 So thanks so much for coming today. My name is Nicky Waremeister, and I'm a librarian in the Art, Music, and Recreation Department. And at the main library here up on the fourth floor, make a visit. It is my pleasure to present today's program with artist Tom Marioni and guest speaker Mark Van Proyen. Tom is the founder of the Museum of Conceptual Art from 1970 until 1984. Vision Magazine in conjunction with Crown Point Press from the years 1975 through 1981, and the Art Orchestra, which had an event in 1990, culminating the event in 1997. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1981. And as the creator of the ongoing social artwork, the art of drinking beer with friends, is the highest form of art. First down at the Oakland Museum in 1970, his work can be found in museum collections throughout the United States and Europe. We'll be starting today's program with a filmed interview that was conducted by curator Karen Nelson with Tom as part of a 1999 Meaning and Message exhibition at the Oakland Museum. And then following today's video screen, there will be a short Q&A session between Tom and artist writer Mark Van Proyen. We will be concluding today's program by opening it up to the audience for any questions or comments that you all might want to put out there. So thank you and enjoy. But before we begin the last thing, just silence any of your devices before we begin the program. Thanks very much. I'm Karen Nelson. I'm here with Karen Tsutumoto. And we're filming Tom Marioni for an exhibition called Meaning and Message today as August 9, 1999. And I'd like to thank you for agreeing to interview. You're welcome. On videotape. One of the things that we'd like to do is just to get to know a little bit more about you and sort of your process of becoming an artist. And I'm wondering, what made you become interested in art? When I was in the sixth grade, our class went to the new modern hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio. And there was a mural by Miro in this restaurant in this Terras Plaza hotel. And I saw that and I thought, I want to do that because this guy's really getting away with something. And that was the beginning of my, that was my first experience with modern art. Great, thank you. And then did you study art when you were in college? I went to art school and a museum school in Cincinnati. Art Academy. And then I moved to San Francisco in 1959. And 10 years later, I found my own style. It took me 10 years to become integrated into this community because it's very, very closed. And then was that the time in 1969? Was that the time that you'd founded the Museum of the Conceptual Art? That was 1970. But in 1968, I got a job as curator of the Richmond Art Center. And that led to me founding my own museum because of my experience as a curator. And I did a lot of adventurous shows at the Richmond Art Center and ended up leaving in 1971 after I had already started the mocha. And then it was during the time when you were at the Richmond Art Center that you were making some artworks under the name of Alan Fish? Right, there was a conflict between being an artist and a curator. So I created a fictitious artist. And under the name Alan Fish, I didn't work for three years, including the act of drinking beer with friends as the highest form of art at the Oakland Museum in 1970. And then when you founded the Museum of Conceptual Art, what was your mission or what were the kind of things that you were looking to do with that museum? Well, there was no such term as alternative art space in 1970. And it was later known as an alternative art space. But I founded it as an alternative to what already existed. There was no situation for me or my friends to show this experimental new art, which was a kind of process art, performance art, all the kinds of things that conceptual artists do, which are outside of painting and sculpture. Could you give us a definition of conceptual art? My definition of conceptual art, idea-oriented situations, not directed at the production of static objects. That was my definition in 1970. And idea-oriented situations, well, that's obvious. But situations means outside of static art, it could mean running for political office as an art project. And today, I define conceptual art as an artist not locked into any one medium or not defined by a medium, the way a ceramic artist as a painter is. Most artists are defined by the medium they work in. Conceptual artists are free to work in any medium or any material. They start with an idea and then realize the idea and whatever is the appropriate best medium for the idea. So it's idea art, basically. And not directed at the production of static objects means not making things as ends in themselves. So in other words, conceptual artists can work with objects, but many times they're found objects. Or sometimes it's an object that has a history. So if I drink beer with my friends as an art event, the empty bottles afterwards sometimes are saved on a shelf. And that becomes an object with a history. So it's not an object that I fabricated, but then it becomes an object of art that was used and had a use, in other words. Is it like a document, then, of the performance? I mean, is it important that there be things at the end? Well, I used to call things like that relics. I grew up as a Catholic, and the idea of a relic is like a piece of something, an actual piece of something. Yes, the piece that you mentioned, the Art of Studio, in 1973, after I was no longer Alan Fish, because I didn't have to be Alan Fish, after I left the Richmond Art Center and I was no longer a curator, in other words, a curator working for somebody else. I was kind of an artist curator running my own situation. And the Museum of Conceptual Art, I didn't consider the art by other artists, other artists did there as my art, but I considered the social activities, like drinking beer with friends, and the idea of the museum as my art, because the museum had its own, it's like a specialized sculpture action museum, and it had its own unique philosophy. So in 1973, and on other occasions, I sometimes organized shows, and since I was the director, I would not usually put myself in the same shows, except when I was doing it as Alan Fish. In this case, I invited one of nine artists who was a craftsman, a friend of mine, to create a work that would be seen as his work, but in reality it was my work, because I was the architect of it, or the author of it. And he executed the work. And so he, in the one old back room of Mocha, he spent the evening in the show called All Night Sculptures, where all the artists did works that existed for that nighttime viewing time, from sunset to sunrise the next day. Back on the old workbench, which was there before I moved into the museum, the old workbench was there when it was a printing company for 50 years before I moved in. So I was the second tenant in the space. I more or less left the space the way I found it. And different artists added to the history of the space by leaving some kind of residue behind, which then became part of the permanent collection in the museum. So everything about the museum was unique in that the collection was even made up of relics and residues and records. Anyway, this show, this craftsman, Frank humans, made a mold from a woman model. It took all night to do it, first her back and then her front, and then he made a casting of it in plaster. So the whole back room turned