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Making and unmaking the museum: Tom Marioni and San Francisco conceptual art, 1968-1979

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Making and unmaking the museum: Tom Marioni and San Francisco conceptual art, 1968-1979

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MAKING AND UNMAKING THE MUSEUM:

TOM MARIONI AND SAN FRANCISCO CONCEPTUAL ART, 1968-1979

by

Leta Y. Ming

____________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Leta Y. Ming
Acknowledgments

Many individuals have supported me in the writing of this dissertation, in particular
those associated with the Art History Department at the University of Southern California. I
first began working on Marioni in the context of a course taught by Thomas Crow, who
encouraged his students to investigate the social networks that underlie artistic production.
Through his shining example, he has also inspired me to dedicate myself to uncovering the
untold histories of California art. I also would like to thank my advisor Richard Meyer, for
fostering an environment at USC where writing on contemporary art is embraced. His
scholarship serves as a constant reminder that we can work on the contemporary period
without sacrificing our commitment to the archival and analytical methods of our discipline.
I wish to extend a heartfelt thanks to my other committee members Sarah Banet-Weiser,
who introduced me to the field of Cultural Studies and theories of power and ideology, and
Megan Luke, for her careful reading of my work and insightful comments on art historical
issues big and small. My appreciation also extends to Nancy Troy and Jonathan Reynolds,
who helped shape my line of inquiry when it was just a proposal. I also want to acknowledge
the kind encouragement given to me throughout my time at USC by professors Sonya Lee
and Karen Lang. Aside from the faculty, the USC community was made up of a group of
wonderfully supportive graduate students, and I am especially grateful for the feedback that I
received from writing group colleagues Jason Goldman, Sarah Hollenberg, Anca Lasc,
Rachel Middleman, Younjung Oh, Amy Von Lintel and Kristine Tanton, as well as for the
intellectual stimulation and friendship of Priyanka Basu and Jason Hill. A special
acknowledgement goes to Aleca LeBlanc, whose sympathetic understanding and balanced
ii
reason were particularly helpful in getting me through the arduous process of completing
this project.
Research for this dissertation was assisted by grants from the USC Art History
Department and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program. I also was fortunate to be
selected as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2009, and
wish to thank Amelia Goerlitz, Cynthia Mills and Joanne Moser, as well as the staff at the
Archives of American Art for granting me the space, time and resources to advance my
project. Two friends whom I met while in residence at the museum, Makeda Best and Tom
Folland, both deserve my gratitude for being willing, astute readers of my work. My sincere
appreciation also extends to Stephanie Cannizzo for providing me repeated access to the
Museum of Conceptual Art Archive at the Berkeley Museum of Art. Most importantly, I
would like to express my deep gratitude to the staff at the Getty Research Institute, where
most of this dissertation was written, for providing me the peaceful space and the materials
that I needed to get my work done.
This project greatly benefited from the interviews of artists and curators that I have
conducted over the years, and I would like to thank those who generously shared their
personal experiences with me including Vito Acconci, Kathan Brown, Howard Fried, Paul
Kos, Connie Lewallen, Phil Linhares, Jim Melchert, George Neubert, Dennis Oppenheim,
Brenda Richardson, Alan Scarritt, Bonnie Sherk, Barbara Smith, and most especially to Tom
Marioni for patiently describing to me, in great detail and often more than once, events from
some forty years ago. I also very much appreciate his giving me access to his archival
materials and allowing me the breathing room to write my own narrative of his career.
iii
During the years that I was working on this dissertation, I had the great opportunity
to work with Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, on the exhibition Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981. The knowledge
that I gained from this experience was formative in shaping the ideas in this dissertation. I
especially benefited from discussions among the exhibition’s Advisory Committee, which
included Frances Colpitt, Thomas Crow, Peter Frank, Hal Glicksman, David Joselit, Peter
Kirby, Connie Lewallen, Philip Linhares, Jane Richardson, David Ross and Kristine Stiles, all
of whom had so many funny stories and insights to share about their experiences living
through this period of California history. I would like to specially acknowledge Kristine Stiles
for being one of the first to write so thoughtfully and illuminatingly about the work of
Marioni.
My time in graduate school corresponded to several important milestones in my
personal life, including most devastatingly, the death of my mother Bernadette Soong Ming,
whose presence I unfailingly miss every day, but whose profound love also continues to
sustain me. Through her example, she taught me that it is possible for a woman to dedicate
herself to a professional career and nevertheless always be there for her children. I am also
deeply grateful for the steadfast love and support from my father Tao Kuang Ming, whose
early lessons in discipline helped propel me through this project, and whose example made
me think, naively, that getting a Ph.D. was not a big deal. My gratitude and affection also
extend to my devoted and big-hearted brother Leo Ming and his wife Megan Winzeler,
without whom I would not have been able to weather the hard times that I encountered
throughout my years of graduate school. While in the throes of working on this dissertation,
I was incredibly fortunate to meet and marry Ken Park, to receive the warm embrace of his
iv
family members Sung, Judy, Richard and Jenny, and to share in the joys of parenting our son
Cassius. It is hard to express how grateful I am to have Ken in my life, not only for keeping
me grounded throughout this process, but also for the many responsibilities that he took
over and the many sacrifices that he made to allow me to single-mindedly concentrate on my
work. I thank him for all of the plants that he remembered to water, all of the sandwiches
that he packed for me, and for all of the bottles that he prepared for our baby. It is Ken to
whom I wish to dedicate this dissertation and to whom I give my last word.
v
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures viii

Abstract xiii

Introduction: How Conceptual Art Came to San Francisco 1
Part One: Site San Francisco 1
Marioni’s Homegrown Conceptual Art 3
San Francisco in the 1960s: Countercultural Revolt 10
San Francisco’s Art World in the 1960s: “Nothing to Lose” 17
Part Two: Conceptual Art and Its Discontents 26
Conceptual Art’s Origins in Postwar Modern Sculpture 26
Conceptual Art’s Critique of the Auratic Art Object and the
Authentic Artistic Subject 30
Conceptual Art’s Participation in the Critique of Art
Institutions 39
Part Three: Marioni’s Curatorial Forays into the Museum 43
The Founding of MOCA: Do-It-Yourself Conceptual Art 45
The Artist-Curator and the Curator-Artist 51
Part Four: Writing on Marioni 56
Marioni’s Reception in the Histories of Conceptual Art 56
Marioni and Institutional Critique 60
Marioni and Me: Methodological Issues 62
Parsing the Roles of Artist and Curator 72

Chapter One: Artist as Curator: Marioni at the Richmond Art Center 75
Part One: Marioni Becomes a Curator 75
Exhibitions at Richmond: Marioni Installs Marioni 83
Conceptual Exhibitions at Richmond: Invisible Painting and
Sculpture, 1969 and The Return of Abstract Expressionism, 1969 84
Marioni the Artist in Marioni the Curator’s Shows 94
Part Two: Marioni Redefines Curating as Art 102
Part Three: Marioni Loses His Job 111
Controversy Brews: Sculpture Annual 1970, 1970 111
The Beginning of Marioni’s End: Terry Fox’s Levitation, 1970 118
Marioni’s Last Stand: California Girls, 1971 123

vi
Chapter Two: The Museum of Conceptual Art: Making Avant-Garde Art
Among Friends 129
Sound Sculpture As, 1970 143
Body Works, 1970 157
The San Francisco Performance: New Art from the Bay Area, 1972 164
All Night Sculptures, 1973 178
Wednesday Afternoon Open House, 1973-74 185

Chapter Three: Marioni’s Works in Museums: Making Museums Pay 195

Chapter Four: The Museum of Conceptual Art: Portrait of a Museum
as an Alternative Art Space and Conceptual Artwork 235
A Short History of the Alternative Art Space Movement in the
Bay Area and Beyond 240
The Changing Model of the Alternative Art Space 259
MOCA as Conceptual Work of Art 265

Conclusion: Free Beer: A Private Party Turned Public 282

Bibliography 291
Interviews Conducted 291
Archives and Libraries Consulted 291
Comprehensive Bibliography 292

Appendix: Figures 309

vii
List of Figures

Figure 1: Tom Marioni, Conceptual Art calling card, 1970 309

Figure 2: Sol Lewitt, Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966 309

Figure 3: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965 310

Figure 4: First card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of
Conceptual Art at 75 Third Street, 1972 310

Figure 5: Second card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of
Conceptual Art at 75 Third Street, 1972 311

Figure 6: Third card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of
Conceptual Art at 75 Third Street, 1972 311

Figure 7: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles,
1968-72: Invitation to Section XIX, 1968-69 312

Figure 8: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles,
1968-72: Opening of Section XIX, 1968-69 312

Figure 1.1: Tom Marioni, Bent Wood #8, 1967-68 313

Figure 1.2: Tom Marioni, Wall No.1, 1966-67 313

Figure 1.3: Tom Marioni, One Second Sculpture, 1969 314

Figure 1.4: Larry Bell, Untitled, c. 1969 314

Figure 1.5: Lloyd Hamrol, Situational Construction for Art Center, 1969 315

Figure 1.6: George Neubert, Post and Lintel Space, 1968 315

Figure 1.7: Bruce Conner, Untitled, 1969 316

Figure 1.8: The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition installation shot 315

Figure 1.9: The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition poster detail 317

Figure 1.10: Paul Kos, Condensation of Yellowstone Park Into 64 Square Feet, 1969 317

viii
Figure 1.11: Ron Goldstein, Untitled, 1969 318

Figure 1.12: Terry Fox, Untitled, 1969 318

Figure 1.13: Mel Henderson, Untitled, 1969 319

Figure 1.14: Dennis Oppenheim, One Hour Run, December 1968 319

Figure 1.15: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), Birds in Flight, 1969 320

Figure 1.16: Letter from Thomas Marioni to Allan Fish 321

Figure 1.17: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue cover, 1969 322

Figure 1.18: Tom Marioni, Process Print, 1970 323

Figure 1.19: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, 1969, entry on
Bob Anderson 324

Figure 1.20: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, 1969, entry on
Dennis Oppenheim 325

Figure 1.21: Jim McCready, This Year, Burn the Church of Your Choice, 1970 326

Figure 1.22: Sculpture Annual submissions, Richmond Art Center, 1970 with
Allan Fish (Tom Marioni) paint splatter on pedestal submission (lower right) 326

Figure 1.23: Terry Fox, Levitation, 1970 327

Figure 2.1: A Participation Piece, invitation by Tom Marioni (front) 328

Figure 2.2: A Participation Piece, invitation by Tom Marioni (back) 328

Figure 2.3: Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice Melting, 1970 329

Figure 2.4: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), Piss Piece, 1970 330

Figure 2.5: George Maciunas in 1963 performing George Brecht’s
Drip Music, 1959 331

Figure 2.6: Nam June Paik, Fluxus Champion Contest (aka Physical Music), 1962 331

Figure 2.7: Mel Henderson, Untitled piece for Sound Sculpture As
with woman performer for Terry Fox, Paul Kos and Herb Yarmo’s Untitled
piece in background 332
ix

Figure 2.8: Screening of Body Works, 1970, inside Breen’s Bar 332

Figure 2.9: Screening of Body Works, 1970, inside Breen’s Bar 333

Figure 2.10: Paul Kos, Pool Hustle, 1972 333

Figure 2.11: Bonnie Sherk, Traditional Performances: a piece within a piece,
within a piece, etc., 1972 334

Figure 2.12: Howard Fried, Untitled, 1972 334

Figure 2.13: Stills from Howard Fried, Fuck You, Purdue, 1972 335

Figure 2.14: Mel Henderson, Attica, 1972 (version installed in museum) 335

Figure 2.15: Larry Fox, documentation of The San Francisco Performance
road trip. Pictured from left to right: Paul Kos, Mel Henderson,
Bonnie Sherk, and Tom Marioni. 336

Figure 2.16: Chris Burden, Bed Piece, 1972 at Market Street Program, Venice 336

Figure 2.17: The San Francisco Performance image used for the invitation.
Pictured from left to right: Howard Fried, Bonnie Sherk, Paul Kos,
Tom Marioni, Larry Fox and Mel Henderson. 337

Figure 2.18: The San Francisco Performance newspaper, open to page showing
contact sheet of Larry Fox’s pictures taken during the road trip 337

Figure 2.19: Installation of photographs by Larry Fox, The San Francisco
Performance, 1972, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California 338

Figure 2.20: Terry Fox, Memento Mori, 1973, exterior view 338

Figure 2.21: Barbara Smith, Feed Me, 1973 339

Figure 2.22: Interior of MOCA space, 75 Third Street 340

Figure 2.23: Tom Marioni, The Artist’s Studio, 1973. Frank Youmans performs
Marioni’s piece by casting model Sally Pine. 340

Figure 2.24: MOCA refrigerator with Free Beer sticker 341

Figure 2.25: Wall of beer bottles collected from Wednesday afternoon
open house 341
x

Figure 2.26: Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1960 342

Figure 2.27: Andy Warhol, 200 Campbells Soup Cans, 1962 342

Figure 3.1: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends
is the Highest Form of Art, October 26, 1970, Oakland Museum, Oakland, Calif. 343

Figure 3.2: Invitation from The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest
Form of Art, October 26, 1970 344

Figure 3.3: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), 6 x 6 x 6, June 5, 1971, Walnut Creek
Civic Arts Center, Walnut Creek, Calif. 345

Figure 3.4: Daniel Spoerri, Restaurant de la City Galerie, 1965
53 in. x 53 in. x 13 ½ in. 345

Figure 3.5: Invitation to opening of Tom Marioni, My First Car, 1972 346

Figure 3.6: Tom Marioni, My First Car, 1972, De Saisset Museum, University
of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, Calif., screenshot of video taken at opening 347

