Philosophies of Sampling: Part Two
Media
- The New "Natural" Environment:
Ernie Kovacs once said, "Television is a medium because it is neither
rare nor well-done."
But I think Negativland put it better. Artists have always lauded and
celebrated their natural environment. Whether in impressionist paintings
of ponds and lilies, or poetic serenades about leaves of grass, it is
quite natural, if not necessary, for artists to exalt, comment, and even
confront his or her environment. 
In
the present day, we live in an environment of electronic sounds and images.
Our environment is television. Our environment is the radio. Our environment
is film. Our environment is the internet. Our environment is advertising.
Our environment is, in a way, a true virtual reality. It has become just
as natural and acceptable an environment as the earthly one from which
it has sprung. The bulk of our daily sensory input is not focused on the
physical reality around us, but on the media that saturates it. Artists
cannot help but find the new electrified environment irresistibly worthy
of comment, criticism, and manipulation.
"The rise of semiotic figuration in late twentieth-century art and theory must be recognized in order to accept the legitimacy and social value of Appropriation. To understand Appropriation as transcending re-use or plagiarism one must accept that our social environment is increasingly determined by simulated signs, and that the realm of the 'imaginary' has supplanted that of the 'real' in determining our sense of self and nature. As a result, artists now represent beer cans and coke bottles as readily as they once did apples and oranges.
"The
semiotic basis of Post-Modern art is precisely what makes Appropriation
both central to and unavoidable in contemporary representation. The referent
in Post-Modern art is no longer 'nature,' but the closed system of fabricated
signs that make up our environment. In the nineteenth century realistic
painters from Thomas Cole through Claude Monet strove to accurately represent
nature as it appeared to the eye, divorced from the cultural biases that
had built up for hundreds of years. In the present century, culture functions
as the ideal artistic referent. Consequently, contemporary artists like
Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, or David Salle should be free to reproduce
our 'nature,' even if some of it is made from commercial signs and imagery
that are protected by copyright and trademark." Excerpted from Naomi Abe
Voegtli's Rethinking Derivative Rights, 63 Brooklyn L. Rev. 1213,
1221-1222 (1997).
As Negativland has propounded, appropriation sees media, itself, as a telling source and subject, to be captured, rearranged, even manipulated, and injected back into the barrage by those who are subjected to it. Appropriators claim the right to create with mirrors.
The spectrum of commentary, however, is very vast. Negativland's indictment of modern media and corporate society is very upfront and audible in their music. Most of us are a lot more subtle. If we subscribe to the theory that all art is commentary, we must also subscribe to the notion that commentary can be neutral or even appreciative. To comment does not necessarily mean to be critical. One of my favorite albums of recent months is DJ Food's Kaleidoscope. While incorporating a lot of elements from beat culture, DJ Food doesn't expressly criticize or glorify the sources he appropriates from -- he sculpts them into whatever his inspiration dictates. The idea of sampling, as I've always believed it, was to take elements that we like from all sources, dab them on our pallette like globs of paint, and turn them into something wholly our own. As sure as visual artists do not have exclusive rights to use certain colors, nor should musical artists have exclusive rights to certain sounds.
The idea that all art is commentary is crucial in an American copyright analysis. As we will discuss now, the Copyright law allows us to appropriate in limited situations under the Fair Use doctrine. In essence, the law says that we can apporpriate if we're commenting or parodying something or someone. But you will soon see that the courts have yet to uniformly establish how that works in sampling cases.
Sampling Artists Share Their Philosophies on Sampling
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