Tom Marioni
Exhibition Projects:
Studio Chester Springs, 2000
(performance and artifact, colored pencil on paper, 3' x 6')
Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players,1997
(performance)
The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art,
2000, after 1970
(performance)
An Aid to Communication #2, 2000, after 1970
(beer bottles, wood shelf, 5' x 8' x 4'")
Drum Brush Drawing, 2000, after 1972 (made in performance)
On Saturday evening at dusk, Tom Marioni performed Studio Chester Springs at the village's historic Diamond Spring.
While a harpist played inside the small springhouse, her backlit form and the harp's projected onto
a large paper covering the springhouse door, Marioni drew on the paper, filling in parts of the shadowed
forms. His pencil moving across the paper (amplified to function as a drumlike surface) created a light,
scratchy undertone accompanying the harp's more harmonious sounds. Each of the elements: dusk, sound,
shadow, even smoke rising from a cigar held by the artist, participated in a kind of anthology of
evanescent effects. The nearly abstract drawing he created during the event, and exhibited during
the rest of Reenactment/Rapprochement, was more freestanding artifact than a literal record
of what happened. Studio Chester Springs is one of a number of versions of Marioni's Studio series,
each created anew in different locations. It is most similar to Studio Kyoto, performed with a woman
koto player who played inside a small Shinto shrine. On Sunday afternoon, Marioni led a group of volunteers
in his Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players, a process-performance piece in which the chorus of
bottle-blown notes grew progressively lower as the bottles' contents were consumed.
Marioni's drum-brush-on-paper accompaniment also created a drawing and "record" of the event.
This, and a free-form improvisation on unusual instruments, made up Marioni's recreation of his
1970 conceptual artwork, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.
Since his first performance piece, sketching a nude model in a San Francisco night club in 1967,
Tom Marioni has created a distinctive body of work, reflecting a personal confluence of conceptual,
sculptural and performance art. His own Museum of Conceptual Art (1970-1984) encouraged many other artists.
Since curating a sound-art show in 1970, his own work has often incorporated sound, both in performance
and gallery settings; his Art Orchestra brought together thirteen San Francisco artists playing invented
instruments. His Studio series, of which Studio Chester Springs is a part, has been performed
in Berkeley, Chicago, Berlin, Basel, Bern, Kyoto and other cities. Marioni has had solo exhibitions in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Warsaw, Basel, Osaka and elsewhere, and most recently at Margarete
Roeder Gallery in New York (2000).