Ari Marcopoulos & Joe McPhee

On August 22, 2021, artist Ari Marcopolous and musician and poet Joe McPhee met at LAXART to collaborate on Alone Together, a private performance (by McPhee) and film (by Marcopoulos) that comprise this exhibition.

LAXART occupies the former home of Radio Recorders, a legendary recording studio through which passed a veritable Who's Who of music legends, from Elvis Presley to Duke Ellington. Amongst these legends was saxophonist Charlie Parker. 2020 was the centennial of Parker's birth. To mark both that occasion and the seminal recordings he made on the site of LAXART, we commissioned Marcopoulos and McPhee to make a new film dedicated to this giant of jazz, and, in a deeper way, to reflect on a year of grief and separation.

Joe McPhee—who was born in Miami, Florida in1939, and lives and works in New York—is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, a player of tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, the trumpet, flugelhorn and valve trombone. He began playing trumpet when he was eight, before learning other instruments. He played in various high school and then military bands before starting his recording career. His first recording came in 1969, when he appeared on the Clifford Thornton album Freedom and Unity. McPhee taught himself saxophone at the age of 32 after experiencing the music of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Ornette Coleman. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, McPhee lectured on jazz music at Vassar College. In 1981, McPhee met composer, accordionist, performer, and educator Pauline Oliveros, whose theories of “deep listening” strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. He was also inspired by Edward de Bono’s book Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity in developing his own “sideways thinking” approach to improvisation.

McPhee has not yet signed with any major label in his native United States, and was possibly better known throughout Europe than his native country until the 1990s. With a career spanning over 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forging new connections while reaching for music’s outer limits.

Ari Marcopoulos—who was born in Amsterdam in 1957 and moved to New York City in 1980—is an artist, filmmaker, and photographer currently living and working in New York. He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, at Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Berkeley Art Museum in California; MoMA PS1, New York; galerie frank elbaz, Paris; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; and Alleged Gallery, New York, among other locations.

Marcopoulos participated in two Whitney Biennials (in 2008 and 2010), and his photographs are in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Detroit Institute of Arts. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Interview, Paper, Blind Spot, Transworld Snowboarding, and Snowboarder. His films include the documentary Larry Wright and Key to the Riddle, a documentary on the artist Forrest Bess. Among Marcopoulos’s many books are Epiphany: Gucci (Idea, 2016), Not Yet (Rizzoli, 2016), Rome–Malibu (Roma, 2016), Fumes (Karma, 2015), Out to Lunch (Roth, 2012), Directory (Nieves/Rizzoli, 2011), Out and About (Damiani, 2005), Kids Born out of Fire (Perks and Mini, 2004), Pass the Mic: Beastie Boys 1991–1996 (powerHouse, 2001), and Transitions and Exits (powerHouse, 2000).

Generous support provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.