into what looked like the traditional artist's studio. And then the bust was placed on the bench with the shelves behind it, as you'll see it in the Oakland Museum. And it stayed there for 10 years about, and then it was shown in the 100 years of California sculpture at the Oakland Museum, sometime in the early 80s. So then in the early 80s, I took it from my Museum of Conceptual Art and exhibited it in the 100 years of California sculpture at the Oakland Museum. And in a room that you built, which was the same dimensions of my room, but it didn't have all of the same walls. I didn't try to create any faux finishes or anything. I just installed the object, the shelf with the plaster bust in a space that was the same dimensions as the one in Milka. So the idea was that it created the mood of the classic artist's studio. So it was like the classic artist's studio brought up to date and made into an installation piece. And so it didn't bother you then to change it from one environment to another. That seemed like it was a... Well, I knew someday that the building, the condemned building that I was in would be torn down and I knew that I would take that piece with me, you know, out of the space. But for the time being, it was part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Conceptual Art. The other piece that we have in the Meaning and Message show is the one called Tree Drawing a Line as far as I can reach. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about making with that piece. Right. The Drawing a Line as far as I can reach from 1972 was done at the Reese Pallet Gallery in San Francisco in a solo show I had where I lived in the gallery for one week and I made works, mostly drawings, based on the definition of the creation of the world as it is in the Bible in the Old Testament. In the first page. And in the Bible it says that God created different things on different days. So on the days that it said he made light and then vegetation and then trees and birds and water and then Adam and Eve, like that. And that, more or less in the correct order, according to evolution, the day that... The Sunday was a... I was in the gallery in Darkness. Monday I had my first and only LSD experience so I could see light in a new way while I was living in the gallery. And then on Tuesday, which would have been the third day, is when I used up a pencil that was made from a tree to make a picture of a tree. And I didn't make a picture of a tree necessarily the way a tree looks. I imitated the way a tree grows. So in a way I was like doing yoga and making a drawing at the same time because it's about the measurement of my reach. So it's like a stretching exercise that makes a drawing at the same time. So as I drew the line from the bottom to the top in sitting on the floor with the paper blow to the floor, it was brown wrapping paper. I kept resharpening the pencil until I made many thousands of lines until I used up the entire pencil. So there's one whole pencil used to make that drawing. So that drawing suggests a tree, but it's not a pictorial tree because I wasn't consciously making a picture of a tree. I was making a record, maybe a record of how a tree grows. Then on the day that there were birds, I did a piece called Running and Jumping While Trying to Fly. I'm not sure that's the correct title but it's something like that. And I ran across the gallery with another piece of brown wrapping paper horizontal on the wall instead of vertical. It was high up on the wall and I ran around the gallery and kind of in a circle and every time I approached the paper I leapt like I was jumping over a table or something and drew a line. So this became a record of flight. So I was recording my attempt at flight by making a mark every time I leapt through the air and in the end I had a drawing which resembled the wing of a bird. So again it was not a picture of a bird it ended up resembling a bird because the action imitated the flight of a bird. And then I did Allen Fish Drinks Steamed Beer. I did a commercial for the Anchor Steamed Beer Company. On the day there were fishes and Fritz Maytag of the Anchor Beer Company heard about it and on the last day the day that the Bible said God rested that was the day of celebration and that's when Fritz Maytag showed up with seven cases of Anchor Steamed Beer for the reception at the end of the week and I lived in a room in the gallery that I would sleep in during the day and make the works in the gallery. So in a way it was like performance pieces whoever happened to be in the gallery at the time could see me making the line drawing or jumping drawing or the other works. When I was reading a little bit of that piece I think you wrote a comment to a very important period in your work. Yeah, what I learned, it's been so long. What I learned about that piece the creation of seven day performance it was called, 1972. It was the beginning of my process drawings and after that in that same year I started making drum brush drawings which were also imitating the flight of birds in the way birds fly and not how a bird looks and coincidentally they end up looking like birds or shadows of birds and I started doing these drum brush drawings. Again these were like tracings from rubbings with brushes like jazz drum resues steel wire brushes it was kind of a trance drumming really. Starting in 72 I still do them today but not as often. I used to do them every morning just like somebody would do exercising and that ended up being very important to my work this drumming drawing because it represents images that I use in my work a lot are trees and birds but they're not pictorial trees and birds but they are at their roots about flying and growing. So the drum brush drawings then were inspired by the automatic writings of the surrealists so they were not consciously pictorial but they ended up making a pictorial record of the sound activity and they were maybe too complicated for me to go into now because they have many over the years I learned many things about them and I think they changed only slightly the way handwriting changes as personality changes and things like that. Now you asked me about any kind of Asian influence in my work and there definitely is I think it's impossible not to have an Asian influence and live in California. One of the things that I found since I moved here from the Midwest was that there is an equal in San Francisco anyway to the European and Asian influence in the culture unlike New York and one of the things that I think many people in New York think is that California art is soft and weak because they don't understand the Asian influence in California art and in Los Angeles a lot of artists use light because it's a lot of sunshine and light has become the subject of California art which is never talked about in the East Coast is more like an Italian thing in a way the Italians understand California art very well and as far as the Zen influence I never read any books on Zen I don't really know anything about Zen but I was having a conversation recently with some friends and they were talking about Zen art and how there are some of that and some of the things I've done I didn't know anything about Zen and then we were talking about poetry and I said, well, there once was a man from Nantucket and you know the rest and the other guy said, that's Zen so now I know what Zen is anyway, I made a lot of drawings that are influenced by calligraphy by Chinese