Figure 3.7: Don Potts, My First Car, 1972 347

Figure 3.8: Panel from Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board
of Trustees, 1974, 7 panels, under glass, framed in brass, each 20 in. x 24 in. 348

Figure 3.9: Tom Marioni, Christmas Poem, 1972, lithograph on paper
5 1/2 in. x 7 3/4 in. x 1/2 in. 349

Figure 3.10: Letter from Tom Marioni to Henry Hopkins regarding
Christmas Poem, 1972 350

Figure 4.1: MOCA, 86 Third Street, interior 351

Figure 4.2: MOCA, 86 Third Street interior 351

Figure 4.3: MOCA, 75 Third Street, interior 352

Figure 4.4: MOCA, 75 Third Street, interior 352

Figure 4.5: 80 Langton Street, interior 353

Figure 4.6: 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street, interior, 1972 353

xi
Figure 4.7: MOCA, 75 Third Street interior with painted remains of
Darryl Sapien’s Tricycle: Contemporary Recreation, March 14, 1975 354

Figure 4.8: David Ireland, The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall,
Ceiling and Floor of the Museum of Conceptual Art, 1976 354

Figure 4.9: Paul Hoffman, selection from The MOCA Suite, 1979 355

Figure 4.10: Installation shot of The Museum of Conceptual Art at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1979 355

Figure 4.11: Tom Marioni, Invitation to Café Society, 1976 356

Figure 4.12: Photograph of Café Society at Breen’s Bar, 1979 356
xii
Abstract

In 1968, San Francisco artist Tom Marioni stopped making traditional two- and
three-dimensional art objects and turned his focus to situational actions or performances
that unfolded over time – what he called conceptual art. After his conversion to
conceptualism and throughout the early 1970s, Marioni became the leading advocate of what
was then an emerging art practice in the Bay Area. As curator of the Richmond Art Center, a
small community museum in the East Bay, and founder of one of the first alternative art
spaces, the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, Marioni organized radical
shows of process, body, performance, video and installation art with the intent of advancing
his own career as well as those of other conceptual artists. Using Marioni’s career as a case
study, I demonstrate how avant-garde artists of his generation disrupted prevailing notions
of artistic labor and artistic subjectivity by shifting away from a solitary, artisanal practice of
artmaking towards a post-studio, managerial model. In addition, Marioni’s hybrid artmaking
and exhibition-making career is a compelling prehistory to the now widespread practice of
artists acting as curators and the phenomenon of the itinerant, global star curator.
Although Marioni’s art is easily dismissed because of its miming of rebellious, puerile
adolescent male behavior, this potentially troubling aspect of the work is precisely what
needs to be examined and historicized. My dissertation argues that Marioni’s location in San
Francisco – steeped in a rich tradition of countercultural radicalism and far from the high
stakes critical scrutiny and market pressure of New York City – fostered the artist’s unique
form of interactive, convivial and irreverent conceptualism, which introduced such leisurely
social activities as drinking beer with friends into the realm of high art. Indeed, Marioni’s
xiii
xiv
often outrageous, flamboyant gestures align his practice to a larger countercultural attack on
white, middle-class culture that flourished in 1960s and 1970s San Francisco, in which
uncivil provocations and playful pranks constituted purposeful, pointed critiques of
“repressive” societal conventions. Furthermore, my study contends that Marioni’s work
contributes to the history of institutional critique, a key aspect of conceptual art, in its
exposure of the artist’s complicit and inevitable participation, as well as vulnerability, in the
star-based, winner-take-all art economy.
Introduction: How Conceptual Art Came to San Francisco

Part One: Site San Francisco
“What is conceptual art?” So asked just about everyone who artist Tom Marioni
encountered in 1970, puzzled by the name he attached to the art exhibition space that he
founded in San Francisco, the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA). The frequency with
which Marioni was asked this question attested to the unfamiliarity of Bay Area audiences
with this radical new art form that jettisoned traditional formal notions of aesthetic value –
including color, composition and artisanal technique – and proclaimed the centrality of the
idea of the work rather than its material manifestation. Although artists from New York City
to London to Buenos Aires had been working with conceptualist ideas since the mid-1960s,
in 1970 conceptual art was still a novelty in Northern California. Marioni decided that the
best way to respond to these repeated inquiries about conceptual art was to print up calling
cards (Figure 1) with his definition of the term spelled out in black and white:
“CONCEPTUAL ART/idea oriented situations not directed at the production of static
objects.” By virtue of its appearance in an elegant italicized typeface, the definition was made
to look official and sanctioned by an independent authority. Providing the questioner
something tangible by which to remember Marioni when they had parted ways, the printed
card also served as an effective marketing tool for the artist’s personal understanding of
conceptual art as well as for the museum that he had started to enshrine this type of work.
Yet it was also an ironic gesture: presenting an abstract idea – the definition of an art that
was predicated on the dissolution of the art object – in a material form and employing the
1
trappings of the Establishment to represent an art that arose in opposition to official
institutions and doctrines of art.
Since his embrace of conceptualism in 1968 – a conversion in his art practice that he
once described as a “born-again experience” as well as a “moral position” (against the war,
environmental destruction and materialism) – and throughout the 1970s, Marioni made it his
mission to the spread the gospel of conceptual art.
1
This dissertation addresses his strategies
for doing so, which included acting as an organizer of exhibitions as well as a maker of
conceptual art. He curated exhibitions of new art at the Richmond Art Center, a small
community museum in the East Bay, and after being stymied from putting on shows of
radical art there, he opened up MOCA. As I will show, much of Marioni’s practice was
motivated not only by a genuine interest in introducing new forms of art to a public, but also
by self-interest, since conceptual art – an avant-garde, international practice – was going to
be his ticket to art stardom.
2
But because there was no existing network of people interested
in producing, exhibiting, writing about, and seeing conceptual art in San Francisco, Marioni
had to create this world himself. Starting an exhibition venue explicitly dedicated to
conceptual art and passing out cards that defined this new art form were two types of
conceptualist missionary work that he took up in 1970.
This dissertation focuses on Marioni’s most active period in the late 1960s and
1970s. It begins in 1968 – what I am calling his annus mirabilis – when he decided to
discontinue making art objects and became a self-described conceptual artist, while at the

1
Jamie Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986,” Expo-see (1986), copy located in Tom Marioni artist’s
file, archive of the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California.
2
Throughout this dissertation, I use avant-garde in the vernacular sense to describe artists who were interested in pushing
the boundaries of conventional practice.
2
same time getting hired as curator at the Richmond Art Center. The study ends in 1979
when Marioni received recognition by the art world by being shown in two exhibitions at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, while at the same time Marioni’s exclusive
engagement with conceptual art came to an end.
Although San Francisco has been Marioni’s adopted home since 1963, he was
originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. Born in 1937, Marioni grew up in an immigrant Italian
Catholic household and studied violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music as a child. He
later attended the Cincinnati Art Academy where he was graduated with a degree in
sculpture in 1959. Following graduation, Marioni moved to San Francisco. Soon after he
landed there, he had to leave to serve a stint in the Army – which took him to Ulm,
Germany and Columbus, Georgia – but in 1963, after his military service was complete, he
permanently settled in San Francisco where he still lives and works today.

Marioni’s Homegrown Conceptual Art
Around 1967, Marioni first learned about a type of “new experimental art being done
in New York,” which inspired him to make a series of “refrigerator graphics,” catchy, text-
based stickers made from pre-printed rub-on letters mounted on adhesive paper to be placed
on refrigerators.
3
Although his first forays into conceptual art imitated the language-based
art by such artists as Lawrence Weiner or Joseph Kosuth, by 1970, Marioni had staked out
his own territory. As specified in his calling cards (which themselves mimic conceptualist
word pieces), Marioni defined conceptual art as “idea oriented situations not directed at the

3
One graphic read, “Art is a bunch of shit but I love it,” and another read “Kelvinateher,” a play on the brand name of the
appliance manufacturer Kelvinator. Tom Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir (San Francisco: Crown Point Press,
2003), 80–81.
3
production of static objects.” In practice, the conceptual art that he made as an artist and
exhibited as a curator was comprised of durational “actions” or performances by an artist, or
situations set up by an artist that unfolded over a given time period.
4
This included both
concise, one-person actions like One Second Sculpture, 1968, where he tossed a rolled-up,
unhoused metal tape measure into the air, unfurling it into a momentary line drawing in
space, as well as extended, group situations like his The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the
Highest Form of Art, 1970, in which he held a private party for his artist friends in the galleries
of a museum. The term “situation” suggested an affinity with the ideas of Anglo-American
conceptual artist Victor Burgin, who observed in his influential article “Situational
Aesthetics” published in Studio International in 1969 that much recent art was “largely
contingent upon the details of the situation for which it is designed.”
5
Thus Burgin’s notion
of situation implied an awareness of the constantly shifting experience of the spectator in
relation to the artwork. Likewise, much of Marioni’s work sought to engage the audience’s
ongoing, active participation with the artwork rather than reproduce the normative distance
between the spectator and art object.

4
Following artist Joseph Beuys, Marioni preferred the term “action” to refer to performance-based art because he thought
the former more accurately described his grounding in the plastic arts rather than in narrative and text-oriented theater.
5
Victor Burgin, “Situation Aesthetics,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 118. Marioni reported that he did
not read this text, but the article nevertheless demonstrates the currency of the idea of “situation” at the time. Tom
Marioni, personal communication with author, February 17, 2012. Robert Morris also used the term “situation” in his
article “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” published in Artforum v. 5 n. 2 (October 1966): 20-23 in which he insisted that “what
is to be had from the work” is not “located strictly within the specific object. The situation is now more complex and
expanded.” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” in Modern Sculpture Reader, ed. Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex
Potts (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 240. Another well-known, but later usage of this term occurred in Nancy
Foote’s 1980 Artforum article that solicited artists’ responses to “impermanent” installation art. Nancy Foote, “Situation
Esthetics: Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience,” Artforum International 18, no. 5 (January 1980): 22–29.
Several years after he founded MOCA, Marioni defined “situational, or environmental, art,” as that which “is
made for the place it is shown, physical space and often political and social position of the inviting institution taken into
account” and included Happenings (Allan Kaprow’s semi-scripted participatory performance events), earth art and most
conceptual art under this rubric. Tom Marioni, “Hard Bop,” Vision 3 (1976): 13 reprinted in Tom Marioni, “Hard Bop,” in
Writings on Art: Tom Marioni 1969-1999 (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2000), 40.
4
Although Marioni’s interpretation of conceptual art accorded with Burgin’s ideas, it
represented a significant departure from the more dominant definitions of conceptual art
that emerged in the late 1960s as articulated by New York artists Sol Lewitt and Kosuth. In
the first public declaration of the principles of conceptual art, “Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art” published in the Summer 1967 issue of Artforum, Lewitt described conceptual art as a
practice in which “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution
is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
6
The primary role
of the artist then was to conceive of or design the work, whereas the execution of that
concept was mechanical and nonessential. In Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966 (Figure 2)
presented in serial fashion, all of the permutations of a set of solid and open enameled
aluminum squares, cubes, and extensions of these shapes. Artist Lawrence Weiner took
Lewitt’s argument even further in his famous “Declaration of Intent” first published in the
catalogue for the exhibition January 5-31, 1969, pronouncing that the actual fabrication of the
artwork could be done by anyone, and that ultimately the work did not have to be
constructed at all.
, Lewitt

7
Yet for Marioni, the execution or performance of the piece was precisely
what constituted the essence of the work of art.

6
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake
Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 12.
7
Weiner’s full statement is as follows:
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver
upon the occasion of receivership.
Lawrence Weiner, “Declaration of Intent,” January 5-31, 1969 (New York, Seth Siegelaub, 1969), n.p. reprinted in Alexander
Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Blake Stimson and
Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), xxii.
5
Marioni’s notion of conceptual art also differed greatly from that put forth by
Kosuth in his many writings beginning in the late 1960s. In Part Two of his 1969 three-part
article “Art After Philosophy,” Kosuth argued that “the ‘purest’ definition of conceptual art
would be that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept ‘art.’”
8
As seen in one of his
earliest and best-known works, One and Three Chairs, 1965 (Figure 3), which juxtaposed an
actual chair with a textual dictionary definition of a chair as well as a photograph of the chair,
Kosuth meant that conceptual art consisted of investigations into the ontological status of
art in the form of linguistic propositions. Though Marioni’s actions, in their temporality and
situatedness, addressed and destabilized the fundamental nature of art, they had little to do
with the linguistic and theoretical artworks favored by Kosuth, and certainly Kosuth would
never have accepted them as “pure” conceptual art.
What Lewitt, Weiner, Kosuth and conceptual art in general also stood for was the
rejection of the art object as a supremely visual and aesthetic testament to artistic
expressiveness and subjectivity, a quality that characterized much of the art, particularly
painting, that came to prominence in the 1950s. Lewitt, for example, claimed that
“[a]nything that calls attention to and interests the viewer in this physicality is a deterrent to
our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive device.”
9
Although Marioni’s
conceptualist vision also constituted a skepticism of the aesthetic, handcrafted art object as
the repository of creative genius, unlike these other artists, Marioni’s rejection of the object

