Ari Marcopoulos: Zines
Ari Marcopoulos
Aperture
English
Essay by Maggie Nelson.
Softcover
336 pages
228 x 222 mm
2023
ISBN 9781597115551
Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. This project collects in one volume for the first time a selection of zines by Marcopoulos, many never before released, providing a unique insight and overview into an essential part of this influential artist’s daily practice. Often self-published or created in collaboration with boutique and independent publishers like ROMA, Dashwood Books, and PPP Editions, these informal, DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbook, diary, installation space, and a means of processing Marcopoulos’s daily practice of photographing his life, his family, his neighbourhood, and the rarified cultural milieu in which he operates.
This collection showcases an impressive array of printed zines, exploring each as an artistic object through an engaging layout. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, key zines are featured-including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zines-and punctuated by individual images presented full scale. An interview with Hamza Walker underscores the role of zines as an essential part of Marcopoulos’s artistic practice, emphasizing the personal, diaristic element within the work, while an essay from Maggie Nelson meditates on the work’s position within a wider social and cultural context.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/ari-marcopoulos-zines-maggie-nelson?_pos=2&_sid=d5d850a38&_ss=r)
About the Artist
A photographer and filmmaker who gravitates toward elusive subcultures, Ari Marcopoulos photographs objects and cultures that pique his interest, such as sneakers with wide laces from New York’s 1980s hip-hop scene. Creating images with anthropological and ethnographic undertones, Marcopoulos has said that most of his photographs arise “through accidents or circumstances that just happen to present themselves.” Rather than romanticise his subjects, he depicts them in a straightforward manner that reveals their beauty and anxieties. Working as an assistant to Andy Warhol after emigrating to the United States, Marcopoulos favours analog film for its slowness and for the time it asks of the viewer. Most recently, he has begun to explore high-contrast landscape photography that conjures a vague and fleeting sense of familiarity.
arimarcopoulos.net
(source: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ari-marcopoulos-untitled-26)
About the Contributor
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry.
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Nelson)
About the Magazine
Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, is a magazine and photography organisation. Created in 1952 by photographers and writers as ‘common ground for the advancement of photography,’ Aperture today is a multi-platform publisher and center for the photo community. From their base in New York, we produce, publish, and present a program of photography projects, locally and internationally.
aperture.org
(source: https://aperture.org/about/)
