Art As Social Interaction
Pioneering conceptual Artist Tom Marioni Comes Home for a Retrospective Exhibition
Cincinnati CityBeat
Interview By Jason Gargano
Tom Marioni unwraps a turkey sub as I join him at a small table on the Contemporary Arts Center's second floor to discuss an imaginative, rules-busting career that's taken him from Cincinnati's East Side to the furthest reaches of the globe.
"This is a big deal," he says. "It's basically my life's work to date."
Clad in a blue Hawaiian shirt that contrasts nicely with the bushy thatch of white hair atop his head, Marioni eagerly describes the content of an exhibition more than four decades in the making, appropriately titled Tom Marioni: Beer, Art and Philosophy.
"It's a multimedia show," he says. "There's video, there's audio, there's photography, there's photograms, there's installations, there's tableau pieces, there's drawings and prints and sculptures. All the things that conceptual artists do.
"But no paintings," he says, laughing. "Conceptual artists are free to work in any medium except painting." It's less than a week before the exhibition's Friday opening, and the 69-year-old artist's youthful voice is rife with anticipation as he talks about growing up in an arts-infested household in Hyde Park.
"My father was a very cultured man who came to this country from Italy when he was 21 in 1921," he says. "He went to school and became a doctor. He was a Sunday painter. He used to read and write a lot. We had a library in our house. My mother used to sing opera and play the piano and the harp."
The young Marioni took weekly violin lessons at UC's College-Conservatory of Music while going to Summit Country Day, the all-boys Catholic school where he was an altar boy with a hotrod fetish (it was the '50s). One school trip remains burned in his cortex.
"Something Marshall McLuhan said that influenced me was, 'Art is anything you can get away with,' " he says. "When I was a kid in Cincinnati they built the Terrace Plaza Hotel, and we went as a class when it first opened in 1948. We went into the Gourmet Room, which was at top of the hotel, and in there they had this (Joan) Miró mural, which is now in the Cincinnati Art Museum. I saw that and I thought, 'That guy's getting away with something. I want to do that.' "
He went on to attend the Art Academy of Cincinnati because it seemed "easier than studying architecture." He took off for the West Coast a few days after graduation in 1959.
"My two choices were New York or California," he says. "I chose San Francisco because it was the time of the Beat era, and that attracted me. Jazz and poetry -- I've always been a big Jazz fan."
The cosmopolitan city nurtured Marioni's adventurous yet contemplative nature. He began to explore what would become his lifelong interest -- the burgeoning conceptual art movement, an approach that thrives on temporary, interactive experiences over the permanence of traditional art objects.
Marioni opened the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in 1970, a place that was home to his groundbreaking explorations in performance art as a kind of social sculpture or interaction.
"It was this brand-new idea of having a museum that's collection was made up of residue and records and evidence of actions," he says. "It was a very specialized sculpture action museum. I made a space because there weren't other spaces for this kind of art. The pieces were all site-specific things. They were all designed for the situation and place.
"The art was moral and political. It was about ecology, it was against the war. It was also about the fact that art had become so materialistic."
Over a 14-year run MOCA hosted exhibitions that reveled in unexpected, nontraditional elements, incorporating everything from sound- and light-based pieces to some of the earliest shows based entirely on video installations.
MOCA also was home to what would become Marioni's best-known work, "The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art," a site-specific "installation" in the building's first-floor café in which the artist would invite friends over to, yes, drink beer and socialize every Wednesday afternoon. The gathering continues more than three decades later, now taking place in his home studio.
In his elegantly written 2003 memoir, Beer, Art and Philosophy (on which much of the CAC exhibition is based), Marioni says of his beer-drinking endeavor: "This was a social artwork. I am the author of this idea. In the '90s the idea of social interaction in an art context became an art movement."
I ask him to elaborate on the nexus of his "idea."
"I was part of the avant-garde," he says between bites of his sub. "I was part of the first generation of conceptual artists, and I was a romantic. I was trying to re-create that whole artist and writers scene of Paris' café society in the '20s."
It was also a nod to his Catholic school upbringing.
"I chose Wednesday because I considered it benediction day," he says. "And I also considered that in religious rituals a stimulant is usually used to heighten the experience, like wines. Or there are other ways of creating stimulant in people, like chanting or gospel singing to heighten the experience of the ritual. So I just used an American Cincinnati stimulant: beer."
I ask him about the reaction to a project that could easily be taken out of context, something he's been fighting against his whole career.
"That's a big fascination of mine: invisible art," he says. "That was my example of invisible art. My drinking beer with friends in the café downstairs every Wednesday was a disguised performance. It was invisible because it wasn't seen as being art. But it was my intent that it was art. It was an art action."
Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
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