calligraphy my drawing aligned as far as I can reach it means stick in Chinese so it's actually a word and in the 80s I did take lessons from a Chinese teacher and learned to write some Chinese characters and I started using a feather to write some Chinese characters that I was interested in writing like the word heart or art or to speak certain words that I liked that looked like what they said and in a way it's like the drum brushes are musicians' tools that I make a picture with the feather is traditionally a writer's tool that I make pictures with and I call it feather writing because I use the back side of the feather the soft side of the feather and that's what I did in the 80s so I'm as much a graphic artist as I am a sculptor but I see the world as a sculptor from the point of view of a sculptor and being a conceptual artist just means that I that I approach it from a sculptor's point of view which I think most conceptual artists come from sculpture rather than painting or other disciplines there are certain mediums that have become standard conceptual artist mediums and they include video performance language art systems art like Solowit language art like Lawrence Weiner and action art which is experiential like performance art and performance art which I don't do very much anymore but I did in the 70s a lot I was known as a performance artist in those days is different from theater because the artist is not playing a role the artist is being himself the artist is manipulating material not the audience as it is in theater and the action is directed at the material the artist is manipulating rather than at the audience like it is in theater so in the case of performance art in its pure form which I consider I'm part of the first generation performance artist who used it as a kind of sculptural way is more like a demonstration or a ritual than an acting out of something and it's not about storytelling or illusion which are traditional theater ideas so I make an action which may sometimes produce as a sound I was also known as a sound artist like the drumming pieces where I'm making a picture and a sound kind of marriage of art and music at the same time and so that's also in a way related to calligraphy In 1969 I made a work called One Second Sculpture where I threw up in the inside of a metal tape measure and it was very prophetic for me because it included many of the elements that I used in my work after that because it was a sculpture that performed itself that made a sound that existed for a period of time, one second and then made a calligraphic drawing in space while it was opening up itself Well in 1979 I wrote a manifesto about this idea and one of the things I said was that ten years ago it was important to make a break from the object and now some artists in my generation have returned to the object not as an end in itself but as a material to explain a function like the empty beer bottle does Well I think I organized the first some of the first, maybe the first conceptual art shows in the Bay Area at the Richmond Art Center The first serious show I did there was in 1969 was called Invisible Painting and Sculpture and then I did another show that same year called The Return of Abstract Expressionism and this was instead of a painting show it was a sculpture show about earth art, process art and anti-farm sculpture and this show was about materials in a natural state and process of changing materials in the gallery and I did California Girls in 1971 which was one of the first feminist art shows in the country color is subject matter in sculpture sculpture about color and then at Mocha which is my museum of conceptual art I did mostly theme shows very few solo shows except for Dennis Oppenheim Terry Fox and Vito Oconchi but I did many group shows where artists were seen for the first time in the Bay Area like Vito Oconchi for instance and I did Sound Sculpture As which was the first show well the second show one of the first shows at Mocha where artists made actions that produced sounds and then that was one of the first sound art shows anywhere maybe the first one and it became a movement of sound art that's returned now in the 90s a lot of sound artists now doing things like sound as material sound for its own sake like art for art sake sound for sound sake when people most people when they go to look at art they want to be led by the hand and many times people say well if you don't explain your work to me how am I supposed to know what it's all about and I say well there are clues there it's a mystery and I'm giving you some clues and if you think about it a minute maybe you can figure it out from the clues and I shoot for the mood and if somebody gets the mood then I figure they got most of it well when somebody goes to the opera and they don't speak Italian and it's an Italian opera they can enjoy the opera but they don't get as much from it as somebody who knows what the words are painting you know and it's like that in everything when I look through a microscope I see an abstract expression as painting but maybe the scientist sees a cure for cancer so sometimes when people go into a gallery and they look at art they don't know what they're looking at they might dismiss it because they can say there's nothing there so when they come to look at my work it's the same problem people look at Jackson Pollock's paintings they don't know maybe they don't know the whole process of it so they don't get as much from it the more you know the more you get the reason for this artist's studio piece to be displayed the way it is is the reason it has a room around it is so that I can have control over its mood and lighting and I've made you might say I've made a piece of static sculpture but then I've designed the gallery that it goes in as well I try to have as much control over how my work is seen as I can and I think any smart artist does even Rothko said he wanted his paintings only seen in low light although they don't always respect his wishes now that he's dead because he was after a mood as well Duchamp said that that the artist makes the artist makes 50% of the work and then the viewer interprets it and completes the work and does the other 50% of the work well the curators job is to interpret the art to the public so the artist makes the object sometimes but it's the curator in me that wants to over explain my work sometimes I can remove the mystery from the work by explaining it too much not leaving enough open to interpretation Nelson Rockefeller said he was a famous art collector as well that the nice thing about abstract artist you can see anything you want in it but that's sometimes a problem because many times people see things in the work that the artist doesn't want them to see or doesn't intend for them to see but you can't control that you can't control what people are going to see so it's the curators job to try to present the work the way the artist intended it what is the artist supposed to be doing well I have a definition for art art is anything done well and by well I mean great like corn on the cob cooked to the moment of perfection and that's something that everybody can understand I think so I also think that everybody is a potential artist but I don't think everybody is an artist so if people do whatever they do as though they were an artist then they can make art doesn't have to be made out of artist materials well I've often said San Francisco is a very