Tom Marioni, 5/18/09, "Beer, Art, and Philosophy"

Considering himself to be one of the co-founders of Conceptual Art as well as the founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), Marioni certainly isn’t someone to take lightly, despite what one might think in the titles of his works. Many in the audience seemed to be drawn to his talk specifically for his work, entitled “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the ‘Highest form of Art’,” Marioni performs a musical piece that he carefully orchestrates in both the beginning and end, allowing the audience to watch the interactions of the beer drinkers as well as listen to the differing tones and sounds made by the slowly emptying beer bottles. Marioni was very specific in his description that his performance was a musical piece rather than sound-art because of the work he had put into composing the piece.

Marioni discussed briefly how he grew up in a Catholic family, and how the ideas involving “relics, residues, and records” inspired him in his future work as well as his spiritual journeys within the studies of Zen and calligraphy. He was especially interested in the idea of calligraphy’s symbols looking like as well as the act of creating them being similar to the object that the symbol represents, and how in English we don’t have that kind of luxury.

Marioni hit upon intent several times within his lecture, especially when audience members asked him about how genuine his titles were and how some of his pieces came about. One performance in particular seemed to stand out to prove his point. He had a working janitor, an actor, a dancer, and an artist (specifically a sculptor, himself) sweep the floor in his gallery. While these four people performed the same action and completed the same task, they completed it in completely different manners with completely different intentions because of their occupations. It is this reason exactly why Marioni wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times stating why he didn’t agree with the Guggenheim trying to recreate old performances from artists both dead and alive; by trying to recreate the experience in the first place, even though the artist who is recreating the piece is trying their best to keep the original artists intent in mind, they’re still doing a recreation of the original event, and will therefore not be able to give a pure performance of what originally occurred and rather will be “acting” the part of the original artist.

Marioni also spoke about his experience of living in San Francisco, and how it has shaped his future works. Marioni considers himself a sculptor who creates “artifacts” after the fact of his performances, including pieces such as “Tree, Drawing a Line as Far as I Can Reach,” (1972) in which he sits down on the floor of the museum and repeats the action of stretching up as far as he can reach for a specific amount of times, which he calls “out of body action drawings.” Specific physical actions, when armed with a pencil, lend a certain shape or overall image after the physical event is over. The idea of capturing the overall effect of a collection of repeated small temporal events in one piece was very interesting to me, almost a collective photograph of a single action.