Sampling and Site-Specific Practice in Contemporary Art

In the early 20th century, copying, cutting and pasting entered the Western European avant-garde through collage and readymades, as artists employed found objects and ephemera to create new meaning from existing materials.

This book explores how this practice has evolved in contemporary art today, looking at its important and distinct outcomes in the practice of artists such as Andrea Fraser, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Christian Marclay, Amie Siegel and Christopher Williams. It analyses the pivotal consequences of the interrelationships these artists establish between fragments of culture, from television and film, to internet culture and their artwork’s site, where the verb to "sample" has become deeply tied to digital music editing, writing, image production, database searches and social media.

Samples take many forms: quotations of other cultural works; replicas of other objects; reenactments of works by other artists; or fragments that are quite literally cut or removed from other works of art, design, or media. Via Bouman’s analysis, we visualise the shared frameworks of meaning that underpin these multifaceted, multidimensional and medium-fluid works. Focussing on ‘action’ and ‘form’, the book discusses the relationship between the referent and reference, and the citational labor that any sample performs. The distributive sense of authorship that emerges places the audience in a new position of significance.

Concepts and themes discussed include: queer and race theory, postproduction and mirroring, mobile site specificity, now-time and dragging, and gender fluidity and Drag King performance, centring sampling as a key form of 21st-century art. With novel insights into the conceptual, material, and aesthetic dimensions of sampling in contemporary culture, the book provides a new critical framework for understanding the complex implications of this practice, as a vital resource for researchers in contemporary art practice and visual culture.