8
“Art After Philosophy” was originally published in Studio International 178, nos. 915-917 (October, November, December
1969): 134-137, 160-161, 212-213 and reprinted in Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 171. For more on the responses
generated by this article and other debates surrounding the definition of conceptual art, see Alberro, “Reconsidering
Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” xxx n.1.
9
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 15.
6
led to a preoccupation with the experience of making and viewing art, a point to which I will
return later.
Several years after codifying his definition of conceptual art in calling cards, Marioni
acknowledged his departure from more recognized conceptual artists in his articulation of an
overarching schema of conceptualism, a schema that divided up the field into three
subcategories: language, system and action. Kosuth’s work epitomized the language category;
whereas system-based conceptual art was exemplified by Lewitt.
10
Marioni placed his own
practice under the action category, as it consisted chiefly of performances by an artist using
her own body or a situation or process that unfolded over time. In this way, Marioni
distinguished his homegrown version of conceptual art from the more dominant
approaches.
Marioni’s individual artworks and exhibitions differed from more well-known
categories of conceptual art not only because they were durational, however, but moreover
because they invited group interaction among artist and audience members alike. Marioni’s
incorporation of social activity into the sphere of art occurs in such artistic works as The Act
of Drinking Beer with Friends and such curatorial endeavors as Body Works, 1970, an exhibition
of videos held at a bar downstairs from MOCA and All Night Sculptures, 1973, a one night
exhibition of installation-performances that lasted from dusk to dawn. In The Act of Drinking
Beer with Friends, each of the partygoers became a participant in the artmaking, dissolving the
high cultural sanctity of the museum exhibition space. For Body Works, Marioni deployed the

10
Marioni, “Hard Bop.” This essay was originally published in 1976 in the third issue of Marioni’s art journal Vision.
Marioni also presents his schema in other contexts including a 1975 interview with student Jeannette Willison. Jeannette
Willison, 11 Video Interviews (San Francisco: 1975), video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 33 min., copy located
in Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
7
unusual location of the bar to set the casual, convivial tone of the event, one that made the
experience of observing art (in this case, videos) a communal, shared one. The timing of All
Night Sculptures placed the artist in the same time-space continuum as the audience and
required that the spectators become active participants in the pieces presented. In as much as
these projects called for a kind of audience participation or collaboration, they upset the
convention of spectatorship, especially Modernist spectatorship, as a passive, disembodied
activity.
Much of Marioni’s artwork – including using the museum for a private party as
described above and using exhibition funds provided by a museum to purchase a car for his
personal use (My First Car, 1972) – seemed to crudely take advantage of the museum for the
artist’s personal pleasure. In addition, works like The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends and Piss
Piece, 1970, in which he urinated into a metal container in front of a live audience after
imbibing great quantities of beer, drew on masculinist and hedonistic tropes such as
excessive alcohol consumption and scatological humor. Through a miming of juvenile
rebelliousness, the work spurned conventional notions of “serious” art, and as such,
presented itself as a world apart from more well-known works of conceptual art that
adopted an ascetic, distanced affect (as reflected in the liberal use of black and white text and
deadpan documentary photographs). Although the irreverent tone that Marioni struck – one
that taunted the institutional authority and conventions of propriety – seemed sometimes
childish, flimsy or stupid to critics, museum officials and even other artists, Marioni wanted
the work to be taken seriously. My dissertation attempts to do just this, for although my aim
is not to apologize for the juvenility or machismo that characterizes Marioni’s practice, I also
do not believe that these (potentially offensive and often sexist, at least to a contemporary,
8
feminist historian like me) qualities should not immediately disqualify it from closer analysis.
In fact, it is these very aspects – which I also find very funny – that inspired me to delve into
this subject further in order to understand the motivations and historical context that made
this work possible. Ultimately, my dissertation argues that Marioni’s indecorous art actions
should be seen in the context of the countercultural rebellion of the younger generation
against the dominant white, middle-class values and social mores of their elders. In light of
this history, Marioni’s actions can be read as manifestations of this generational attack on
rationalized, bureaucratic society’s repression of individual freedoms. In addition, my study
seeks to demonstrate that underneath the flamboyant, outrageous gestures of Marioni’s
“exploitation” of museums was a serious concern with the contemporary artist’s ability to
function in a commodity-based economy and a studied attempt at exposing the typically
suppressed financial ties that bind the artist to the art institution. As art historian Howard
Singerman observes, the new generation of university educated artists to which Marioni
belongs, had a
relationship to the economics of the art world [that] was more immediate and less
distanced than it had been for previous generations. Educated by the university to be
artists, they understood art on one level as their job, their source of income; often
they learned it as a kind of marketing and portfolio management.
11

Marioni, perhaps because of his continual struggle to get recognition, did not seek to
obscure the fact that he was, borrowing Singerman’s words, “a producer systematically
linked to distributors and consumers.”
12
Instead, Marioni took up the business of being an
artist as the very subject of his work.

11
Howard Singerman, “Chris Burden’s Pragmatism,” in Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey, ed. Anne Ayres and Paul
Schimmel (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 23.
12
Ibid.
9

San Francisco in the 1960s: Countercultural Revolt
In a 1995 essay, critic, curator and early champion of conceptual art Lucy Lippard
sought to explain “why I talk about Conceptual art in political terms when, looking back,
most of it seems supremely apolitical,” a question often put to her “by younger students of
the period”:
With a few exceptions, the art was apolitical, but in an art world that still idolized
Clement Greenberg (who in turn publicly abhorred Pop and Minimal art), that
denied even the presence of political concerns, and offered little or no political
education or analysis, Conceptual artists, most of whom were then in their twenties
and thirties, looked and sounded like radicals.
13

Indeed, although conceptual art hardly looks political now, because of its disregard for
traditional notions of artistic value, artists believed in conceptual art’s liberatory potential. It
was absolutely tied up with the politics of the time, and artists like Marioni, who converted
to conceptualism in the late 1960s, believed that by doing so, they were making a political
statement. Marioni explained in a 1986 interview, part of which was cited above: “It was a
time of artists taking a moral position – not all artists, but say, Conceptual artists – taking a
moral position, having an ecological awareness, being anti-materialist, being against the
Vietnam War.”
14
If this sounds vague and unspecific, it was because Marioni himself was not
committed to any specific political cause and did not actively participate in any social protest
movement. Yet like most conceptual artists, he clearly felt that the stakes involved in making
conceptual art were greater than the art sphere itself. Lippard, writing in 2009, also observes

13
Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer
(Los Angeles; Cambridge, Mass.: Museum of Contemporary Art; MIT Press, 1995), 27.
14
Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986.”
10
that conceptual artists and critics generally limited their protesting to art world institutions
because that was the sphere that
affected us most, where we had some knowledge and some power (if not much) – in
other words, where we could effect change. The idea was that the revolution would
happen because of radical change in every sector. The sum of the parts would add up
to permanent political change.
15

Thus although conceptual art may seem apolitical and art-world-centric to contemporary
eyes, it had a decidedly radical and even moralistic valence in the Vietnam War era. I am not
trying to argue that conceptual art generated tangible political changes (although it certainly
did effect change in the art world, for example, compelling museums to be more critical of
their own practices), but I do want to emphasize how it was aligned with the 1960s and early
1970s leftist rebellion against the oppression and domination of industrialized society –
including the rationalized strictures of capitalist culture, programmatic middle-class
expectations for youth, and the brutality of the Vietnam War – or what philosopher Herbert
Marcuse called “The Great Refusal.”
16

My dissertation argues that Marioni’s peculiar conceptualism grew out of his
alignment with this cultural revolt, and that this oppositional impulse was fostered and
enabled by his location in San Francisco, one of the primary American stages where the
social tumult played out. The Bay Area was host to numerous watershed political and
cultural events including mass demonstrations that took place under the banner of the Free
Speech Movement in Berkeley, 1964, or the San Francisco State University strike, 1968-1969;
wild, drug-infused rock and roll concerts like the Monterey Pop Festival, June 1967, and the

15
Lucy R. Lippard, “Curating by Numbers,” Tate Papers, no. 12 (Autumn 2009),
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/lippard.shtm.
16
Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 10; Herbert
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
11
Altamont Music Festival, December 1969; and events that combined campaigning for social
justice with spirited socializing like the Human Be-In, January 1967. Marioni himself linked
the emergence of performance-based conceptual art to this politically-charged milieu,
arguing that the art “developed in the time of free speech, free love, the hippie era of drugs
and rock and roll.”
17

In fact, Marioni revealed his affection for and abiding desire to participate in an
oppositional youth culture represented by both the Beats and the hippies in a telling
observation made in his 2003 memoir: “I was too young to have been a beatnik and too old
to be a hippie.”
18
Like many young musicians, artists and poets in the 1950s, Marioni was
attracted to San Francisco, specifically the North Beach neighborhood, because of its
reputation as the archetypal bohemian haven. The Beat writers and poets coalesced around a
shared artistic sensibility and a sense of disaffection for and isolation from the mainstream
culture, and they renounced the responsibilities of adulthood including moderation, self-
control and respectability.
19
Attracted to mysticism and Eastern philosophies such as Zen
Buddhism, they also embraced aspects of African American culture including jazz music,
specifically its focus on improvisation, spontaneity and frenzied emotions.
20

When Marioni first arrived in San Francisco fresh out of art school in 1959, he
played conga drums on the street corner and lingered forlornly outside jazz clubs to which

17
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 83.
18
Ibid., 74.
19
Mel van Elteren, “The Culture of the Subterraneans: A Sociological View of the Beats,” in Beat Culture: The 1950s and
Beyond, ed. Cornelis A. van Minnen, Jaap van der Bent, and Mel van Elteren, European Contributions to American Studies
42 (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999), 83.
20
Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1985), 83.
12
he could not afford the admission, so that he could hear the music for free.
21
But before
long, he received his draft notice by the army and left the city to perform his military service.
By the time Marioni returned to San Francisco in 1963, the high tide of the Beat era had
crested.
22
Although Marioni missed the height of the Beat activity, his fascination with Zen,
jazz music and spontaneity that was absorbed from Beat culture would later surface in many
of his artistic projects.
Instead of North Beach, young people fleeing to San Francisco circa 1963 in search
of bohemia more often than not ended up joining the newly emerging hippie movement in
the Haight-Ashbury district, which at the time was “an almost forgotten part of the city, a
working-class, interracial area” with the attractions of a surplus of cheap housing and
proximity to San Francisco State University.
23
Much like the Beats, hippies sought out ways
to push beyond conventional ways of thinking through Zen mysticism and marijuana, with
the added elements of electrified rock music and the hallucinogenic drug acid. In the spirit of
finding new ways of being, they (most of whom were white and middle-class), together with
their contemporaries in the New Left movement, took seriously the notion of alternative
economic and social structures not based in the capitalist marketplace. Not only did they
reject traditional middle-class work and living arrangements, opting to live communally and
to live off welfare checks, but they also participated in the opening of, for instance, free legal
clinics and food cooperatives.

21
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 63–64.
22
According to historian Alice Echols, by 1965 North Beach rents had skyrocketed and the neighborhood had lost its luster
as the center of hipness. Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The ’60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), 19.
23
Ibid., 19, 21.
13
The attitudes of the counterculture – as well as Marioni’s provocative, bodily actions
– can be better understood through an examination of ideas that emerged in some of the
more utopian currents in the social theory of the period. Postwar leftist intellectuals
complained that the standardized, bureaucratic organization of government and corporations
had permeated all areas of human life, thus suffocating the imaginations, liberties and desires
of the people. For example, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a professor
at the University of California, San Diego from 1965 to 1976 and widely admired by activists
and artists, complained in 1964 that “the productive apparatus,” or industrialization along
with its attendant automation and bureaucratization, “tends to become totalitarian to the
extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes,
but also individual needs and aspirations.”
24
Although the mechanization and centralization
of societal functions had the potential to make production more efficient and to free
workers from mindless labor – that is, to be a democratizing, liberatory force; instead the
“surplus of freedom” that was produced enriched only a few, and became a deterministic
and controlling force over society. What Marcuse desired instead was, as suggested in his
book Eros and Civilization, a liberal, socialist society in which “the body would be
resexualized” and traditional family structures would disintegrate.
25
Philosopher Norman O.
Brown, who was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Bay Area from
1968 to 1981, celebrated the infant’s lack of bodily and sexual taboos and capacity for play.
In his 1959 book Life Against Death, which reinterprets Sigmund Freud’s theory of

24
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 3.
25
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). as quoted in Myriam
Miedzian Malinovich, “On Herbert Marcuse and the Concept of Psychological Freedom,” Social Research 49, no. 1 (Spring
1982), http://myriammiedzian.com/Spring_1982.html.
14
sublimation, Brown claimed that “[u]nderneath the habits of work in every man lies the
immortal instinct for play. The foundation on which the man of the future will be built is
already there, in the repressed unconscious.”
26
Yet while Brown recognized that a return to
infantilism was no solution, he and Marcuse, perhaps unwittingly, paved the way for the
1960s and 1970s countercultural challenge to the work ethic, and the movement’s
preoccupation with childhood pleasures, the body, sex, and intoxicants.
Marioni’s work as well as the emergence of unorthodox and “libertine” hippie
lifestyles must also be seen as part of a larger assault on civility and a broader cultural shift
toward informality that was occurring throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As historian
Kenneth Cmiel argues in his illuminating 1994 essay, “The Politics of Civility,” the
counterculture and the political Left saw rules of decorum as simply another form of
repression of individual freedoms by the liberal managerial state.
27
Thus they deplored and
dispensed with conventions dictating the ways one should live or behave in everyday life.
Along with the previously described changes in living arrangements and the relaxation of
sexual mores, there was also an increasing looseness in other areas of comportment
including language (i.e., the increasing use of slang or expletives) and styles of dress and
appearance (i.e., the adoption of casual clothing or an unkempt, scruffy look).
28

Furthermore, Cmiel convincingly demonstrates that the break with established decoru
often strategically provocative. Dissidents like stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who was
m was

26
Norman Oliver Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 34.
27
Kenneth Cmiel, “The Politics of Civility,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David R. Farber (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 274.
28
Ibid., 269–270.
15
known for peppering his routines with obscenities in the 1950s and 1960s, used these
“strategic acts of incivility” in order to bring attention to the bigotry of American society.
29

Marioni himself was deeply affected by Bruce, recounting an experience of seeing the
latter perform in San Francisco in the early 1960s: “He was from another planet. I heard
things that I had never before heard discussed in public. He talked about sex, drugs, race,
and homosexuality, and he ridiculed religion. Everything Lenny Bruce said was shocking, but
funny too.”
30
Perhaps what Marioni absorbed from the countercultural groups and comics
like Bruce was the utility of a playful, humorous iconoclasm, both to attract attention to and
to contest rigid and oppressive boundaries. As is borne out by his artistic practice that
incorporated beer drinking, communal activities and pranks, Marioni ultimately saw that the
serious and the non-serious could stand in productive tension with one another.
The bohemian and countercultural collectives were also important to Marioni as
models for the kind of community of artists that he sought to build. Because it was an
attempt at forming an oppositional, internally supportive, peer group, Marioni’s creation of a
repertory of conceptual artists was in imitation of the Beats and hippie collectives alike as
well as of other artistic groups like the abstract expressionists. Marioni actively forged this
community through founding MOCA and organizing exhibitions that he actively promoted
to the art press, and by imposing a group consciousness upon a number of disparate artists.
But in order to create this sense of camaraderie, Marioni also had to police the boundaries to
maintain the exclusive atmosphere. Only artists approved by Marioni were welcome to show

29
Ibid., 275.
30
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 64.
16
at MOCA and over time, many artists outside of the group felt that the MOCA circle was
cliquish and unapproachable.

