One Time Over Another: Tom Marioni's Conceptual Art

Early California performance allied itself very closely with life and there is a non-artful vigor in much of the best work. There was only a thin membrane separating the life of the performance from that of the artist and of his or her audience of close friends; and dividing the art from the moods, tastes and actions of the decade.

Moira Roth, PAJ 12 (1980)

Art (Not Life)

Defining his conceptual practice as "[i]dea oriented situations not directed at the production of static objects,"¹ Tom Marioni's work poses questions about where and when the "presence" of his artwork is constructed and perceived. Here, and while engaging with media including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, the narratives Marioni sets around his individual works consistently emphasize processes that precede or surround his presentation of objects, installations, events, and actions. Articulating the different times—and tenses—in which his work occurs, Marioni's approach casts a contradiction and a quandary over his frequent exhibition of prints, objects, and the staging of performances and events. Reflecting on this in an extensive interview with Robin White published as an issue of View in 1978,² Marioni concluded that, with regard to the inclusion of process "as a direct element" in his work: "There is something that results. The end isn't the art, but it has a history and that history gives it power." In this approach, Marioni's work directly challenges the viewer's encounter with a singular artwork, re-positioning objects and events as cyphers of activities now ended, and as provocations to a thinking of his processes, actions, and themes.

Questions around both the time and tense of Marioni's work are foregrounded in his earliest elaborations of conceptual art. In his first photographic work in relation to actions such as One Second Sculpture (1969) as well as the explicitly live works that followed, Marioni's presentations challenged the viewer's ability to configure his work as individual and bounded "performances," while his display of objects invariably served to report earlier acts, or other times and places. In this context, too, and over time, specific occasions or aspects of Marioni's work have come to be defined as passages between forms and events, rather than discrete moments. The image of One Second Sculpture thus not only "reports" Marioni's action, but has been evolved through implicitly recursive forms, re-emerging as print images (of the photograph) and object-displays (of the steel tape) and so as a network of points of reference. Marioni's most well-known installation and "social work," The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970), finds its continuance in his Free Beer (1973-74) and Café Society (1976-84) comprising of invitations to a "salo(o)n" event every Wednesday, and held latterly in Breen's Bar immediately below the spaces Marioni rented over the same period for his Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), which he has articulated as itself a "social" work. For those joining the Wednesday events, Marioni's rules for invitation and behavior at once shaped the tenor of each occasion, while inviting an association with his artworks in an implicit layering and structural history of events that have subsequently extended beyond MOCA itself. Following MOCA's closure in 1984, Marioni continued Café Society as the Academy of MOCA at various locations until 1990, as Archives of MOCA at his studio on Hawthorne Street until 1992 and subsequently as Café Wednesday, in which form it remains. Within this process, too, Marioni has periodically foregrounded and formalized this layering of places and events by presenting specific works that articulate these histories, including in 1979 The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art comprising "an installation with free beer" that implied the occupation of one "place" by another. Across these occasions as a whole, and in their recurrence and variation, Marioni purposefully defers attention to the margins or periphery of a conventional staged event, and toward that which occurs mutually within it, precedes it, or continues...