Something borrowed

This week, Chris Ofili was named as Britain's representative at next year's Venice Biennale. He is one of our most successful painters, because his work manages to blend together several traditions at once. As I was contemplating his extraordinary new exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery last week, it occurred to me that it reminded me of something I had seen before.

In the gallery, a wood-panelled shrine houses Ofili's most substantial sequence of paintings. A dozen works line two long walls, leading up to another, larger painting as a sort of altarpiece. Each features the figure of a monkey, worked in different colours, embellished in a variety of textures and fanciful ways. And they mirror each other, so they all point in one direction, even though they are laid out on opposing walls.

But they are the same monkey. And what's more, it has been lifted straight out of one of Andy Warhol's early illustrations. Rather than see this as a crisis of originality or even a breach of copyright - the laws of which are, at best, blurred in the art world - we should understand these gestures as an intelligent, useful and slightly anxious desire to anchor a new artwork to a centuries-old tradition. And it produces a great freedom for the artist to test the limits of that connection.

A more direct version of cultural borrowing came to a head in the Eighties, when "appropriationist" art was all the rage. Often the "lift" was almost unedited. Sherrie Levine's photographic series from that time, for example, were exact duplicates of 20th century masters.

When you see a Levine on the wall with the title After Walker Evans, there is nothing visual to distinguish it from the original. Jeff Koons was at it, and still is.

He was even taken to court by a postcard manufacturer, who claimed Koons had transformed a pretty picture of a smiling couple and some puppies into three dimensions.

All of this is inherited, of course, from Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades, which posited the idea that you can take an object, however banal, and bring it into the gallery as your own work of art.

But while copyright lawyers are having a field day with music samplers, today's visual artists are one step ahead of the game. A successful lift, one would hope, would not only create a new work which could stand independently, but would benefit the original as part of the process; perception of the source work would be permanently changed by the new work.

It is as if the younger artist engages in a critique of the older work to make it visible anew in a contemporary climate.

The Chapman Brothers, who are among the most contentious of the Young British Artists, have revisited Goya's Disasters of War series several times, remaking scenes in life-size and reduced-model formats, as well as producing a series of prints. If we ever thought their work relied on shock tactics, we see that it has only been learned from the master.