Tom Marioni: So the critic goes to the artist's studio...

By Barry Johnson

Last night I went to an artist's lecture and a vaudeville routine broke out:

Two cannibals finish eating a clown. One of them turns to the other: "Did that taste funny to you?"

That's San Francisco artist Tom Marioni, who was born in Cincinnati in 1937, moved to San Francisco in 1959, and became what he calls a First Generation conceptual artist in 1969. His career, as depicted in the videos and still photographs he showed at Portland State, has lurched from joke to joke, from chance discovery to chance discovery. Maybe the unifying thread has been beer.

 

Marioni's most famous work of conceptual art: The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art. It consists, unsurprisingly, of people drinking beer -- at a series of events, ever since he came up with the concept in 1970 for the Oakland Museum. A recent example occurred at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in September, with Ed Ruscha as one of the barkeeps. Marioni has also done beer-bottle chamber music: In one, he collected different beer bottles from China to Czechoslovakia and created a sound video by blowing into each empty bottle, which is more interesting than you may think -- the resonant airy thonk of the bottles, the graphics of the labels, the "movement" around the globe. We learned that in the UK, all the bottles sound alike.

A man goes to the doctor. "I have five penises," he says. "How do your pants fit?" the doctor asks. "Like a glove."
Marioni was in town because he fits so well with PSU's master's program in art and social practice, which explores the traditional  boundaries between artists and artworks and their audiences. Maybe "spindles, folds and mutilates" those boundaries is better than explores. Marioni's career suggests that we can all be in a work of art almost anytime we wake up to the possibility. His job is to wake us up.