San Francisco’s Art World in the 1960s: “Nothing to Lose”
Although the Bay Area was an epicenter of social upheaval and political radicalism in
the late 1960s, the dominant art scenes in town tended toward conservatism. The city was
teeming with thousands of artists, many of whom had moved to the area to attend or teach
at local art schools, and yet, aside from these educational institutions, the region had little by
way of artistic infrastructure for contemporary art; there was a dearth of museums, dealers
and art publications. This lack, however, provided an opening for artists interested in
experimentation. Brenda Richardson, who attended the University of California, Berkeley in
the mid-late 1960s and worked as a curator at the Berkeley Museum from 1970 to 1974,
remarked: “In the Bay Area, [artists] had nothing to lose, absolutely nothing to lose. There
was no money, there were few galleries, there were no articles, few shows, nothing really.”
31

A distant three thousand miles away from New York City, the commercial and intellectual
center of the international art world, the city’s artists worked in an environment that did not
orient itself toward the market or toward favorable critical attention. With little to gain by
way of recognition or financial rewards, the artistic climate invited experimentation and was
characterized by what Richardson described as an “anything goes” ethos.
32

The smallness of the contemporary art scene in San Francisco was demonstrated by
the paucity of established institutions. San Francisco had three major art museums at the

31
Brenda Richardson, interview by author, February 10, 2009, Baltimore, Maryland.
32
Ibid.
17
time: the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the M.H. de Young Museum and the San
Francisco Museum of Art. The first two were general purpose museums, and only the San
Francisco Museum specialized in modern art (in fact, it would change its name to the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975 to more accurately describe its mission to collect
modern art). Its support of contemporary art in the late 1960s centered primarily on the
exhibition of American abstract painters.
33
The East Bay was home to two museums that
supported contemporary art, but they were young institutions with relatively little power in
the art world. The most important of these was the Berkeley University Art Museum, which
despite its mission to collect across cultures and historical moments, had an emphasis on
contemporary art.
34
This focus was set by the Director Peter Selz, who came to the museum
in 1963 from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and who curated the show
Funk in 1967, which was important for coining and popularizing the term “funk art.”
(Including the work of such artists as Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, Robert
Hudson, Manuel Neri, Harold Paris, Peter Voulkos and William Wiley, “funk art” described
a trend in Bay Area artmaking in the 1950s and 1960s that used humble materials and the
technique of assemblage in a kitschy, ungainly, absurd and irreverent manner.) By 1970,
Richardson had become curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, and she along with Susan
Rannels produced a number of daring, dynamic shows that showcased local contemporary

33
Al Held, Gene Davis, Leon Polk Smith, Frank Lobdell, Edward Corbett and Robert Natkin, for example, all had one-
artist exhibitions at the museum in 1968 and 1969. Exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art, copy located in San
Francisco Museum of Art Archive, San Francisco, Calif.
34
Founded in 1963 with a donation of two hundred fifty paintings and two hundred fifty thousand dollars by painter Hans
Hoffman, the Berkeley Art Museum did not become a full-fledged institution until the fall of 1970 when it opened in a new,
freestanding, modernist building. University of California, Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive website,
“BAM/PFA Mission & History,” http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/mission. In the late sixties – prior to the
opening of the purpose-built structure, the exhibitions occurred in the Power Plant, a large abandoned building on campus,
where curators and artists had a great deal of freedom in exhibition-making and artmaking. Richardson, interview.
18
artists like The Eighties (1970), and Free (1970), both of which included artists closely
associated with Marioni. Interestingly, the museum mounted these shows before it officially
opened its purpose-built building in late 1970. In this same year, the Oakland Museum also
began showing contemporary art after the Art department promoted a youthful George
Neubert to the position of Director and Head Curator.
35
But the Oakland Museum was
founded only the year before and was still a young institution with little prestige. Also
beginning in 1970, the de Saisset Museum at the University of Santa Clara, an hour’s drive
south of San Francisco, under the direction of curator Lydia Modi-Vitale, opened their doors
to contemporary conceptual and video art and gave opportunities to Marioni and other
avant-garde artists. While the support of contemporary art by these smaller institutions
helped to sustain the greater Bay Area art scene, they were primarily low stature local or
regional institutions and did not change the fact that the San Francisco art infrastructure was
quite limited.
In the late 1960s, only a handful of galleries specialized in vanguard art. One of the
most progressive San Francisco galleries in the 1960s was the Dilexi Gallery (1958-1970),
which had been associated with Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, but by 1969, Director James
Newman decided to close the gallery.
36
Wanda Hansen also ran an important gallery, which
showed mostly Bay Area Figurative artists associated with the San Francisco Art Institute;
she later merged her business with Diana Hansen’s, thereby forming the Hansen-Fuller

35
George Neubert, telephone interview by author, August 27, 2008.
36
After leaving the gallery, Newman founded the Dilexi Foundation, which engaged in two notable projects that were
aligned with the conceptual thinking embraced by Marioni. Newman organized with local educational television station
KQED a series of thirteen one-hour programs created by artists, and he realized a public event of thirteen outdoor
environmental art events in Bernal Heights (September 12, 1969). This latter event was intended to be preview of a much
larger mass public event to take place throughout the month of September in 1970, but the this mass event was never
realized. Christina Orr-Cahall, The Dilexi Years: 1958-1970 (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1984), 19–20.
19
Gallery. Under the direction of Carol Lindsley (who was partners with Richardson), the
Cellar at Resse Palley was also a place for avant-garde art. In any case, galleries were not a
dominant part of the Bay Area contemporary art scene.
The San Francisco art scene also lacked critical art publications and an enthusiasm
for aesthetic discourse. Although Artforum, what became the nation’s premier contemporary
art publication by the 1970s, was founded in San Francisco in 1962, the editors moved its
offices to Los Angeles in 1965 (and later to New York).
37
James Monte, a curator at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art in the late 1960s remarked that the Bay Area did not allow
editor Phil Leider to fulfill his ambitions for the magazine’s growth, which was in large part
due to the limitations of the market and lack of art dealers who formed the advertising
base.
38
Coverage of the Bay Area by national art publications was usually absent altogether,
and if it existed as it did briefly in the early 1970s in Artforum and Arts Magazine, it was
limited to a review that packed short accounts of several events into a single article.
39
The
only major regional art publication was Artweek, a weekly newspaper founded by Cecile
McCann in 1969 (its inaugural issue was January 1970) in the East Bay town of Castro
Valley. McCann, who had originally moved to the Bay Area to study ceramics, contributed
many articles to the first issues of Artweek and provided a great service to the West Coast art
community by founding this publication. Despite its excellent coverage of art events in

37
Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, 14. James Monte, a founding editor of the
magazine in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 106. In 1967, Artforum made
its final move to New York under pressure from its primary advertisers, New York galleries, and in its interest to become
“national.” Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (New York: Praeger, 1974), 157–158.
38
James Monte quoted in Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, 106.
39
In the September/October 1970 through September/October 1971 issues of Arts, Brenda Richardson contributed a “Bay
Area Report” or a review of Bay area events, but it along with all other “Reports” outside of New York were terminated
afterwards. Artforum’s formal coverage of San Francisco also ended around this time, in the first issue of volume ten
(September 1971), when Artforum discontinued a section of reviews of shows in San Francisco and other cities.
20
Northern California, however, it rarely offered sustained criticisms of art and did not reach a
national or international audience.
Testimony to the absence of an intellectual artistic climate in the Bay Area is
provided by artist James Melchert, who was close to Marioni in the early 1970s and who
taught at the University of California, Berkeley throughout the 1960s and 1970s until he
moved to Washington, D.C. in 1977:
[We in the Bay Area] didn’t have…much critical or analytical discourse. Absolutely
lacking. If there were a panel discussion, and you’d have a crowd of sixty people,
[who] would come to hear three or four artists talk – essentially it was clowning
around, and no discussion that was in any way illuminating or penetrating. It would
be entertaining. And I have to admit my own mentor, Pete[r] Voulkos, he
discouraged any kind of critical investigation. Now this was characteristic of the
whole Bay Area.
40

Artist Dennis Oppenheim, who grew up in Richmond and studied at Stanford in the late
1960s, likewise complained about the lack of theoretically rigorous discussion in California:
California artists don’t speak….There simply wasn’t [a discourse]. There were
attempts at critiques and schools. But the conversations were often limited and
short-ranged because I think there was this sort of general distrust of language as
something that should be replaced by visual.
41

The lack of in-depth discourse in the San Francisco scene contrasted sharply with the New
York art world. When Richardson began getting to know New York artists beginning in
1972, she found a milieu that was very different from California: “I was shocked, [the artists]
watch everything they say, they watch everything they write. They say, ‘Well, I can’t show at

40
James Melchert, interview by author, August 12, 2009, Oakland, Calif.
41
Dennis Oppenheim, interview by author, February 20, 2009, New York, New York.
21
this gallery, I have got to show at this other gallery.’ It was all strategy.”
42
In New York, as
well, critics wielded enormous power and fostered the formation of tendentious coteries of
artists. In a 1977 article, New York critic Lawrence Alloway described how other New York
critics Clement Greenberg in the 1950s and 1960s and Robert Pincus-Witten in the late
1960s and 1970s, for example, each coined terms – “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and “Post-
Minimalism,” respectively – to corral a group of artists into a movement. Using their intellect
and influence, these critics not only decided what artists were worthy of coverage in their
publications, but were also able to persuade museum staffs and dealers to show the artists
they championed.
43
In addition, not only did the New York artistic climate mix together
critics and artists, but it also expected artists to have a theoretical vocabulary with which to
frame their work. Artists in New York were simply more attuned to, as well as restricted by,
the art world around them.
This absence of critical scrutiny, and the concomitant freedom from being
categorized into a movement prematurely, helped to foster a more open, experimental
artistic milieu in the Bay Area, allowing artists like Marioni to experiment with humor, play
and lightheartedness in their work. Richardson attributes much of this openness to the
influence of artist William T. Wiley, who was arguably the most admired artist in the Bay
Area in the 1960s and early 1970s as the only local artist of his generation to gain national
prominence: “It was only because that tone had been set by in the most essential way by
Wiley – that anything goes – that humor was allowable.”
44
A professor of art at the

42
Richardson, interview.
43
Lawrence Alloway, “The Artist Count: In Praise of Plenty,” Art in America 65, no. 5 (October 1977): 105–106.
44
Richardson, interview.
22
University of California, Davis, Wiley became known for his fantastical drawings and
paintings, although he also experimented with performance, video and film. But it was not
so much the form of his work that affected the Bay Area art community so much as his
accepting embrace of new approaches to artmaking, what Richardson described in 1973 as
being “totally receptive to new ideas and seemingly unorthodox proposals and projects.”
45

Indeed, this was an attitude that fostered the radical early work by his student Bruce
Nauman, who is now one of the most respected conceptual artists in the world. A 1967
article published in Art News featuring four artists in the Bay Area including Wiley, Nauman,
William Geis and William Allan, also confirmed the playful tenor of the art scene in San
Francisco: “There is a willingness to be unpretentious, unsolemn, jok[e]y. [San Francisco
artists] seem to aim at being deliberately non-impressive.”
46

This relaxed and uncompetitive atmosphere in San Francisco contrasted strongly
with the environment in New York, where artists, evidently so intent on maintaining an aura
of seriousness, rejected humor outright. Richardson remembers:
Now you get to New York City, forget humor. No, no, no. Anybody that’s got
anything funny in their art is just thrown out of the club. It was so shocking to me,…
it was so different, there was no room for funny. There wasn’t funny.
47

Curator Constance Lewallen also noted this tendency by East Coast artists circa 1970 to
“[disdain] humor, taking it for a lack of gravitas.”
48
The careerism and competitiveness that
characterized New York artistic circles tended to make humor a taboo subject in art, or as I

