reviews ari MarCoPoulos
Ari MArcopoulos:
The chAnce is higher
MC, Culver City
3 NoveM ber – 12 JaNuary
The Chance Is Higher, 2007
(installation view), 163 x 91 cm.
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy MC, Culver City
Ari Marcopoulos is known in large part for his emotionally rich photographs and leaning against the wall. Most, like Cairo and Angel (both 2007),
documenting the scene and stars of the 1980s artworld, demonstrating feature the artist’s son, a lanky, knit-capped teenager who obviously lives
simultaneous knacks for capturing the ephemeral details and broader in a city, and just as obviously doesn’t mind getting bruised and dinged up
zeitgeist of his subjects and their contexts. Like other photographers who in the name of a good skate. His pale skin and dark, watery eyes bespeak
straddle the line between diary and documentary, such as Ed Templeton a depth of consciousness belied by his strut and smirky humour and the
and Larry Clark, Marcopoulos is drawn to portrayals of youth culture’s scars and other evidence of his carelessness, but the pantheon (or rogues’
mainly urban edgy lifestyle. Templeton famously photographed young gallery) of hovering faces, the array of hefty boards pushing poses and
skateboarders and cigarette smokers, and Marcopoulos himself is drawn stares, is hard to resist. The young man’s eyes are also the focal point of
to the physically damaging practice of skateboarding and the vibrant, the video Eero Loop (2004), in which he appears to have had a nasty fall
grimy subculture that attends it. His subjects, mainly the bruised faces and but not to really mind. His angelic face and mottled skin makes a painterly
legs belonging to skinny white kids having hard-knock fun on city streets, texture when projected large against the bare wall, in full colour. By the
are run through the artist’s particular filter of poetic interpretation. Using time the boy appears again in the newest video piece, Dressage (2007),
extreme close-ups, humour, diffusion through reproduction deterioration he is a bit more of a cocky teen, reciting dialogue from the film Gladiator
and scale, sparse colour and dramatic cropping, Marcopoulos drapes (2000) with mock gravitas and hammy delivery. Legitimately funny, this
images of what might otherwise be brutal, visceral depictions of injury one nevertheless disturbs the otherwise meditative, almost churchlike
and isolation in a moiré of romanticised adolescence, rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the installation. Marcopoulos’s approach relies for its
boyhood, art history and urban cheek, creating something larger than the effectiveness on the slow bubbling up of its more unsettling aspects from
sum of its parts. under a surface of elegance and gauziness, which the latest DVD pierces.
The exhibition comprises roughly a dozen images, monumental When it’s turned off, the dust settles and the serene contemplation of
black-and-white photocopies simply tacked to boards resting on the floor adolescent exuberance resumes. Shana Nys Dambrot
117 ArTreview
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