closed art world and that's because how strong the San Francisco Art Institute was back in the 40's and the 50's established it as a second art center even in the 50's San Francisco after New York even before LA was an art center and so when I moved here I might as well have moved here from Europe or Mars because if you didn't go to the San Francisco Art Institute and you didn't work in a figurative or a funk figurative style and you'd work didn't have angst to it then you weren't part of the Bay Area style and that was closed because that's all that the support system was interested in back when I first moved here back in the I moved here in 59 so all during the 60's there was a kind of next generation of figurative art the funk artists were really figurative artists too and so when I started MOCA it was mostly made up of outsiders like myself, the conceptual artists but still carrying on the figurative tradition of the Bay Area because performance art was body art was figurative art really it just wasn't static and it just wasn't painted or objects, static objects about the figure and that even went on into the 80's with artists like Mark Pauline who does robotics things which is also figurative so the tradition of figurative art continues today in the Bay Area and the artist no longer has its stronghold the way it did in the past because it was such a important 100 year old institution so I knew that the only way I could break into the scene here was to start my own scene and so I started the Museum of Conceptual Art so that I could create my own support system and I started my own art magazine too it was called Vision in 1975 and produced art journals on California Eastern Europe, New York we went to an island in the Pacific and made recordings of artist talks called Word of Mouth and then the fifth issue was called Artist Photographs every time I wished that somebody would organize an exhibition that I would be invited to be in and it never happened I would do it myself because I also thought that a lot of people didn't take very much initiative in the Bay Area and many times there would be shows by Bay Area artists they were organized outside of the Bay Area usually Minneapolis you know like the first Wiley retrospective the first Tebow retrospective they weren't even organized here but they were Bay Area artists I can't even think of very many if any exhibitions of Bay Area artists that were organized here and then sent out to other places very few I can't think of any out there but I'm sure there have been some in more recent times and in the 60s the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art basically only collected Bay Area art so it was very provincial at that time so they have many works by Hudson Wiley Arneson and the funk artists of the 60s in their collection maybe 20-25 works by each of those artists I mean 25 each and then when we got into the 80s when art became more about money and the museum changed over then just the opposite happened they only collected art from New York and not any Bay Area art the end of the 60s I mean there were like routes to conceptual art like happenings in the 50s fluxes in the 60s but happenings were really an extension of theater fluxes was really an extension of poetry and music and conceptual art was an extension of sculpture and at the end of the 60s we were in a kind of moral time because of the Vietnam War the drug culture and particularly in the Bay Area all of these kind of social experiments were happening in the Bay Area free speech and so on later on then it became the gay scene and then cuisine and so on health consciousness all these things start in the Bay Area and then they get marketed in New York City and there's a lot of support for a very liberal community here for social experiments but not so much in the art world the art world is more or less pretty conservative in the Bay Area whereas the rest of the community is not as conservative so artists took at that time everywhere in the world a moral and a political stand an ecological position the earth artists you know Michael Heiser and Christo and everybody Oppenheim were all doing earth art and now Walter D. Maria who's from the Bay Area like Oppenheim filled a gallery with dirt in Germany in 1968 and with the message that said God has given us the earth and we have ignored it so it was like a moral and a political reason for making art it was political art Good afternoon my name is Ruth Miller and I am an instructor of humanities courses oh you're too kind at Diablo Valley College I want to transition from that taped recorded interview to a live exchange with Tom Marioni I don't think we can have enough opportunities to acknowledge and celebrate artists in our own Bay Area backyards so I want to thank the library for providing this venue so to lead that conversation I also want to invite Mark Vamporian to the stage so if Tom and Mark could make their way up to the table while they're doing that Tom has been introduced but I'll introduce Mark Mark Vamporian among many other things is an art writer and critic he has published in numerous art periodicals so numerous that I'm going to consult my notes here Art Week Art in America Art News Art Issues and Square Cylinder he's also pinned dozens of essay contributions for various galleries and institutions he also is a former professor long standing professor and only recently retired from the school formerly known as the San Francisco Art Institute that's the first time I've said that and I'm not happy about it that's a subject for perhaps another talk and another day but for today it is highly appropriate in any address of Tom Marioni's art much of which is performative and social that there be a live component and in that spirit following Mark's conversation with Tom I'm hoping you all might have some questions or comments of your own please welcome Mark Vamporian in conversation with the artist Tom Marioni weekend I know the weather is not that big a deal but it could have been so welcome here I had a list of questions there we go we get some volume that had written up in my in my mind in the last couple of days and pretty much the video answered most of them so I'm going to pick up from where the video left off and ask the question about the conservatism of the Bay Area in relationship to its identity or history of being a place of social experiment and so I'd like to ask Tom to elaborate a little bit on his remark about the conservatism of the Bay Area art world and maybe speculate as to why it is so conservative in the 60's there was no when it was the avant-garde there was no pop art in the museum later the fissures gave pop art to the museum much later and minimal art and then in the 70's when conceptual art was the avant-garde of the time the museum here only more in the last few years because conceptual art was an international movement it was in Japan it was in Europe and in the U.S. mostly and they had almost no European art except in the 80's and they started collecting the German artists which was the new wave and then so for instance Janus Cornelis and Joseph Boyce and Hans Haka the major conceptual artists and artists of the late 60's and early 70's only came into our collections here in more recent times you know when I had the show at the Richmond Art Center of invisible painting and sculpture I got a Larry Bell glass box which is in the Oakland Museum now it was the first time anybody had seen Larry