45
Brenda Richardson, William T. Wiley (Berkeley, Calif., University Art Museum, 1971: University Art Museum, 1971), 10.
46
Joseph Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker, “The Way-Out West: Interviews with 4 San Francisco Artists,” Art News 66, no. 4
(1967): 39.
47
Ibid.
48
Constance Lewallen, “A Larger Stage,” in State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, ed. Constance Lewallen and Karen
Moss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 99.
23
will argue later, even if the work contained humorous elements, it was often occluded by the
critics that wrote about it.
Interestingly, Marioni himself did not see other the Bay Area art world as so open. In
the 1960s, when Marioni settled in San Francisco, he felt like an outsider to the small Bay
Area art scene, which in his view was dominated by figurative and funk painting and
sculpture, and to this day, Marioni complains that Wiley and other artists of his generation
never attended MOCA events in the early years.
49
As he observed:
When I arrived in San Francisco, I might as well have moved…from Europe or
Mars. If you didn’t go to the SFAI [the San Francisco Art Institute], or you didn’t
work in a figurative style,…then you weren’t a part of the Bay Area style….funk
artists were really figurative artists, too.
50

Marioni’s assessment of the Bay Area scene was not altogether accurate in that significant
pockets of non-figurative or non-funk and non-SFAI-affilated communities did exist, and
that some of these very same “funk” artists – like Wiley – created proto-conceptual works
(one of which Marioni included in a 1969 show he curated at the Richmond Art Center), and
in fact, two of the artists that Marioni became very close to, Terry Fox and Howard Fried,
had direct contact with Wiley while they were still developing their artistic interests: Fox
participated in an art exchange with Wiley in 1967 (the two artists traded ordinary household
dust by mail), and Fried studied with Wiley as a graduate student in the Davis art program.
Yet it is understandable that Marioni felt a sense of isolation because he did not attend art
school in the Bay Area. There and throughout California, most artist communities were

49
Marioni listed Robert Hudson, Manuel Neri and Peter Voulkos along with Wiley as other artists from the older
generation that never came to MOCA. Marioni felt they rejected MOCA because “[t]hey were threatened by it. Because we
[conceptual artists] were the new generation that were rejecting, leaving that stuff [funk, figurative art] behind.” Tom
Marioni, interview by author, August 17, 2009, San Francisco, Calif.
50
Tom Marioni, interview by Karen Tsujimoto, DVD, color, sound, Oakland Museum, 1999, copy located in Tom Marioni,
personal archive, San Francisco, Calif.
24
oriented around educational institutions rather than around a gallery, as they might be in
New York. In addition, no obvious artist watering hole like Max’s Kansas City, a bar that
served as a gathering place for New York artists in the 1960s and early 1970s, existed in San
Francisco. Without any local school affiliation, Marioni did not have a ready-made group of
artistic interlocutors.
Furthermore, although San Francisco provided a low-stakes environment in which to
make their work, it did not mean that conceptual artists were actively supported by local
institutions. Fried recounts that “there was a real discrimination against [conceptual art]”
unlike what he had seen in other cities in the world.
51
He added that “there were people in
the museum world who just didn’t think [conceptual art] was art” and refused to acquire the
work for their institutional collections.
52

Given the low-stakes environment of the Bay Area art world and its distance from
the high-stakes New York scene, Marioni had the freedom to develop a homegrown
conceptualism, a more casual, socially-oriented, interactive kind of conceptual art than that
which had dominated the airwaves. But it is not as if San Francisco artists were unaware of
their counterparts in New York; they simply had more freedom in deciding how to engage
with the propositions and theories posed by the leading artists and more flexibility in
breaking with the art world’s prevailing rules without suffering any consequences since their
work was under so little scrutiny. While sociability and jocularity certainly do not exclude
intellectualism, Marioni’s art practice, with its emphasis of socializing, irreverence and

51
Howard Fried, interview by author, January 14, 2008, Vallejo, Calif.
52
Ibid.
25
drinking beer, was less about theorizing and more about interacting, doing and having fun.
53

In fact, Marioni’s work could be said to have been a kind of anti-New York art, a deliberate
attempt at desacralizing the high seriousness that characterized the East Coast avant-garde
scene. In addition, in contrast to much of the cerebral work that is commonly associated
with conceptual art today, Marioni’s oeuvre foregrounded not so much the idea of the work
(which is how Marioni himself put it in his calling card definition), but the immediate,
durational experience of encountering the work that both artist and spectator underwent.

Part Two: Conceptual Art and Its Discontents
Conceptual Art’s Origins in Postwar Modern Sculpture

Reflecting on his state of mind in the mid-late 1960s, Marioni proclaimed in his
recent memoir:
Sculpture was where it was at, an intellectual pursuit, no longer architectural
ornamentation. In the 60s, Minimal Sculpture, and then Anti-form Sculpture, had
taken the stage away from painting. Even Andy Warhol declared painting dead.
Painting had no more power.
54

53
Although it may not be readily apparent in his work, Marioni was in fact very interested in theorizing and writing about
art, but ultimately he lacked the critical thinking and verbal skills to excel in this field. He offered up his services to the
newly founded Artweek in December 1969 and contributed a single, rather racist article to one of the first issues. Tom
Marioni to Cecile McCann, December 2, 1969, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley,
Calif.; Tom Marioni, “Black Art,” Artweek 1, no. 3 (January 17, 1970): 3. He also sought out writing opportunities with
Artforum. Artforum editor John Coplans playfully declined Marioni’s offer in a 1971 letter:
Dear Thomas:
I now you have tride hard but a riter you are knot.
Love,
John
John Coplans to Tom Marioni, n.d. [location in archive suggests date of November 1971], Museum of Conceptual Art
Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
Consistent with his abiding interest in writing about art, Marioni long aspired to publish his own art publication
and succeeded in doing so in 1975 with the first issue of Vision, a limited edition journal that ran for five issues until 1981.
The publication consisted mostly of artists’ pages showcasing works of art, but Marioni also wrote an introductory article
for each issue. Marioni was able to found his own publication in large part because his second wife whom he met in 1974,
Kathan Brown, was owner of a successful press (Crown Point Press) that could support the printing and distribution of the
publication.
54
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 82.
26
Like other artists of his generation, Marioni associated painting with all that was traditional
and outmoded in artmaking. While some rejected sculpture alongside painting, Marioni
retained his commitment to sculpture, even after becoming a conceptual artist in 1968. For
him, conceptual art simply represented the most progressive and evolved development in
sculptural practice. Indeed, as our gloss of post-war art history will show, much of what
becomes understood as conceptual art had its origins in modern, postwar sculpture.
When conceptual art emerged in the late 1960s in New York, Modernism – a critical
tradition associated with critic Clement Greenberg (I use the term in capitals to refer to this
tradition) as well as the postwar art that became associated with it – was both ascendant and
at the same time under assault. As art historians Charles Harrison and Paul Wood put it,
artists and critics saw Modernism “both as entrenched and dominant and as conservative and
critically exhausted.”
55
Privileging the internal formal relations of the work, Modernist
criticism conceived of the art object as autonomous and separate from social and historical
circumstances, and believed that the object’s role was to wholly engage the spectator,
removing him or her from the contingencies of space and time. The theory assumed that a
single disinterested, measure of quality in art existed, and upheld the notion of artistic genius
and greatness (which is, of course, not limited to Modernist criticism but goes back to
Vasari).
To be sure, since the 1950s, many artists pursued strains of artistic practice that did
not conform to the Greenbergian ideal, not least those associated with the Pop, Fluxus and
Happenings movements, yet Modernist ideals were nevertheless dominant in the 1960s. It

55
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, “Modernity and Modernism Reconsidered,” in Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties
(New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with The Open University, London, 1993), 207.
27
was only with the ascendancy of minimalism in 1968 that the dominance of Modernist
painting and sculpture crumbled.
56
Although in his influential article “Specific Objects”
(1965), minimalist artist Donald Judd spurned the categories of painting and sculpture
altogether because he felt they were overly predetermined and exhausted – especially in light
of Greenberg’s vigorous advocacy of self-referentiality and medium-specificity – he
nevertheless described a new type of “three-dimensional work” made by artists including
John Chamberlain and Claes Oldenburg that curiously resembled sculpture in its occupation
of three-dimensional space. His criticism aside, Judd’s own works – abstract three-
dimensional objects that were serial in fashion rather than singular and monolithic and that
used industrial materials that were foreign to art production – helped to expand the
possibilities of artmaking. While Judd was ready to jettison the idea of sculpture, another
minimalist artist, Robert Morris, was more typical in his continued use of the category
“sculpture,” even while reinventing its definition. In “Notes on Sculpture, Parts 1 and 2”
(1966), he critiqued the traditional sculptural idea of composition as a process of relating
parts to a whole and proposed a new kind of “literal” sculpture that created a “strong
gestalt,” that is an art object that did not seek to create illusion but made the viewer aware of
his or her actual experience with the art object.
57
Morris thus identified the conditions of
placement and viewership as key to a work’s meaning.
In the same issue of Artforum – a special issue devoted to “American Sculpture”
(Summer 1967) – in which Part 3 of Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” was published, critic

56
James Meyer identifies 1968 as the year that minimalism became dominant. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in
the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 249.
57
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 1-3,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison
and Paul Wood, New ed. (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 828–835.
28
Michael Fried’s famous rebuttal, “Art and Objecthood,” also appeared.
58
Fried, one of
Greenberg’s protégés, objected to the Minimalist espousal of the circumstances under which
the beholder apprehended art, pejoratively calling it “theatrical,” and defended the primacy
of the autonomy of the object and of medium-specificity.
Yet Fried ended up losing this battle. Too many artists had already put aside
Modernist principles of judgment and deliberately and knowingly made their works
“theatrical,” that is, engaged with the site and contingent on the viewer. Artists like Carl
Andre, Robert Smithson, and Robert Irwin created new types of sculpture that were
conceived in relation to their sites. In the meantime, sculptors in England including the duo
Gilbert and George as well as Richard Long were actively reinventing the idea of sculpture,
transforming it from an aesthetic object into a set of performed actions by the body (e.g., a
narrated performance in the case of Gilbert and George and a country walk in the case of
Long). By calling his actions and situations extensions of his sculptural practice, Marioni
participated in this seemingly limitless expansion of sculpture, particularly as expressed
through the body.
Meanwhile, artists and critics began to understand the new forms of art not so much
as sculpture, but as conceptual art. The aforementioned seminal article, “Paragraphs on
Conceptual Art,” was actually published in the same special issue of Artforum (Summer 1967)
that was devoted to “American Sculpture.” If minimalism began the challenge to the
Modernist aesthetic order, then conceptual art, with its deliberate attempt at evacuating
evidence of the artist’s skilled hand and the rejection of traditional aesthetics, took the

58
Artforum, v. 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967).
29
reimagining of the aesthetic order even further. Art historian Hal Foster provides a useful
summary of the shift away from Modernist principles that occurred in the 1960s:
the normative criterion of quality is displaced by the experimental value of interest,
and art is seen to develop less by the refinement of the given forms of art (in which
the pure is pursued, the extraneous expunged) than by the redefinition of such
aesthetic categories....the intent of artistic intervention becomes less to secure a
transcendental conviction in art than to undertake an immanent testing of its
discursive rules and institutional regulations.
59

Thus Modernist painting was replaced by an art that transcended traditional artistic mediums
and that challenged the conditions of art production and display. Conceptual art became one
of the key new terms used to describe work that was radically challenging the conventions of
Modernist artmaking.

Conceptual Art’s Critique of the Auratic Art Object and the Authentic Artistic Subject
Conceptual art was one of the new modes of artistic practice that grew out of a
generational revolt against Modernism. By analyzing Marioni’s artistic and curatorial oeuvre,
we see how the development of conceptual art pushed violently on previously inviolate
principles of art, including the aura of the art object and the authentic artistic subject as
embodied in the skilled and expressive craft of artmaking.
One of the earliest critical appraisal of conceptual art was an essay by Lippard and
fellow critic John Chandler that was published in the February 1968 issue of Studio
International. This landmark article, “The Dematerialization of Art,” identified a trend toward
the “dematerialization” of art, or the paring down of visual forms and shifting away from the

59
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 58.
30
rarified art object.
60
At this relatively early moment in the history of conceptual art (this
article appeared just several months after the publication of Lewitt’s “Paragraphs on
Conceptual Art”), Lippard and Chandler identified two tendencies in contemporary art:
art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied; in the second case,
matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion. If the completely
conceptual work of art in which the object is simply an epilogue to the fully evolved
concept seems to exclude the objet d’art, so does the primitivizing strain of sensuous
identification and envelopment in a work so expanded that it is inseparable from its
non-art surroundings.
61

Whether this art was a theoretical proposition or an ephemeral action, conceptual art
radically redefined the work of art as something very different from the aesthetic,
autonomous objet d’art. Rejecting conventional aesthetic concerns, artists increasingly made
“black paintings, white paintings, light beams, transparent film, silent concerts, invisible
sculpture,” that is, objects that reduced visual complexity and eliminated the necessity for
highly specialized skill on the part of the maker.
62
As such, conceptual art staged an attack
on the stable, cohesive, material art object – an assault that had begun with the dispersed,
serial works of minimalism (and the temporal experiments of Fluxus and Happenings) in the
prior decade – that was so central to Modernist notions of painting and sculpture.

