within arm's reach

I am completely obsessed with photographer Ari Marcopoulos right now, whose mid-career retrospective currently up at the Berkeley Art Museum is pure exhilaration.  Dutch by birth, Marcopoulos moved to New York in the late '70s and assisted the likes of Andy Warhol and Irving Penn at the same time that he began doing his own street photography, approaching his subjects with an emotional honesty that rivals Robert Frank.  He also became absorbed in the NYC art and music scenes, photographing everyone from John Cage to Public Enemy to Robert Mapplethorpe, and not long after started capturing skaters and other adrenaline junkies (and their resulting injuries).  Marcopoulos is also an accomplished videographer, and I dare you not to get a contact high from his piece Claremont during which Noah Sakamoto and Patrick Rizzo bomb on skateboards down a twisty road in the Berkeley hills, passing a camera back and forth between them.  These days Marcopoulos lives in Sonoma with his wife and two sons Cairo and Ethan, and many of his recent images such as the one of Cairo pictured here document his home life.  Marcopoulos is the master of a variety of film techniques, but his Xerox prints are the ones that totally destroy me; something about the graininess of the texture makes them especially poignant in their beauty and ephemerality.  He also loves a lot of the same music I do.  When I was in Spain I picked up a copy of apartamento magazine just for his photos of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore at home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the BAM exhibition features his video of an extended noise jam between the couple captured during that same visit (and I totally spotted him a couple weeks ago at SY's Fillmore show).  Marcopoulos was also recently selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and as cranky as I am at how NYC-centric the list is this go-round I am very happy he is one of the few California artists (and the lone Bay Area representative) who will be shown.