Bell and that's only Southern California to San Francisco you know and so the first time Chris Burden was seen anywhere it was in San Francisco in my book and same with Bito Akanshi and Dennis Oppenheim and so it was like it was provincial basically and it almost still is you know it may be in a different way than it was then though different way yeah oh yes because the art world is also different so the provincialism would have to be equally different right right it's it's international I didn't know what international meant when the Yerba Buena Center started I was on a committee with the redevelopment agency to help figure out who was going to design it and everything and I was excited when they said it's going to be multicultural I didn't know what multicultural man I thought oh great we're going to have Kunsthalle's like in Europe you know but I found out later multicultural meant everybody but Europeans you know and then this goes back to maybe the 50's question you at the very beginning of the video you said something about breaking into the extremely insular berry art world was not so easy to do because you didn't have the bonafeeds of the San Francisco Art Institute how was that really like how did that manifest itself in your experience yeah it wasn't just the Art Institute it was also UC Davis and UC Davis Bill Wiley was the main influence of that and Wiley in his contemporaries he was exactly the same age as me they were you know like when the 70's came along and conceptual art came along which was more or less like a rejection of formalist art that generation felt threatened I think you know and they were kind of even hostile to me but later I mean Hudson Wiley became my best friends later you know you lived up in the same neck of the woods that they did in Marine County yes I did for a while and Wiley was very interested in Duchamp's work even though he was so there was a point of connection for you there and he was the teacher of Bruce Nauman and Howard Frieder who were two really great conceptual artists and then how did the kind of anxieties around the Vietnam War and also the 1968 election presidential election play into this shift in attitude that you articulated also in my invisible show at Richmond Art Center Wiley Hedrick at that time was doing a series he took all of his old paintings and painted them black and there was a painting in there of him that was like eight feet by sixteen feet long something like that enormous and you could see the it was black paint you could see the brush drugs were done this way when he was on a ladder you know then they went this way and then they went that way because he went like that to cover up his whole painting you know it was a political political statement you know about art so the Vietnam War and like I said in the video and the drug culture and anti-materialism because of pop art was all so commercial and so much about money and everything that it was a reaction against that so it goes every other decade where it goes back and forth you know. But Wiley was really the only artist who made a point of doing anti-Vietnam work I mean the black paintings were exhibited at one point where he had a show of them where they were all faced to the wall with turning their back on them and he had actually kind of played it and he also lived up in that neighborhood with Wiley. I used to play croquet with him in Forrest and Oles and Whitaker yeah. And then right around the mid-seventies there was something called the Manhattanization of San Francisco which was an initiative that came out of then Board of Supervisors and particularly the supervisor named Diane Feinstein who was our current senior senator and of course her husband Richard Blum the real estate developer how did the there seems to be that that was a point where San Francisco's identity became shifted away from being a kind of bohemian kind of alternative to Paris to some kind of like wannabe Manhattan type civic structure how did that impact your procedures and processes? Sort of like yuppies came after hippies in the 80s was when people were putting a lime in their beer and that became like a way that the yuppies drank beer and that always irritated me. So but it seemed to also that conceptual art found an opening at that time because it was reflective of the international movement that was going on in New York and actually also in Los Angeles and there was also an openness to art from other places were as previous to about say 1973 you know the Bay Area was a you know very insular place that just happened to have an international identity in part because Art Forum was publishing very briefly from the Bay Area. Yeah like I said earlier earlier that the it was an art center because of the Richard Diemenkorn generation you know and that was before the light artists and the plastic artists in LA came along in the 60s so in the 50s it was like that and well in a show at the Berkeley Museum during the time of the Vietnam War Terry Fox burned a lot of flowers in the garden outside the museum as a gesture against the bombing of Cambodia you know at that time so that was a anti-war performance kind of you know and what was the other part of that question? The interest in art outside of the Bay Area. Oh oh yeah well because Consumption Art was an international movement and before that the art always was centered in a place you know like in 100 and he was in Paris you know and after World War II it's all because of the war it all shifted to New York you know and then right now it's hard to say there's a center but there are other more than one center like Berlin for instance is an art center considered an art center now you know. And there have been different periods when different Europeans were singled out like there were the Italians you know that was the first the Germans and then the Italians and then so it's like California is always considered you know like the famous poster of California is seen from New York you know it's like out there where the cactuses are like that you know. The Saul Steinberg poster. Right the Saul Steinberg. Do you see like a resurgence of conceptual art taking place I know that for example this summer's document which is the first in many that I haven't been able to see started you know opened up with a conceptual curation where instead of having an artistic director they had a chain reaction curation system that tried to reopen up and elaborate on traditional major exhibition organization. Collectives. Collectives of collectives actually. And it's it was apparently divided up into different collectives it turns out there were a thousand artists and this new document and there was a lot of things like farms and social art like my drinking beer with friends in a way you know a kind of social art so it was it was like for instance Bonnie Shirk who had the place called the farm here if she was still alive would have been a perfect artist for this year's document. Yeah. Yeah. In other words document is essentially Burning Man but without the fund. Good. Good one. Yeah. Yeah. You know conceptual art came about in the 70s because the economy was bad it's like when Carter was president and the economy was bad then that's when nobody bought art because it didn't have any color basically you know and then it turned at the end of the 70s with all the artists like Schnabel and his generation you know so it goes back and forth like that you know. Right. Okay it's maybe