Marioni’s works participated in this dematerialization, not only in ephemeral
performances like Piss Piece, but also in process-driven works like Birds in Flight, 1969, which
was fabricated at the site of exhibition by tossing crumpled up sheets of colored
construction paper against the wall and allowing them to fall on the floor into an arbitrary
pattern. Because this work required no artisanal skill to create and was made out of common

60
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36.
61
Ibid., 31.
62
Ibid., 36.
31
construction paper that would be thrown out at the closing of the exhibition, Birds in Flight
literalized the increasing dispersal of the art object.
What Marioni’s works also exemplify is conceptual art’s rejection of the Modernist
concept of art as autonomous and self-contained. Echoing Lippard and Chandler’s claim
that the art became “inseparable from its non-art surroundings,” critic Brigid Pelzer recently
observed about art in the late 1960s and early 1970s:
Visual art – by constantly and declaratively dissolving borders, changing its
perimeters of intervention, and the agreements as to what was acceptable or not, in
order to do away with its allegedly fallacious autonomy once and for all – not only
ran the risk of diluting itself in anecdotal productions, but above all became
indistinguishable from culture in the broadest sense of the term.
63

Indeed, conceptual artists like Marioni, by making quotidian activities and materials the stuff
of his art, created work that resembled banal life rather than transcendent art, and elicited
suspicions that the work was not really art, but a scam, a joke or just plain stupid.
One of the appeals of conceptual art for some avant-garde artists was its perceived
ability to disrupt the process of commodification of the art object. Lippard and Chandler
mention this briefly in their article: “since dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic
materialism is denied along with physical materialism.”
64
This sentiment is supported by
statements by such artists as Morris, who observed in 1969:
you can’t deny that there are certain feelings, I think, on the part of everybody that
have to do with not liking that kind of reduction of art to a commodity....You could
overemphasize that, but I think it is undeniably there – that resistance to art as a
commodity.
65

63
Birgit Pelzer, “‘Cache-toi, Object!’ The Unattainable Revolution,” in Behind the Facts: Interfunktionen 1968-1975, ed. Gloria
Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2004), 65.
64
Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34.
65
Robert Morris in interview with Patricia Norvell on May 16, 1969 quoted in Patricia Norvell and Alexander Alberro,
Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner
by Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 61.
32

Some recent scholarship, however, contests the prevalence and strength of these feelings
among conceptual artists. In his 2003 book Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, art
historian Alexander Alberro contends that New York conceptual artists working with the
dealer Seth Siegelaub always intended for their work to be sold, and indeed conceived
creative ways to market their dematerialized art.
66
In addition, artist and critic Andrea Fraser
argues that in fact, “the predominant orientation of conceptualism was not to refuse to sell
an artwork, but to control it.”
67
I believe that a spirit of anti-commercialism certainly
pervaded conceptualism, but that this stance was more tied up with an anti-Establishment
posture rather than a flat rejection of the market. This is particularly true of West Coast
conceptualism – which is to say that it would be more accurate to describe San Francisco
conceptual artists as anti-Establishment rather than strictly anti-commercial. Given that they
were already so insulated from the commodity-driven art world by virtue of their remote
physical location, distancing themselves from this world was not their most pressing
concern.
As the necessity of a rarified, aesthetic and saleable object was rejected, so was the
requirement that an object embody an artist’s creativity or bear an obvious intervention of
the artist’s hand. In other words, the shift away from traditional, studio-crafted art toward
temporary, situational work not only threw into question what constituted an art object, but
also the notion of what counted as artistic labor. Indeed, conceptual art challenged the cult
of the authentic artist subject, one that fetishized the “hand” of the artist. This fetishization

66
Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
67
Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere? Part II,” in
Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005), 63.
33
is present in both a more traditional, artisanal notion of artmaking as a specialized skill as
well as the mythic construct of the abstract expressionist painter. This later model – of an
artist who expressed his individual creativity and originality through his gestural brushstrokes
– was advanced not only by Greenberg, but more directly by rival critic Harold Rosenberg.
68

Conceptual artists actively rejected the expressionist model, as demonstrated by a comment
made by Weiner in a 1972 interview, which expanded on an earlier assertion that anyone
could fabricate his work: “It becomes Expressionist to say, ‘I am the only one who can make
this work, there’s not another viable means of doing it.’ I find Expressionism related to
aesthetic fascism.”
69

The literature now commonly refers to conceptualism’s removal of evidence of the
artist’s exquisite handcraft as a “deskilling” of the artist, although many scholars now prefer
the term “reskilling,” in reference to the fact that artists had to develop a different set of
skills to function as artists.
70
In Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999),
Singerman argues that the growth and influence of graduate art school programs helped
drive the transformation of what counted as artist’s work that occurred in the 1960s and
1970s.
71
According to Singerman, the artist’s ability to theorize about her work supplanted

68
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 (December 1952): 22 reprinted in Harold
Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 23–39. For more
on how this myth was perpetuated in the mass media, see Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27–113.
69
Weiner’s quote was originally published in Willoughby Sharp, “Lawrence Weiner at Amsterdam,” Avalanche 4 (Spring
1972): 70 and was cited in Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” xxxiii note 22.
70
See, for example, Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography In, or As, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering
the Object of Art: 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles; Cambridge, Mass.: Museum of
Contemporary Art; MIT Press, 1995), 263; Helen A. Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen .A. Molesworth
(Baltimore, Md.; University Park, Pa.: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 32.
71
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1999).
34
the acquisition of concrete, manual techniques as the central and fundamental skill taught in
graduate art programs. Hence the deskilling of the artist that we see in such works of
conceptual art as Birds in Flight is connected to changes in the educational training of artists
that occurred in the postwar era. Curator Helen Molesworth proposes that we view this
transformation of artistic labor in the larger context of postwar era late capitalism. In an
insightful 2003 essay titled “Work Ethic,” Molesworth describes the process by which artists
became part of the growing professional managerial class as the society experienced a shift
from an industrial to a postindustrial, service economy.
72
As artists became credentialized as
artists in the higher education system, they turned to intellectual, administrative activities as
authentic venues for and outputs of artistic labor.
73

In her weighty book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist
(1996), art historian Caroline Jones also identifies the late 1960s as a period when the way
that artists worked changed dramatically.
74
She argues that artists moved away from a
solitary, studio-based practice focused on form and object-making to a “post-studio”
practice in which artists embraced the urban, industrial world in which they lived and
worked collaboratively with others in the production of their work, and one in which they
“located [that production’s] meaning in discourse rather than in the object.”
75
For Jones,
artist Robert Smithson is the paradigmatic post-studio artist: “Smithson and his interpreters

72
Molesworth, “Work Ethic.” In a separate essay, Molesworth also persuasively argues that the challenge to artistic labor
that we see in the 1960s is perhaps Dada’s greatest legacy. Describing Dada as “a profound rejection of the production of
objects with traditional artistic skills,” Molesworth supplies Dada’s inventions of montage, the readymade, and chance as
evidence “abdications of traditional forms of artistic labor.” Helen A. Molesworth, “From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back
Again,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 178.
73
Molesworth, “Work Ethic.”
74
Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist.
75
Ibid., 58.
35
completed the radical transfiguration of the artist from a studio-bound modernist solitary to
the unbounded ‘post-studio’ artist of the postmodern world.”
76
Indeed, conceptual art, at
least in the earthworks of Smithson or in the situational performances of Marioni, embodied
a new method of working as an artist, one that rejected traditional Modernist principles of
solitary, studio-bound labor.
Art historians have routinely linked the willful deskilling of conceptual art to the
larger crisis in the arts regarding notions of authorship and authenticity. The late 1960s saw
the publication of Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” and a profound
skepticism in the idea of artistic genius and originality perhaps most evident in the stagings
of BMPT, a collaboration of the four French artists Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel
Parmentier and Niele Toroni. On various occasions between 1966 and 1968, BMPT enacted
a live performance in which each artist selected a nondescript, abstract motif and repeatedly
painted it on canvas after canvas, thereby demystifying the artist’s creative process normally
hidden behind studio walls and resulting in what art historian Benjamin Buchloh, comparing
them to Warhol, called “the aesthetic of anonymity.”
77
The members of BMPT opted to
evacuate their technique of skill because they sought to parody established notions of
authorship and originality using, of course, the vilified medium of painting. However, as my
analysis of Marioni’s work corroborates, although Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni
may have cultivated an aesthetic of anonymity, they were not actually interested in being
anonymous; in fact, the artists joined together in a collective for the express purpose of

76
Ibid., 275.
77
Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”
October, no. 55 (Winter 1990): 139.
36
attracting the attention they felt they would not be able to attain as individuals.
78
In addition,
each of the motifs that the BMPT artists chose – including Buren’s vertical stripes – became
identified with the particular artist as his personal trademark style.
Both Buren and Marioni realized that being anonymous did nothing to advance their
standing in the art world, and actively sought ways to publicize their work. As mentioned,
Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity demonstrated the ways in which conceptual
artists and dealers went to great pains to publicize and market their work, whether through
disseminating catalogues, granting artist interviews, organizing public discussions by the
artists, or creating certificates of authenticity and ownership.
79
Advancement of their careers
and recognition were their goals, not the erasure of authorship. Thus my dissertation, rather
than fixating on how conceptual art attacked the authorship function of the artist, instead
emphasizes how conceptualism revised the definition of what the artist did, or put a
different way, reimagined what constituted legitimate, appropriate labor for the author-artist.
The spectator’s experience of conceptual art was categorically different from Fried’s
idealized disembodied beholder. If the Modernist art object was one that encouraged
individualistic aesthetic contemplation (and in Fried’s mind, permitted the immediate
apprehension of the work in a flash), the conceptual art object denied the beholder a
conventional sense of beauty, and strove to demonstrate the continuity between the work of
art and the mundane world. As Lippard and Chandler observed, conceptual works “have set
critic and viewer thinking about what they see rather than simply weighing the formal or

78
As Buren remarked in a recent interview, “It was nearly impossible to make a mark as an individual artist at that time so
we decided if we worked together and said the same things we could make our voices heard.” Daniel Buren interviewed by
Brendan Davis, August 17, 2009, Art Interview Online Magazine,
http://www.art-interview.com/Issue_013/interview_Buren_Daniel.html.
79
Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity.
37
emotive impact.”
80
Yet this was not without problems. As Buchloh intoned in a 1990 article
about conceptualism: “in the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the
manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criteria of distinction…all the
traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment – of taste and of connoisseurship – have been
programmatically voided.”
81
By nullifying the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment,
conceptual art often created an uncomfortable experience of befuddlement and even anger
in the viewer. In fact, Marioni remembers today that “a lot of people back then thought
[Conceptual Art] was Con Art, that [Con Art] was short for Conceptual Art.”
82
In other
words, the audience members suspected that the work was fraudulent, that it was an attempt
to dupe them into thinking it was a serious and legitimate work of art.
This problem of confounding the viewer is, of course, not limited to conceptual art,
but exists throughout the history of modernism, as art historian Michael Leja observes in a
discussion about artist Marcel Duchamp:
Modernism…necessarily presented its audiences with far greater risks of fraud than
the academic art it challenged. Modernism’s perpetual reinvention of the
fundamental tenets of artistic practice and aesthetic evaluation meant that its public
would always be scrambling to devise frameworks for interpretation and estimation
of quality. When standards of achievement are constantly being overturned, the
window for deception is thrown wide open.
83

Although I have discussed Marioni as an artist who rejected certain conventions of
Modernist art – including the expectation that art was an autonomous, precious art object –

80
Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 36.
81
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” 118.
82
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
83
Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley; London: University of
California Press, 2004), 246. A similar argument is put forth by art historian Jeffrey Weiss, who observes that “hoax, as a
claim, an act and a condition, suffuses the experience of modern art.” Jeffrey S. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art:
Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-gardism, C. 1909-17 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), xvi, 163.
38
he nevertheless belongs in the trajectory of avant-garde modernism to which Leja refers, a
trajectory where the attack on doctrinaire practice was the norm.
84
With the advent of
conceptual art in the late 1960s, the deskilled and deaestheticized work once again asked the
viewer to accept something that dispensed with traditional, optical measures of artistic value
and to find new ways to make sense of the work. Indeed, as much as conceptual art works
revised the function of the artist, it also reimagined the role of the spectator.

Conceptual Art’s Participation in the Critique of Art Institutions
Contemporary art historical scholarship sees conceptual art as a practice closely
linked to the critique of art institutions; an entire subset of conceptual art is now known as
“institutional critique.” The origins of this theorization began in the mid-1980s, when such
art historians as Buchloh and Craig Owens began to uncover a tendency in the early 1970s
work of such American and European artists as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel
Buren and Hans Haacke to expose the naturalized or suppressed economic and ideological
logic of art institutions, with perhaps the most programmatic statement of the development
of institutional critique from within conceptual art being Buchloh’s 1990 article “Conceptual
Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.”
85

84
Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp, 246.
85
Artist and critic Andrea Fraser explores the origins of the phrase “institutional critique” in the 1980s in Andrea Fraser,
“From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” in Institutional Critique and After, ed. John C. Welchman,
Southern California Consortium of Art Schools Symposia 2 (Zürich: JRP/Ringier; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art
Publishers, 2006), 125–126. Contrary to Fraser’s speculation that she was the first to use the phrase “institutional critique”
in print, according to Alexander Alberro, it first appeared in an article by artist Mel Ramsden in 1975. Alexander Alberro,
“Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 8. Ramsden’s text is reproduced in Mel Ramsden, “On
Practice,” in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 170–205. The art historical literature has also corralled the 1980s and 1990s work of such artists as
Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Sherrie Levine, James Luna and Fred Wilson under the banner of institutional critique.
39
Buchloh argues that early conceptual art, by exhibiting in the gallery space the previously
hidden administrative apparatuses – including copying machines, art criticism, and
documentation of artworks – that legitimated objects as art and upheld the institution of art,
brought attention to the administrative processes and infrastructure themselves as subjects
that were ripe for interrogation.
86
Hence early conceptual art, which was characterized by a
more stylistic interest in the trappings of administration, that is, an “aesthetic of
administration,” eventually gave way to a more analytical interrogation of the processes of
administration that predetermine the production and reception of art, or a “critique of
institutions.”
87

Yet conceptual artists were not alone in making art institutions the subject of intense
scrutiny and criticism. For conceptual art emerged at a time when an entire generation of
young artists were questioning the relevance and function of the museum, often expressing
strong animosity toward them. Allan Kaprow, for example, declared in 1967 that:
I am put off by museums in general, they reek of a holy death which offends my
sense of reality. …most advanced art of the last half-dozen years is, in my view,
inappropriate for museum display. It is an art of the world: enormous scale,
environmental scope, mixed media, spectator participation, technology, themes
drawn from the daily milieu, and so forth. Museums do more than isolate such work
from life, they subtly sanctify it and thus kill it.
88

