Quotes from artists / musicians

When I am away from it, my thoughts revolve around this image. Where has it been before, masked & hidden? I think I have known this image all my life but did not make it visible before.’
Guston – Guston through Time p65

….Hip Hop and its attendant elements – MC-ing, deejaying, graffiti art, and break dancing. Its all about freestyling, about improvisation, about skilfully mixing beats in your own unique fashion. Like when Mix Master Mike scratches an old Johnson blues record, and the past becomes present.
Eliot Wilder- Endtroducing… p18

In fact most of [Endtroducing…] was built off records built 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”.

It is reverence and a keen understanding of how ostensibly incongruent pieces can somehow fit together to form an organic work that Endtroducing is built upon.
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing…p19

Davis is not only a master sampler and turntablist supreme, he is also a serious archaeologist with a world-thirsty passion for seeking out, uncovering and then ripping apart the discarded graces of some other generation and weaving them back together into a tapestry of chronic bleakness and beauty.
Eliot Wilder – Endtroducing p 20

Somehow hearing scratching and seeing what it looked like – it made sense to my experiences touching vinyl and making it do things. And it was very much a stamp of HipHop.
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing p 34

David Toop – Rap Attack

The way hip-hop came about was, you had a bunch of poor people who were denied access to many things, including expensive instruments. What they did was they incorporated their environment, which was anything from kung fu movies playing in Times Square to the records that their parents had. The way I make music is rooted in the hip-hop way of thinking, which is: take what’s around you, and subvert it into something that’s 100 percent you, but also has a cultural connection in the way it was done before.
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing p 89


Every generation needs a prototype…/ Looking at what young people do now, some people thought I had had ideas somewhat similar to theirs and, consequently, we felt good about each other. Dialogues with Duchamp P 95

I think painting dies. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterwards its called the history of art. Men are mortal, pictures too.
Dialogues with Duchamp P.67

Duchamps secret artwork that took 20 years to complete, and was only discovered after his death – ‘Given:1. the waterfall, 2.illuminating gas.’
P 11 Dialogues with Duchamp (Robert Motherwell – Intro)

…..your right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life. There is no beginning , no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time. Slaughterhouse 5 – Vonnegut P 64

When I look at you across the table, I don’t only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting

Interviews with Francis Bacon P82

Human beings respond to face like patterns with unusual interest from earliest infancy, and they continue to do so throughout life. Faces seem to look out at us from random textures, from passing clouds, from dappled shadows in the woods (that is why we are so ready to believe in tree gods and spirits), from all kinds of haphazard patterns where no real faces exist. On the other side, there is the clinical syndrome known as prosopagnosia, in which patients lose the ability to recognise faces.
Looking at Looking, Ulric Neisser - P78

…..retinal images are quite a recent discovery. There are two accounts of imageless visual perception. One was that finger-like rays shoot out of the eyes to touch objects. The other was that objects send out expanding ‘shells’, like ripples spreading from a stone dropped in a pond but maintaining the forms of the objects; these surrogate surfaces of objects flow into the eyes to enter the mind.
Looking at Looking, Richard L. Gregory – P56

The justification for attributing life to objects was stated by David Hume in his Natural History of Religion (Section III): "There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious."
The Natural History of Religion. D. Hume. p. xix.