Ari Marcopoulos

Ari Marcopoulos:

My father was an airline pilot. He was Greek, although he was born in Egypt, and he moved to the Netherlands. He flew for a Persian airline, a Syrian airline and then for KLM. He met my mum who was a model and stayed in Holland. I grew up there as an outsider. I didn’t grow up in a household where everyone was expected to become an artist.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I think through music and cinema and then starting to go to Amsterdam’s Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum. The first exhibition I saw was either James Turrell or Nam June Paik, who are both quite shocking artists to see as a young person whose first impressions of art are more classical works. Then I saw an exhibition by Robert Rauschenberg which dealt with the Saturn rockets, the space programme before the moon landing. I was also interested in space and astronauts, and that’s how I became interested in art.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I don’t think I had any kind of ambition, just leave the Netherlands [laughing], to go somewhere else! My uncle lived in New York and I’d visited him by myself when I was 12 years old and 15. I loved New York City – the skyscrapers, the large buildings – and I was into basketball and baseball. In the Netherlands at that time, you had two TV channels that ran from 7 pm to 11 pm and in New York it felt like a hundred TV channels. When I was 22, I felt I should go to New York for three to six months and see what was happening over there. But I stayed and am still there.

Ari Marcopoulos:

What I learnt from Warhol, who took so many pictures of everything, is that anything is worth documenting. I met a lot of people while I was in that milieu and other people working for him became my friends. From Irving Penn, I learnt a lot of technical things about light and composition and that I didn’t want to take pictures like Irving Penn.

Ari Marcopoulos:

My first fascination for skateboarding came when I moved with my family to Rio de Janeiro when I was about 17 years old. We went there twice for a three-month period. I was really fascinated by the beach life and the surfing, and the surfers were all skateboarding. I remember buying a skateboard there – skateboards back then were thick wooden planks with clay wheels – and realizing it was very hard to skateboard with it on the cobbled stones of the Netherlands. In New York, I first photographed an early professional skateboarder in the ‘80s. Then in 1993, I was riding my bike past a spot called the Brooklyn Banks, under the Brooklyn Bridge, where skateboarders can skate a large transition, come up and land. I was always interested in how skateboarders interpret contemporary architecture as something with which to work with their bodies, and how they’re a group of people connected by a common interest. I would go around with them and see how they’d pick places to use as part of their practice.

Ari Marcopoulos:

It was all shot between 1993 and 1995. When I moved studios in 2017 or 2018, I found this brown bag and it had all these Super 8 cassettes inside that had been exposed. I didn’t remember what they were. But I knew they were old because I hadn’t had my Super 8 camera around for at least 25 years. I thought about discarding it but then decided to process and scan it. I saw that it was all this skate footage and thought it was like a weird archaeological find. I’m doing a book along with the exhibition which has some of the Super 8 video stills in it.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I was quite taken with the raw quality, not in any kind of nostalgic way but in an interpretative and physical way of how it looks. It’s quite beautiful.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I found the parts that I thought were usable and tried to create a rhythm and make it look kinetic. I always work in quite an experimental way when I’m editing. There are some shots of Beck’s first concert in New York which I remember going to but don’t remember filming, so that was a nice surprise. There’s a clip of my son when he was a little baby. And there’s a snowstorm with this Tropicana Florida orange juice truck driving through the frame that I filmed out of my window in a whole other period but I liked the footage.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I don’t especially care for the Olympic Games, although I’ll watch the track and field and the basketball games. I used to be a track and field athlete. But I don’t look at skateboarding as a competitive sport. In the Olympic Games, people are judging it and I feel that the spirit of skateboarding is not about that. If you go out on a session and see someone landing a trick after falling 10 or 20 times, the excitement by everyone watching is amazing. Very often, when somebody is trying something, nobody else will skate. People sit, watch and wait in order to help this person channel all their energy. That’s the beauty of it.

Ari Marcopoulos:

It seems an apt word for this time: beware of what you say, but also be aware of what you hear and see, and pay attention visually and mentally. For me, it definitely has a double meaning: beware and be aware.

Ari Marcopoulos:

So this is crazy, right? They acquired my film and gave me carte blanche to look into their collection of more than 15,000 works and select some to combine with my work. Choosing from 15,000 artworks is like editing a manuscript of 80,000 words down to 3,000! I started randomly looking at the collection online. The first work that I became interested in is a bar by Daniel Turner which I thought a skater would like to grind on. There’s a word piece, Life Fly Lifes Flies (1997), by Bruce Nauman who is one of my idols. They’d never shown it and it took them a while to find it in their storage. Then I started finding different artists that I’d never heard of.

Ari Marcopoulos:

I wanted to make a gesture that interferes with the traditional space of the gallery. I woke up one morning and thought that I wanted to make an armature and hang this series of portraits on it. I quickly sketched the footing of how it’s supported and the angle. The idea is that there are 10 photographs of friends, five on each side, hanging from a piece of wood as if they’re floating in space.

Ari Marcopoulos:

Well, I hope that it will engage them and bring the outside inside. I have photographed there already and will be photographing some of my friends who skateboard this time around as well.