Kaprow’s censorious and trenchant language was echoed by Smithson in his 1972 essay
“Cultural Confinement”:
Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral
rooms called “galleries.” A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and

86
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” 140–143.
87
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969.”
88
Allan Kaprow, untitled artist’s statement, Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition Sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967), 3.
40
becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world….Works of
art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce
them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from
the rest of society.
89

Accusing museums of enervating new forms of art that sought to engage with the world,
Kaprow and Smithson harshly labeled them mausoleums or prisons.
The anger against museums was strong and pervasive enough in New York that a
vocal group of artists banded together in a group called the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) to
mount demonstrations against the city’s major museums from 1969 to 1971.
90
Conceptual
artists and critics including Haacke, Kosuth, Lewitt and Lippard were active in the group.
The AWC had numerous complaints against the museum, including the latter’s elitism and
its tacit support of the Vietnam War, but AWC’s largest concern was that museums were not
adequately meeting the needs of living artists, which is reflected in the former’s demands that
included adding artists onto museum boards, granting artists free admission to exhibitions,
and maintaining an artist’s registry.
91
Following the lead of ethnic minorities, women and
students of the 1960s and 1970s, artists, too, became activists for their own rights. The AWC
focused its complaints on the art museum because of the latter’s status as society’s most
prestigious and sanctioned authority on art. It was, as the art historian Douglas Crimp

89
Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October 1972): 39.
90
Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt and Lucy Lippard, for example, were closely involved with the group.
91
Furthermore, a list of demands from March 1970 had the temerity to ask museum staffs to take on as their public mission
the responsibility for advocating for artist’s welfare: “[m]useum staffs should take positions publicly and use their political
influence in matters concerning the welfare of artists, such as rent control for artists’ housing, legislation for artists’ rights
and whatever else may apply specifically to artists in their area.” This list was published by Lippard, one of the few critics
involved with the organization, in “The Art Workers’ Coalition: Not a History,” Studio International 180, no. 927 (November
1970) reprinted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York Since 1969,” in Alternative Art,
New York, 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (University of Minnesota Press; Drawing Center,
2002), 88. Also see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009).
41
remarked, the summation or “representation of the institutional system of circulation that
also comprises the artist’ studio, the commercial gallery, the collector’s home, the sculpture
garden, [and] the public plaza.”
92
The museum also became an obvious target of critique
because it displayed art in such a way that reinforced the Modernist idea of the autonomous
art object. As Modernism came under attack, so did its institutional representatives.
Yet despite the angry rhetoric lobbed at museums, artists were nevertheless reliant
on institutional support and approval for their career advancement. Although Kaprow and
Smithson attempted to shift their practice away from museums to some degree – Kaprow
through his large-scale participatory performance events and through an increasing
dependence on educational institutions, Smithson through his site-specific pieces in the
landscape – even important artists like them had to make concessions to the exhibitionary
apparatus. Smithson’s development of the “non-site” object which sat in the gallery space
was a kind of capitulation to the need to show in the museum setting, and Kaprow’s
previously quoted statement about the deadening power of museums itself was printed in
the catalogue for a solo retrospective of the artist’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum.
93
As
he explained:
speaking practically, museums are often useful for there are not yet agencies or
means for otherwise making art accessible to the public. As a compromise…between
what is and what should be, I have agreed to a museum exhibit of that part of my
work from the past which was still partially conceived in the gallery spirit. I would
have preferred a factory building, loading platform or storage yard. But these being
unavailable, I shall try to camouflage the museum environment as much as possible.
One new work, however, a Happening, is to be presented outside the premises.
94

92
Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), 17.
93
Smithson’s “Cultural Confinement” was also originally published in an exhibition catalogue, that of the international art
exhibition, Documenta V (1972), which he submitted in lieu of contributing an artwork.
94
Allan Kaprow, untitled artist’s statement, Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition Sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum, 3.
42

Indeed, an artist did not turn down the opportunity to show at a museum lightly, for the
museum was the most prestigious and visible place for an artist to exhibit, and offered a
pathway to a successful career and to a secure place in history.
95
In addition, Kaprow also
recognized the important societal role that museums could play as a platform for the
promotion of art, and calls for not “the abolition of all museums…but rather the extension
of the museum function into the domain of contemporary needs, in which it can act as a
force for innovations lying outside of its physical limits.”
96
Museums were here to stay; it
was up to artists to determine how to come to terms with them.

Part Three: Marioni’s Curatorial Forays into the Museum
Like Kaprow, Smithson and other avant-garde artists of their generation, Marioni felt
ambivalent toward the museum. On the one hand, he deeply respected the institution, and
appreciated its cultural role of promoting and preserving art. He not only wished to show his
art in museums, but he also desired to become part of the museum power structure by
becoming a professional curator. And yet, Marioni strongly opposed the conservative
policies of established art institutions and felt they were doing a poor job of including
contemporary art and artists into their programming. Much of Marioni’s art practice was
oriented around deflating the pomposity and sanctity of the museum atmosphere or
interfering with the museum’s usual practices of obscuring the heteronomy of the art sphere.
Knowing all too well from his personal career struggles how much artists relied on

95
For an analysis of the important role that museums play for artists, see Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums
in New York Since 1969,” 79–81, 97.
96
Allan Kaprow, untitled artist’s statement, Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition Sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum, 3.
43
institutional support and approval for their career advancement, Marioni sought to expose
his compromised position vis-à-vis the museum through his art. Reproaching traditional
museums for having an outmoded focus on static objects, Marioni – as is seen in his own
curatorial practice – proposed a new museological approach that embraced experimental
ephemeral, durational art forms and treated the artists that made those works as
collaborators.
Marioni is a particularly fascinating subject because of his involvement with different
museums as artist and curator, that is, as a staff member or insider and as an invited guest or
outsider, and sometimes he served in both roles at the same time. In 1968, as he was being
“born again” as an artist, Marioni faced a problem typical to unknown artists – how to make
a name for himself – and rather than stay confined to the conventional role of the artist, he
decided to take on functions in the art world that were normally the responsibility of
curators and administrators. First, he assumed the position of curator at the Richmond Art
Center, which by empowering him with the gatekeeping authority to select artists to be
shown, constituted what he called a “life-changing” experience and a “[move] into the real
art world.”
97
After two years at his post at Richmond, during which he promoted new forms
of art to increasing resistance by his superiors, he opened a new, independent space, MOCA,
which was dedicated solely to conceptual art. Both as curator of Richmond and director of
MOCA, Marioni included himself as an artist in group exhibitions that he curated. Marioni
tried to find a way to make his interest in self-advancement, his concept of art, and his idea
of the museum as a collaborator with the artist, converge. This study, then, probes the

97
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 83.
44
possibilities and limits impinging on Marioni’s ongoing interactions with the museum, both
as a traditional site and as an experimental space.

The Founding of MOCA: Do-It-Yourself Conceptual Art
The most important way in which Marioni attempted to make his new vision of the
museum concrete was by establishing MOCA, which became recognized as the first
alternative art space in the Bay Area and one of the first of such organizations in the
country. MOCA was also one of the earliest alternative spaces to receive funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts. A non-commercial, grass-roots exhibition gallery typically
funded by artists or public grants, the artist-run alternative space often focused on showing
new genre art including performance, video and installation. As I will detail later in this
dissertation, the phenomenon of the alternative art space exploded across the country in the
1970s in large part due to an enormous uptick in the number of artists in the 1960s and
1970s, without a concomitant growth in places for artists to show, much less sell, their art.
98

Artists thus felt particularly excluded from and victimized by the elite tastemaking process,
and many started their own exhibition spaces by identifying cheap real estate, rehabilitating
the spaces as needed, and self-organizing shows. The do-it-yourself art space phenomenon
emerged as a kind of grass-roots protest of the traditional museum and gallery.
Artist and critic Julie Ault, who chronicled the development of alternative spaces and
organizations in New York City in her edited volume Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: A
Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (2003), emphasizes the anti-commodity stance

98
Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987); Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University.
45
of the founders of alternative spaces: “During the 1970s and early 1980s, many artist-
initiated alternative spaces and group structures were established as constructive responses
to the explicit and implied limitations of this commerce-oriented world.”
99
Art historian
Brian Wallis, whose essay appears in Ault’s book, similarly characterizes the emergence of
alternative spaces as “part of a radical, utopian effort to circumvent the commercial gallery
system, especially its social exclusivity and economic prerequisites.”
100
Although my project
is indebted to the work done by Ault, Wallis and other authors in Alternative Art, New York, I
depart from their tendency to emphasize alternative spaces as a strategy developed in
response to the commercialism of the art world. Rather, my dissertation, which takes the
significantly less market-driven art community of San Francisco as its backdrop, argues that
the primary impetus for artists to establish alternative spaces was to create exhibition
opportunities for themselves, which they hoped would translate into economic gain, whether
by finding a dealer or helping them to win grants.
Yet I recognize that artists like Marioni founded alternative spaces not simply for
purposes of self-promotion, but also with what Wallis described as “radical, utopian” goals
in mind. But my argument is that they were radical not so much because they were anti-
commercial, but because of their audacity to believe they could invent their own institutions.
This do-it-yourself mentality is precisely what connects alternative spaces to the 1960s New
Left counterinstitution, a parallel, grass-roots, alternative to a mainstream, profit-driven or

99
Julie Ault, Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (Minneapolis; New York:
University of Minnesota Press; Drawing Center, 2002).
100
Brian Wallis, “Public Funding and Alternative Spaces,” in Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for
the Social Text Collective (University of Minnesota Press; Drawing Center, 2002), 164.
46
top-down public institution. In 1968, Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the New Left
group the Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged radicals to:
build [their] own free institutions – community organizations, newspapers,
coffeehouses – at points of strain within the system where human needs are denied.
These institutions become centers of identity, points of contact, building blocks of a
new society from which we confront the system more intensely.
101

The New Left and other social movements of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged citizens to
look skeptically at established institutions while at the same time, instilled in them a sense
that they had the power to create social change by forging their own organizations and
communities. At this time, a host of counterinstitutions in various fields emerged in the
1960s including alternative schools (Mississippi Freedom Schools, Montessori education),
alternative businesses (food or auto repair cooperatives), alternative clinics (women’s health
clinics, non-profit legal clinics) and alternative media (underground newspapers and zines). I
argue that alternative spaces were types of counterinstitutions, specifically counter-museums
or counter-galleries. And yet, I do not mean to overstate the ambitions involved in forming a
counter-museum versus establishing an alternative school or medical clinic. Although
Marioni founded MOCA in a climate where utopian ideas of communalism were
widespread, his ambitions for the space were clearly limited to redressing issues in the art
sphere rather than larger society.
Related to the idea of alternative spaces as counterinstitutions is my claim that
alternative spaces were a type of institutional critique. By creating MOCA, an ersatz,
slapdash museum, Marioni made a mockery of the traditional museum, throwing into relief

101
Hayden’s remarks from “Democracy Is...in the Streets,” Rat 1, no. 15 (August 23-September 5, 1968): 5 quoted in Alice
Echols, “Nothing Distant About It: Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed.
David R. Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 160.
47
their methods of staging authority and grandiosity. When Marioni re-opened MOCA in 1973
in a new space (it had to close its first space in 1972 for lack of funds), he sent out a mailing
that consisted of three cards (Figures 4-6), the first of which proclaimed: “You are cordially
invited to the opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art Wednesday, January 3, 1973, 7 to
11 p.m., in its new quarters occupying 10,000 square feet of exhibition space at 75 Third
Street, San Francisco, California.” The second card added, “MOCA has over 200 works of
art in its permanent collection, 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, a restaurant and
cocktail lounge, and 7 stories of parking available next door.” A third card titled Membership
Application, essentially a form for recipients to fill out to become members, listed a number
of membership categories ranging from a “Regular Member” at a cost of twenty five dollars
to a “Sustaining Member” for five hundred dollars.
The mailing’s detailed listing of MOCA’s facts and figures – presenting it as a
formidable, established institution – deliberately mislead. The restaurant and lounge that he
referred to was a public bar-restaurant named Breen’s on the first floor of the building that
MOCA occupied, which was wholly unaffiliated with MOCA.
102
In addition, Marioni
officially rented only one floor, the second, of the building, which was five thousand square
feet, but he counted the vacant third floor, which was connected to the second floor through
an open staircase, in his square footage calculations printed in the mailing. (Marioni,
however, did take the liberty of using the third floor whenever he needed more exhibition

102
Marioni, however, certainly patronized Breen’s often and even used it as the site of such exhibitions as Body Works, 1970.
In addition, when MOCA was homeless for most of 1972, Marioni continued to regularly frequent the establishment,
occupying a booth located by the bar’s public telephone and making it his unofficial “office” from which he conducted
MOCA business. Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 103.
48
space with the exception of a single year when the owners rented it out to another
organization.
103
)
A visitor to the opening event would see that MOCA was not exactly as advertised.
Not only was the building not as grand as it might have appeared in the description, but no
permanent collection was on display. As San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein
reported, “[MOCA’s] opening exhibition consisted of only the museum space itself.”
104

Marioni’s empty room constituted a resounding rejection of the clutter of objects that fill
most museums, and declared that the durational, ephemeral art featured at MOCA could not
be fixed into a permanent display.
Marioni’s presentation of MOCA in the invitation packet may be compared to
Broodthaers fictional museum project, Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, 1968-72
(Figures 7-8). For the first part of Musée, Broodthaers created a “museum” in his Brussels
home by installing empty picture crates, special lighting, and postcards of nineteenth century
French canonical paintings. He also staged an official opening by sending out invitations to
art world personalities and having the real director of an actual museum make the inaugural
address. Broodthaers’ project, like so many of Marioni’s exhibitions, brought attention to the
importance of the events surrounding the exhibition, that is, to the administrative markers of
exhibition-making, rather than to the artworks themselves, which in Musée were substituted
by empty crates and flimsy reproductions. Described as “a parody of artistic packaging” by

