White Room: Ari Marcopoulos

White Columns is pleased to present ‘Directory’, a new solo project by the New York-based artist Ari Marcopoulos. The exhibition consists of several hundred standard, black and white Xerox prints of images Marcopoulos shot between 2007 and 2010, and relates to his latest book ‘Directory’ (Nieves/Rizzoli) which will be launched at White Columns on April 15. In a text relating to the project Marcopoulos has said:

“Whether at home or traveling there is constant visual input. As an image-maker one is asked to make distinctions and decisions on what to extract. Having been involved in this practice for over 30 years, I started to try and free myself from even my own expectations. Looking at graffiti all over the world I appreciated the noise of graffiti. I did not look for anything in particular; I did not look for skill. I just accepted it as visual noise. For the last 3 years I captured what had previously passed in front of my eyes as something that was just there, the every day. The noise was for me like music. Of course I held on to some of my older habits as a portraitist or land(e)scapist. It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. At White Columns there is room for several hundred Xeroxes of photographs — extracts from the constant noise we witness as long as our eyes are open. The idea for the book started with a stack of black and white photocopies of my own images. The stack kept growing and it occurred to me the best way to make a book with them was to use the same printers that make telephone books. The images span the time period from 2007-2010. Think of the exhibition as the opening chapter of something potentially a hundred times bigger, something that keeps on growing.”

In a related project for Purple Magazine Marcopoulos presented the following quote from John Cage:

“When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, talking about his feelings or his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic outside my house, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I love the activity of sound. I don’t need sound to talk to me. I love sounds just as they are.” – John Cage

Ari Marcopoulos (b.1957) lives and works in New York. This is Marcopoulos’s first New York exhibition since his 2008 exhibition at the now defunct gallery The Project. Over the past two decades he has shown his work internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum (2009), the New Orleans Museum of Art (2008), and PS1, New York (2005.) His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the seminal 2004 travelling exhibition “Beautiful Losers.” Marcopoulos has published his work extensively with both established and independent presses. His latest book ‘Directory’ (Nieves/Rizzoli), a 1,200-page telephone-directory format publication, will be launched at White Columns on Friday, April 15.