you know time to ask if anybody in the audience would like to contribute a question to the conversation. Or complain. Or complain. Kind of anti-curatorial position being taken at this year's or that is underway at this year's document and I'm just I was just curious if you have thoughts about that since you have functions for a curator and an artist and it seems like the sentiment of a lot of these collectives at documentary was that the curators had undue influence or authority and they wanted art to be directly delivered from the artist. I'm just wondering if you have anything more to say about that. It's it was it was hard to be recognized. I should repeat the question. Go ahead. What Ruth was asking was you know follow up on what I said about the document issue and how the current document kind of dispensed with the role of the curator or the artistic director and created a situation where artists could deliver their work directly to the audience without curatorial intervention and that you know she was wondering if you had thoughts about that. I could do that because I became of Alan Fish for three years. I created a fictitious name in order to not be a conflict of interest you know. And when I did the return of abstract expressionism I put Alan Fish in that show because I needed another work on the floor. There were too many things up on the wall and it was you know basically a sculpture show but but the problem with with being a curator the thing I got recognized as a curator more than an artist. So it hurt somebody when the public wants to know you for one thing and it turns out in the end I'm just known for drinking beer with my friends and not all these other great works that I've done in my life you know. But that's the way it goes that's how it happens. Historical memory is hardly tends to be amnesiac in character. Right but the advantage for me was that being a curator and hanging shows led me to make installations and influence me hanging shows to make installations. Because it allowed you to think of the gallery as a kind of stretch essentially like the way that a painter thinks of a stretcher bar in a larger scale yeah. Outside the gallery reaches outside the gallery you know. John. Yeah well actually Lydia Mutale at the University of Santa Clara where Paul Kosz was teaching was inviting conceptual artists there based a lot on Paul Kosz's influence and sort of guiding her and so the first show one of the early shows was me and Terry Foxx and Paul Kosz at the Santa Clara Museum and that was before Paul Anglum. Anyway Paul Anglum was like kind of a she thought internationally you know she was French Canadian and she had an apartment in Paris and she pretty much showed artists that other galleries didn't show and that was like the conceptual artists and also artists like J. de Feo or... She did an exhibition I think in 1983 called Sight and Vision which featured J. de Feo, Bruce Connor. Bruce Connor yeah. Artists like that. Yeah. The Beat Generation there were five of them. Beat Generation. Beat Generation artists and she was more interested in them than she was in the subsequent Funk Generation but what's interesting was I don't know if this was by intent or by accident she kind of established a kind of connection between the Beat Generation artists and the later conceptual group in terms of their use of found objects reference to poetry nobody had really remarked about that before that. Right. She respected me a lot but she had no idea what I did really. People would say what does Tom Marioni's work all about and she'd say it's difficult you know. That was her... Well maybe that's what you know maybe that's what it's all about. Yeah. But she was a cultural icon she anytime somebody new came in like a new curator in town you know she would have a party in her house to introduce that person to the art community you know and I don't know that anybody else does that really like she used to do it. Well maybe they do we just don't get invited anymore. That's it. We can mic the questioners. Hi Tom in 1976 you and I worked together to produce the tight 13 minutes that your work and many of your colleagues. I was wondering if you continued to exhibit that work and I know it had made the rounds to some of your curated exhibitions and whether that's still in your active body of work. That was you had organized this thing with Channel 6 which was early cable TV and not many people had cable TV at that time you know in the mid 70's and it was called the tight 13 minutes and we're 13 artists did one minute pieces included Jim Melchert and all my contemporaries here in the Bay Area and then at that time I was organizing theme shows you know on the radio and KPFA and I did one on another different one on KQED when it was called actions by sculptors for the home audience was four different artists and so but later I rarely would do things I did a motion picture artist five minute videos was shown at the young museum a few years ago and then the art orchestra was kind of similar thing you know so that's but I don't know I can't think of any that I've done in the last couple of years though. It's an interesting question though because one of the things that you can track the rise of conceptual art is by also the rise and the availability of technological image making and distribution you know it seems that for example Portapak video production was made possible only in the very early 70s and even though it was by I guess industry standards very crude it created the basis for a kind of aesthetic for early video art which always looked like surveillance of something that probably shouldn't have been surveilled. Right. Yeah well I'm very low-tech now because I can't deal with it but in 1970 I did with Willoughby Sharpe maybe the first video art show in California called Body Works and it was shown in Breen's Bar on a borrowed player Portapak that I borrowed from I think San Francisco state or something like that and it was shown on the Bar TV and that was an example of a video art show in a bar. So Mark you kind of touched on this a little bit but it seems like and Tom you were working in a certain kind of like fertile ground where that kind of made happen and then it gets sort of co-opted into all of a sudden you're part of the mission school or you're part of you know a certain movement and it seems like what you're doing comes first and then they figured it out but then it feels like I don't know my DNA has been rearranged and now I have to think about myself as part of a school and I'm wondering if you had any thoughts about how your work is seen in a situation like that. I think my museum of conceptual art was maybe the first alternative art space official alternative art space in the country. 