAL FROM

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Sade - 'The Sweetest Taboo' (1985, Sony Music)

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Sade - 'The Sweetest Taboo' (1985, Sony Music)

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In both music and visual art, the act of sampling and copying from other artists is key to the artistic process. For art in addition to music, nothing exists or can be created without prior influence, whether that be conscious or unconscious. This concept is important in understanding the origin of an image and distinguishing which elements of that image are authentic, and which are not.

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Sade - The Sweetest Taboo - Official - 1985

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Hype Williams - The Throning - 'Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, and Start Gettin' Reel' (2010, De Stijl Records)

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Hype Williams - The Throning - 'Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, and Start Gettin' Reel' (2010, De Stijl Records)

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The fourth track from Hype Williams aforementioned album 'Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, and Start Gettin' Reel' (linked above) encompasses the many elements highlighted by Thompson; including sampled lyrics from Sade's 'The Sweetest Taboo' and distorted layers of analogue noise.

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John Cage's Water Walk performance, and more specifically the arrangement-style drawings he made to support it can be seen as an example of the direct translation of sound into image. Furthermore, the diagrams allow us to visualise the layers and processes involved in making sound, in the same way that one might be able to distinguish between marks, textures and mediums in painting.

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The description of Hype William's combination of audio samples with authentic sound-making in the excerpt from Thompson creates an image that can be translated into the context of visual art. For example, the combination of found imagery with hand-rendered marks such as brushstrokes, which can be seen in the artwork of Robert Rauschenberg.

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Similar to approaches of the Dada artist movement, pop artists of the 1950s and 60s continued to reject traditional ideas of what art should be, and thus employed the use of reappropriating and recontextualising imagery from pop culture to convey their attitudes toward politics and society of the time.

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Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, pop art reached its peak in the 1960s. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery.

In 1957 pop artist Richard Hamilton listed the 'characteristics of pop art' in a letter to his friends the architects Peter and Alison Smithson:

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business

Modernist critics were horrified by the pop artists' use of such 'low' subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of postmodernism.

American pop vs. British pop

Although they were inspired by similar subject matter, British pop is often seen as distinctive from American pop.

Early pop art in Britain was fuelled by American popular culture viewed from a distance, while the American artists were inspired by what they saw and experienced living within that culture.

In the United States, pop style was a return to representational art (art that depicted the visual world in a recognisable way) and the use of hard edges and distinct forms after the painterly looseness of abstract expressionism. By using impersonal, mundane imagery, pop artists also wanted to move away from the emphasis on personal feelings and personal symbolism that characterised abstract expressionism.

In Britain, the movement was more academic in its approach. While employing irony and parody, it focused more on what American popular imagery represented, and its power in manipulating people's lifestyles. The 1950s art group The Independent Group (IG), is regarded as the precursor to the British Pop art movement.

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Tate glossary definition for pop art: Name given to art made in America and Britain from the mid 1950s and 1960s that drew inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture

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Marie Thompson (2017), referenced by Dhanveer Singh Brar (2020)

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Marie Thompson (2017), referenced by Dhanveer Singh Brar (2020)

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"In Hype Williams, the signature noise of multiple mediums can be heard ... mostly generated by analogue and digital media noise. Tracks are undercut by hiss, while tape warbles create distinctive pitch bends...many of their samples sound as if they have been ripped from YouTube videos: the audio artefacts and effects that arise with lossy digital compression...the saturation of their music with noise makes it difficult to discern what sounds are coming from where - what is live and what is sampled."

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The Starting Point: 'Beefy's Tune - Dean Blunt Edit' by Dhanveer Singh Brar (2020)

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The Starting Point: 'Beefy's Tune - Dean Blunt Edit' by Dhanveer Singh Brar (2020)

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Dhanveer Singh Brar's 2020 essay explores black diaspora culture in Britain through the multidisciplinary art and music of Dean Blunt. In particular, Singh Brar's analysis of Blunt's musical projects Babyfather and Hype Williams allowed me to identify and understand a direct correlation between the structures of both musical and fine art practices and the idea of the multi-media 'collage'.

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Beefy's Tune (Dean Blunt Edit): An Excerpt From Dhanveer Singh Brar's Book About Dean Blunt And Blackness In Britain · Feature ⟋ RA

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In this section of his new book, Brar explores the hidden depths of the Babyfather's 2016 album, BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow.