The New York Public Library
presents
An Artist Dialogue Series Event
OUT TO LUNCH
Ari Marcopoulos
in conversation with
Andrew Roth
Wednesday December 5, 2012
6:00 p.m.
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum
Room 227 (2nd Floor)
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
5thAvenue at 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018
Room 227 opens to the public at 5:30 p.m.
All events are FREE and subject to last minute change or cancellation.
Ari Marcopoulos and Andrew Roth discuss the book as exhibition space and chart the history of Marcopoulos’ output from the earliest zines to OUT TO LUNCH, his recent tour-de-force published by PPP Editions. Marcopoulos' first book Portraits from the Studio and the Street (1987) was self-published and part of a larger series on Dutch-born photographers. When he started working with skateboarders around 1993 he became interested in making zines. Publishing independently allowed him to easily disseminate his images and also helped him to formulate new directions in his work. He views the zines and published books as exhibitions.
Ari Marcopoulos, prolific zine-maker and book maven, garners his connoisseurship in this tour-de-force production. Crudely-bound, consisting of individual zine sequences of previously unpublished photographs (punctuated by black-and-white contact sheets, stickers, a screen-play and over-sized, fold-out color posters] OUT TO LUNCH features a small group of images from the 1980s and 90s that chart Marcopoulos’ formative development as a portraitist (of the famous and the anonymous) and his roots in street photography. These are blended with his most recent technically refined and altered documents (through Xerox and exaggerated printing on rice paper), from the diaristic to the obscure. Fascinated with the graffiti that tattoo cityscapes, he haunts streets, rooftops and bridges (often at night) in search of them. For Marcopoulos photographing is prowling and publishing a facile method of shifting his imagery into the world.
“The initial idea for OUT TO LUNCH came from a zine I made for the 2011 exhibition titled Abandoned Sleep. I printed my photos and some tags of west coast graffiti writers on vinyl stickers. The sticker is used in graffiti as a quick method of spreading a tag. Often, writers use whatever sticker is at hand, like USPS mail stickers; they tag them and carry them around to paste in public places. I was interested in having my images distributed in this way: small stickers either placed alone at eye-level or accompanying larger spots alongside existing stickers with tags. By putting them in the zine, now others would start pasting my images in places of their choice. We put 192 stickers in OUT TO LUNCH hoping it would become known as my STICKER BOOK!
Following in the tradition of many Japanese photographic book artists like Araki, Moriyama, Nakahira and Tadanori Yokoo, OUT TO LUNCH is more than a collection of photographs, it is a radical object informed by history.
Copies of the book are available for purchase and signing at the event.
Ari Marcopoulos (born in Amsterdam in 1957) is a prolific book-maker and photographer best known for his portraits and street photographs of skateboard culture and graffiti art. He currently lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited internationally, most recently presenting the entire series of 1200 photographs from Directory (Rizzoli and Nieves, 2010) at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich, Switzerland. He has published hundreds of zines and dozens of books since 1987. He was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 2010 and 2002. His photographs are included in many private and public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich. He is represented in New York by Marlborough Gallery. He is currently finishing Anyway, a series of 52 zines (one a week for one year) published by Dashwood Books. Recent books include The Chance Is Higher (Dashwood Books, 2008) and Out To Lunch (PPP Editions, 2012).
Andrew Roth specializes in selling rare photographic and artists’ books from the 20th century, while also publishing limited edition books under his imprint PPP Editions. He maintains a gallery in New York exhibiting the work of photographic artist’s from the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary art. Over the past 10 years he has presented exhibitions by key Japanese artists Makoto Aida, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Tadanori Yokoo, Keizo Kitajima, and most recently Ishiuchi Miyako. He has also presented solo exhibitions with Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Collier Schorr, David Wojnarowicz, Asher Penn, Keith Haring and Georgia Sagri to name but a few. In 2001, he edited and published The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century — a primer on the history of the photographic book, which went on to help define the rare photographic book market of today. Recent publications include Larry Clark’s Punk Picasso, Leigh Ledare’s Pretend You’re Actually Alive, Male: from the Collection of Vince Aletti, In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955, Ishiuchi Miyako’s Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980, William E. Jones’ Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration, Dash Snow's Movie List, Alex Kitnick's Massage, and Ricardo Valentin's The New Typography.
Initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni in 2004, Artist Dialogues Series provide an open forum for understanding and appreciation of contemporary art. Artists are paired with critics, curators, gallerists, writers or other artists to converse about art and the potential of exploring new ideas.
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