112 Green Street was founded in the fall of 1970 and my mocha was founded in April of 1970 and Art News magazine did a whole thing on alternative art space and never even mentioned mocha in the history of alternative art spaces because it's way out here in California. There were artist run galleries before that though there's for example Clifford Still's students put together something called the Med Art Gallery on Bush Street in the 50s where they just basically rented a space and showed their work. Oh yeah there was the sixth gallery here but it was like a collective artist more like an artist workshop or something there were things more like that but they weren't considered alternative art spaces you know. The thing about mocha it was an alternative to what it was a new art it was a space for avant-garde art it wasn't it. Did mocha ever get money from the National Endowment of the Arts? I did get four or five grants and NEA grants in the 70s. That was for mocha not for you as an artist. Right. I got two or three for myself as an artist but in 1980 I got the last one for that for organizing a conference on the island in Ponipay for the Vision Magazine artist talks. That's another thing that feeds into this history of conceptual art is the idea that the National Endowment of the Arts for a number of years was supporting artist run and alternative spaces and created a whole separate category to fund them on the grounds that they were showing work that was not commercially viable and then that was one of the things that came to an abrupt end in the 1980s. And Robert Hughes said something like alternative art spaces were first like radical spaces and eventually they just became an arm of the government. Yeah. You remember when you and I met in New Mexico and we did the print project for the college over there we helped them raise some money for this. And you're a painter? I'm a painter. My name is Richard Perry. Oh yes. I've been here so long. I remember. Yes. I remember you. Yeah. So actually you're the one who sort of introduced me to the whole concept of conceptual art. Yes. Yes. Thank you for that. So I wanted to ask you mentioned that if I understood great that you weren't being recognized rather than you know for lack of a better definition by the standard in the Bay Area and around. So I got the idea from what you were saying that you created the mocha so that you can develop your whole concept of conceptual art. And then through that it seems like you've really been accepted by all these institutions at one time didn't take you in. And I just wanted to step as your intention to get into these museums through that or just to develop your own path and move ahead in that direction. Well I wanted it to be legitimately a museum because in order to be a museum you have to have a collection. See in Europe they have quintals which are like museums but they don't have any collection that's the difference you know. And even when you write the word museum in Chinese it's three characters. It's a place with many things that's how you write museum in Chinese. So it's a place with many things so it's like you have to have a collection and I was serious that I did have a collection. Artists left residue and they left elements behind records, residue and relics like I said in the tape. So that made it a museum technically as far as I was concerned you know. Somebody said to me well why do you call it a museum you're just trying to impress your father and I said no it's because I'm a museum man I said you know because I'd been a curator you know. And the thing is I was a curator but I was an artist first and sometimes curators become artists but it was the other way around with me you know. I was always an artist and doing being a curator was just something else I did as an artist because as you could see from my interview there that I did many kinds of things and that's what a conceptual artist is free to do you know. I used to say that a conceptual artist is free to work in any medium except painting because painters want to have their cake and eat it too you know. You want to have the art world and the money and everything and you want to be a poet at the same time you know and a philosopher you know. You can't have it both ways yeah. And it was the new museum in New York that was the first museum to break that mold they called themselves a museum and never had a permanent collection and got the and they got all the funding agencies behind that idea and then soon that model proliferated elsewhere. Lydia. I'm curious what thoughts went into your mind as you were watching yourself 23 years ago discussing your art. I've seen it a dozen times so it wasn't like and no new thoughts. Yeah. Would you change anything? Oh oh you know I think that since I'm ahead of my time it will seem up to date. Plus you looked a lot younger. In the back Mick. Yeah this is a question for both of you. I'm getting back to the idea of either residue or relic. What do you think the influence on conceptual art has on current practices now? Oh current practices. Well they're so nice on current practices. What was saying in the Bay Area or in California Well it's you know I'll go ahead. Current practices is such a multi-leveled and you know polyvalent thing that you can't pinpoint it enough to say anything about it which is actually in my mind itself a kind of a problem. But one of the things that we notice is that the collectability of certain things has less to do with it has really to do with the connection they are to kind of I guess for lack of a less cynical term investment categories you know you can put together a drawing and say this is by Jean Basquiat and it's worth $100,000 but a drawing of like no artist that nobody's heard of would be worth the same drawing would be worth $200 so there's a kind of shall we say labeling fetishism that has kind of a conceptual slant to it you know it's really not the object it's the object's reliquary status of being part of something much bigger than itself that adds value to it. There's such a thing as neo-conceptual artists like there's neo-pop you know some people think Jeff Coons is a neo-conceptual artist he's a neo-pop artist he's not a neo-conceptual artist and it returns like in the 90s it returned as neo-conceptual artists and it's like things come back but they come back in a more decorative version you know it's like performance art was concrete like in the 60s and 70s and then by the 80s it became cabaret you know so and everything like that became theatricalized you know and just it's like that with every movement like impressionism became post-impressionism it became it became more decorative you know it's like things become either more decorative or in their neo version you know or more or more. When they get resuscitated that way what gets resuscitated often time is the look of the thing without the underlying purpose behind it because right you know it's like I tell I used to tell students all the time as you can paint an abstract expressionist style but you really can't be an abstract expressionist anymore because it's impossible to be that. Yeah it's like in the 80s when artists were trying to be conceptual artists and they were using the same materials but they didn't have a concept. It was you know it has to be your territory you know it's like you know in the minimal art Dan Flavin's fluorescent light fixtures that's the subject of his art so nobody else can use fluorescent light fixtures because it was his subject you know. And then technology in some ways further amplifies that because it becomes increasingly about the distributional apparatus that presents the art rather than the thing that's being presented. You see that for example there was a technology art in the maybe six months ago in the Asian Museum where there were some you know Korean and Chinese and I think Taiwanese artists that were using technology but it was all about the thing the mechanism of distribution not discernable significance to the thing that was being distributed. A lot of robot art being done now. Yeah because it's easy to do for some people. Other questions? Yeah. One in the