Ari Marcopoulos: Sumo Judo
Opening: 05/16/24 5–7PM
As an artist most renowned for his pictures of graffiti and skateboarding, in which he brings a sensitivity and skill that parallels the visual flair and technical ingenuity of these pursuits, Ari Marcopoulos has been especially drawn to photogenic subjects, which is to say subjects that in one way or another preconceive — or to invoke a categorically photographic term, previsualize — the possibility of their being photographed. This aspect of Marcopoulos’s practice is most apparent in his sustained engagement with the genre of portraiture, where he has recorded the working lives of people who in one way or another exist in the public eye, whether they are artists, musicians, or those who perform what Eugène Atget would have called the “petits métiers” or small jobs of the modern world. Marcopoulos’s photogenic perspicacity is apparent in the series of portraits in this book which were made during two trips to Tokyo and Kyoto in 2013 and 2023 respectively. (Marcopoulos has been a frequent traveler to Japan since the 1990s.) Despite the sitters’ youth and the informality of the situation in which they are photographed, each figure meets the camera’s gaze with a sense of self-assurance and openness that reflects the quickly gained trust between the photographer and subject and, more generally, a familiarity with being viewed common to athletes and performers.
Just as both judo and sumo wrestling involve the strategic transfer of energy from one person to another, Ari Marcopoulos’s photographs exhibit a similar reciprocal dynamic, a generous understanding of creativity and technique in which the distinction between practicing and performance is not important and vision, intelligence, and skill can be found far beyond conventional boundaries policed by words like art or even image.
Excerpted from the text by Robert Slifkin, (Dir of History of Fine Arts at NYU) published in the book, Sumo Judo (Dashwood Books / Roma Publications, 2024), that accompanies the exhibition.
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