Chris Ofili

Part of my approach as an artist is to go with the flow: You begin something, and then, if you get stuck, you pull in information to increase the momentum. The process of culture is similar--for instance, what you find in hip-hop. I like its cut-and-paste attitude. You can often hear where one joint ends and another begins, which is something I try to make apparent in my work so you can see how things are made. Hip-hop takes existing beats, restructures them, and injects the individual in the form of a rap. You might not understand the lyrics, but you always recognize the voice of a particular rapper.... For me, Pop art is political in its attempt to be both of the self and the world, as in hip-hop. But I think the term shouldn't only be used to describe Warhol. In that sense, David Hammons is a Pop artist, as were Jean-Michel Basquiat and Willjam Blake. Hammons has been working with existing formats for some time, such as his Marcus Garvey jelly beans and boxes of Harlem dirt; you can relate those to Warhol's soup cans or Brillo boxes. If you think of Hammons in terms of music, he's managed to go from blues, to jazz, to hip-hop. Blues looks inward, jazz turns its back on the audience, but hip-hop speaks directly to it. So perhaps "My Pop" is "My Hip-Hop."--AS TOLD TO DONNA DE SALVO

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