back? I came in late but do you have an are you interested in any artist currently active? Do you find or can you mention a few artists that you find that are interested to you? I didn't understand. What did he say? He wants to know if you're interested in any contemporary artists and if so who? Oh Mauricio Catalan is a very interesting artist to me right now. Anyone more recent? I like Julie Merit too a lot and Laura Owens. Laura Owens is a painter that does the little girl paintings and blows them up at the gigantic scale. It's like it's interesting what happens when you do a little girl painting and you blow it up into a giant scale. That's a new idea to me. Any other questions? Lydia were you raising your hand again? No. I misread your raised hand. I'll ask a question again. A lot of your work involves a combination of structure or ritual or some sort of you know deliberate imposition with chance or improvisation and I'm just wondering is that a framework that you consciously use or you just have intuitively gravitate towards that approach and is there an influence of jazz in any of that? I wrote a piece that the Art Orchestra performed in 97 at the Legion of Honor called The Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players and that is influenced by the idea of John Cage's use of chance because the sounds are depending on how much beer is left in the beer bottle and you blow into it of 13 people. So it's very influenced by John Cage. One time John Cage told me that he was popular every other ten years. So we're talking about how things come and go and return. Fashions come and then the next decade it goes back to like from representational art to realistic art like that back and forth. No, that's not true. I only work on old ideas. I don't have any new ideas really because right now me and the art world is in a flabby period right now. I don't see it's hard to see really great art being produced right now. It's like I don't think there's any avant-garde anymore. You know it's just like everything's out there like giant flea market. One of the things that I noticed about your last exhibition at the Anglum Trimble Gallery is that you kind of approached your own art as if you were a curator other than yourself and you self-curated your work into five different subcategories that were related to each other but also kind of distinctly different. So you kind of returned to an old idea that way. I showed old work too. Well and new work too. Old and new work, yeah. Well usually an artist I don't like to repeat myself but there are certain things that you get known for that you repeat like I did a whole lot of drum brush drawings. I did a whole lot of drawings aligned as far as I can reach back in the 70s and 80s you know but now I'm just trying to make a political statement you know. Can you explain that? Yeah I think art should be political but not this kind of political raised fist you know I think it should be you know symbolic and subtle and so on yeah. Well I mean all you have to do is turn on CNN and you get sucked into a vortex of terror. So much is called like to me journalism not art you know like trying to cure the ills of the world by trying to help out whatever yes. It's hard to think about that because right now there doesn't seem to be a market for my art you know. My last show I sold one work you know and that's it's like when I'm dead I don't care what happens because I won't know it you know it's like you know it'll get either to the dump or my kids will have the burden of figuring out what to where to store it you know. That seems to have a so I'm just pushing that because I just got contacted about long shirts you know. Yeah well the reason that the Berkeley Museum has my Mocha archives is because when Larry Render was the curator there in 1994 I think it was he got somebody a guy named Nifey has connected to the young museum to come up with the money to buy the archive the Mocha archive you know and in the meantime the Getty Museum was interested in the my Mocha archive but it turned out that this guy maybe offered more money than the Getty Museum did so and I was glad to have it here in the Bay Area rather than in LA too you know. So that's how that's how it got there but as far as my own personal art the Smithsonian Institute has I have an artist club and everybody signs the book every week and I've had it you know since since the you know since the 70s and but I've only had a guest book you know for like since 1990 you know so it's still it's a lot of years. So the Smithsonian came and collected all my old guest books that people signed and they're in the archive of the Smithsonian Institute and so all my friends signatures are in the Smithsonian right now. Oh well my biggest influence well my biggest influence are Duchamp and Eve Klein and Joseph Boyce Duchamp. Joseph Boyce was the basis of the philosophy of my museum of conceptual art 1965 he did explaining pictures to a dead hair he had his face covered in gold leaf over honey and I and other people consider that to the beginning of the whole idea of sculpture based performance where the artist becomes like a sculptor and it's about the action and everything and the idea that you know a dead hair isn't going to explaining pictures to a dead hair is like a few tiles trying to explain it to the public kind of you know. So anyway when I founded Mocha it's a sculpture based museum because it was it was a museum basically a performance art space for sculptors who made actions and that philosophy all comes out of Joseph Boyce so that's a real German idea to me. Joseph Boyce. Where was what located? Oh at 75 3rd Street it was upstairs from Breen's Bar and I used Breen's Bar as a kind of social center and I did a no I did video shows there and then radio show it was told it was torn down in 84. That's now a giant hotel. Oh no the hotel's across the street. Oh okay. It went to Chicago. Breen's Bar in San Francisco the actual the actual bar went to Chicago somebody bought it in Chicago and it was put in a bar there and then it was actually the second longest bar. They had a big fire I heard years later. All right well is that there's one more one more. Can you can you take the mask down just to talk. Well I guess it have to be my the act of drinking beer with friends as the highest form of art which had done all of the world really you know over the last 50 years and for me it's like I hope that's it's something that will be ongoing because it's about the moment so when it's when it's installed because it has certain elements you know like has a yellow light it has a bar and refrigerator and jazz music and table and chairs and a video of beer filling up. It has these elements that are basic in every situation and so I was thinking that that in the future it'll always be about the present you know it won't be dated it'll never be dated a little bit like John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence it's always John Cage is always there and the sounds of the moment a hundred years from now it'll be it won't be dated it'll be of the moment to be contemporary all the time like that that's what I'm hoping it'll work like that. I think of the I have guest bartenders I think I'm the composer the bartender is the conductor and the drinkers are the players like a symphony. Folks I think we have to wrap it up here so I'd like to thank both the presenters here Mark van Pruyen Tom Mariano and it's been a real pleasure.