103
In 1974, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which owned the building at the time, rented the upstairs floor to a
nonprofit organization called the Chinese Youth Alternative, which was intended to provide a safe space for at-risk
Chinese-American youth, but Marioni says that it ended up being a hangout for gang members and hoodlums, and the
Redevelopment Agency evicted the organization after about a year. The youths “trashed the place” before they were
evicted, and Marioni decided to make an exhibition of the damaged space and disarray. He printed up invitations and held
an open house to view the “art installation” on November 9, 1974 (Chinese Youth Alternative, 1974). Marioni, interview,
August 17, 2009.
104
Alfred Frankenstein, “Museum of Conceptual Art Is Sort of Opening,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 4, 1973, 42.
49
critic Irving Sandler, Broodthaers’s Musée was not meant to be an actual operational museum
but a farcical interpretation of one.
105
In contrast, Marioni’s MOCA was intended to be an
actual venue to show art by other artists and a serious place for artistic incubation. Yet his
invitation to the new space, which highlighted (and exaggerated) MOCA’s immense square
footage, its eating and drinking facilities and its seven-story parking garage, also had the
effect of ridiculing the marketing ploys of established museums and the staging of
institutional authority. Like Broodthaers’ work, his invitation suggests that so much of the
museum experience had become more about selling the external, surrounding apparatus
rather than the art, and provides a prescient prediction of the future corporatization of
museums.
Despite my presentation thus far of MOCA as a parody of an official museum,
Marioni’s aim in creating MOCA was not wholly parodic, and in fact, was at the same time,
also earnest, practical and self-serving. Take, for instance, Marioni’s choice of the title
“museum” for MOCA, which he said he used because “I wanted [MOCA] to be part of the
establishment right from the beginning.”
106
Although the term “gallery” would have been an
obvious choice for his start-up exhibition venue, Marioni eschewed the word because it
suggested a commercial bent that did not apply to MOCA, which housed a type of art that
was against both a literal materialism in the sense of precious art objects and a consumer
materialism in the sense of the collecting of those objects. Moreover, the notion of the
gallery was simply not weighty enough for Marioni’s venture, which he hoped would wield

105
Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, 1st ed. (New York: Icon Editions, 1996),
95.
106
Carl E. Loeffler, “Tom Marioni, Director of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), San Francisco, in Conversation
with C.E. Loeffler,” La Mamelle Magazine: Art Contemporary 2, no. 4 (Spring 1976): 3.
50
power and authority in the art world. In a kind of self-validating circular logic, Marioni
strategically named the venue a museum hoping that it would persuade people of the
importance of the venue and of the art that was shown there.

The Artist-Curator and the Curator-Artist
By thrusting himself into the position of MOCA administrator, Marioni participated
in a generational phenomenon in which artists acted as curators, critics and dealers.
Although previous generations of artists certainly adopted para-artistic roles, this practice
became much more widespread beginning in the 1960s and was particularly popular among
conceptual artists. In the 1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham ran a gallery (Daniels Gallery,
New York, 1964-65), as did Kosuth together with conceptual artist Christine Kozlov (Lannis
Gallery (later known as the Museum of Normal Art), 1967). And as cited above, Morris,
Lewitt, Kosuth began publishing their own criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Art historian
Mary Anne Staniszewksi refers to the emergence of this figure in the 1960s and 1970s in her
book The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art
(1997), arguing that “a breed of ‘artist-worker’” came to the fore in curator Kynaston
McShine’s 1970 conceptual art exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. These artist-workers “wrote texts as would critics, installed shows as would curators,
printed publications as would publishers, and sold and distributed their work as would
dealers.”
107
Moreover, as alternative spaces proliferated in the 1970s, so did the position of
artist-administrator and artist-curator, for most of these spaces were being founded and run

107
Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 269.
51
by artists. Marioni’s curatorial career is consistent with the artist-worker trend in the late
1960s and early 1970s, and it also presages the phenomenon made popular by such artists as
Fred Wilson in the 1990s when museums began to routinely invite artists to curate
exhibitions using the institution’s permanent collections.
But it was not only artists who took on new functions. Conceptual curators, critics
and dealers began blurring the lines between their primary activities and artmaking by taking
a more tendentious and overtly creative approach to their working methods. Lippard was
exemplary in this respect. Originally a writer and critic, in 1969 she began to curate
“projects” like Groups, which entailed sending a set of parameters (“Photograph a group of
five or more people in the same place, and approximately the same positions in relation to
each other, once a day for one week”) to artists and collating their responses, all of which
were put on display at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in New York as well as published in
the pages of Studio International; and exhibitions like 557,087 at the Seattle Art Museum,
which had such a “pervasive style” that Peter Plagens accused her of being the real artist in
the show, and for which she created an unorthodox catalogue in the form of a set of index
cards.
108
Indeed, as Lippard recently recalled about her late 1960s and early 1970s conceptual
curatorial projects, “I began to see curating as simply a physical extension of criticism,” and
even compared herself to artists, averring that “I had as little baggage as the artists.”
109
The
New York art dealer Seth Siegelaub also began to creatively curate shows and publications in
such a way “that was recognized as being far in excess of that of curator, for he was

108
Peter Plagens, “557,087,” Artforum 8, no. 3 (November 1969): 64. For a more detailed description of Groups, see Charles
Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001), 9–10.
109
Lippard, “Curating by Numbers.”
52
orchestrating and choosing other artists’ works into a series of publications/exhibitions that
were effectively his own artist’s books.”
110

The new approach to curating embraced by Lippard and Siegelaub was necessitated
in part due to the new types of post-studio, conceptual practices that were emerging, a point
that art historian Julie Reiss underscores in her book From Margin to Center: The Spaces of
Installation Art (1999). Because these new works of art, unlike traditional art objects, were not
pre-fabricated, but had to be constructed at the site of exhibition (and this site, too, could be
a non-traditional one – the pages of a magazine in Lippard’s case or a printed catalogue in
the case of many of Siegelaub’s projects), the curator was forced to work more
collaboratively with the artist in realizing exhibitions of these works.
111
An earlier book, art
historian Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994),
also makes the argument that working with new forms of art inspired impresarios Szeemann
and Siegelaub to develop a new curatorial approach. In a chapter centering on two 1969
exhibitions, Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, Switzerland) and Siegelaub’s
January 5-31, 1969 (New York City), Altshuler contends that a new breed of “creative
curator” emerged: “More than assemblers of the new or impresarios of the avant-garde,
people like Seth Siegelaub and Harald Szeemann set the stage for curatorial assumption of
the artist’s creative mantle.”
112
Italian curator Irene Calderoni expands on Altshuler’s and
Reiss’s ideas in an essay titled “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the
End of the Sixties,” claiming that in their “side-taking which departs from the traditional

110
Green, The Third Hand, 5. For an illuminating in-depth analysis of Siegelaub’s practice, see Alberro, Conceptual Art and the
Politics of Publicity.
111
Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
112
Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Abrams, 1994).
53
objectivity of the museum keeper,” these curators of avant-garde art “[come] closer to the
complicity of the militant critic.”
113
By comparing these curators to critics, Calderoni implies
that they act as partial advocates rather than objective scholars.
Indeed, what we are witnessing, as critic Teresa Gleadowe puts it, is “the curator’s
transformation from scholarly art historian, or guardian of a collection, to artists’ co-worker,
a figure completely engaged in the conception, production, presentation and dissemination
of the art of his or her own time.”
114
Writing in a recent book that addresses this new kind of
curating, Exhibiting the New Art: ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969
(2010), she contends that the two exhibitions named in the title of the book (Op Losse
Schroeven: Situaties en Cryptostructures (Square Pegs in Round Holes: Situations and Cryptostructures)
was a show that Wim Beeren of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam staged concurrently
with Szeemann’s exhibition in Bern):
challenged the traditional understanding of a curator’s role as being institutionally
bound, at a distance from artists and rooted in an analytic relationship with art
history. They marked a moment when curators began to work in close partnership
with artists, joining with them in testing the institutional structures that hosted their
endeavors.
115

This shift in curatorial function and style has ramifications for our contemporary moment
when the global, nomadic star curator is regnant. As curator and critic Paul O’Neill observes
in the introduction to his edited volume on curating: “We have seen a gradual change from
the perception of the curator as career and behind-the-scenes aesthetic arbiter to a more

113
Irene Calderoni, “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the End of the Sixties,” in Curating Subjects,
ed. Paul O’Neill (Amsterdam: de Appel, 2007), 63–79.
114
Teresa Gleadowe, “Introduction: Exhibiting the New Art,” in Exhibiting the New Art: “Op Losse Schroeven” and “When
Attitudes Become Form” 1969, by Christian Rattemeyer, Exhibition Histories (London: Afterall: Distributed outside Europe by
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2010), 9.
115
Ibid., 11.
54
centralised [sic] position on a much broader stage, with a creative, political and active part to
play in the production, mediation and dissemination of art itself.”
116
The recent spate of
books focused on the topic of curating attests to the contemporary art world’s
preoccupation with the substantial power and prestigious position now wielded by the
curator.
117

While the aforementioned studies and others analyze the same canonical exhibitions
at internationally-recognized institutions, my dissertation highlights a “peripheral” art world,
in which the shift in the field is registered in smaller, less visible, regional organizations
including the Richmond Art Center and the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco.
What my research reveals is how smaller, regional venues emerged as a way to serve targeted
audiences that larger museums neglected to address. My study also differs from earlier ones
in that it does not focus on a career professional, but on an artist who adopted the function
of a curator. Indeed, Marioni turned to organizing exhibitions as a way to solve the problem
of having few opportunities to show his work. As he recalled in a 1999 interview, “Every
time I wished that someone would organize an exhibition that I would be invited to be in,
and it never happened, I would do it myself.”
118
Hence, his aspirations to be a recognized,
successful artist, is what motivated him to curate.

116
Paul O’Neill, ed., “Introduction: Paul O’Neill Interviewed by Annie Fletcher,” in Curating Subjects (Amsterdam: de Appel,
2007), 12.
117
Recent books published on the topic of curating, particularly contemporary practice, include Hans-Ulrich Obrist, A Brief
History of Curating (Zurich and Dijon: JRP/Ringierand Presses du re ́el, 2009); Marianne Eigenheer, ed., Curating Critique, ICE
Reader 1 (Revolver, 2007); Paul O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects (Amsterdam: de Appel, 2007); Judith Rugg and Miche ̀le
Sedgwick, eds., Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol, UK; Chicago: Intellect, 2007); What Makes a Great
Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage; Chicago, Ill.:
Distributed for Reaktion Books in the USA and Canada by the University of Chicago Press, 2006); Christoph Tannert and
Ute Tischler, eds., Men in Black: Handbuch Der Kuratorischen Praxis = Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice (Frankfurt am
Main: Revolver, 2004).
118
Marioni, interview by Tsujimoto.
55
At the same time, we discover that Marioni’s curatorial approach ended up
coinciding with the new style of curating that was being adopted by professionals worldwide.
In other words, his identity as a conceptual artist and sympathy with other advanced artists
lent itself to the partisan, collaborating-with-artists model of curating that seasoned curators
like Szeemann were already moving toward. In fact, Szeemann visited San Francisco on a
number of occasions in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was looking for artists to
include in When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta 5 (1972), and included a number of Bay
Area artists in his shows, but ultimately never chose Marioni. But nevertheless, Marioni was
in regular contact with Szeemann and I suspect that When Attitudes Become Form may have
inspired The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition and catalogue (although when asked,
Marioni did not admit to this), and that Marioni may have, if only unconsciously, modeled
his practice after Szeemann’s.
119
This new model in turn set the stage for the phenomenon
of the nomadic, superstar curator that emerged in the 1990s. Inhabiting the roles of creativ
professional curator and artist-curator, Marioni embodies the interconnectedness of the two
phenomena and his career provides a compelling prehistory to our contemporary moment.
e

Part Four: Writing on Marioni
Marioni’s Reception in the Histories of Conceptual Art

In pointing to the intersection between Marioni’s Bay Area brand of conceptualism
and the countercultural forces that emerged in the sixties, my dissertation brings to light two
important aspects of Marioni’s work and of the afterlife of conceptualism in the art historical
and critical literature. On the one hand, Marioni’s work has an undeniable carnivalesque air

119
Tom Marioni, interview by author, June 27, 2008, San Francisco, Calif.
56
that accepts the humorous, jocular and irreverent into art; on the other hand, conceptualism
has been treated by some of its proponents, and certainly by critics and theorists, as a style
allergic to the carnivalesque and founded in a highly abstract sense of system, language and
process. My use of the term carnivalesque, borrowed from Russian literary scholar Mikhail
Bakhtin’s analysis of medieval and Renaissance folk culture, suggests that Marioni’s use of
comic gestures, including those that make visible the usually hidden, obscene sexual and
scatological body, sought to invert existing hierarchies and to overturn the hegemony of a
dominant ideology, including the notion of seriousness that emanated from the established
art world centered in New York.
120
Because the carnivalesque was a behavior indulged in by
those in the lower class of society, the use of the term also emphasizes Marioni’s marginal
position in the art world. Continually struggling to succeed and become famous as an artist,
Marioni resorted to unorthodox measures – including pranks, parties, and bodily functions –
that he knew would provoke the art establishment and get him attention, despite his relative
powerlessness.
Pushing against the intellectualizing thematic in conceptualism, however, Marioni
may have suffered a relative eclipse in the history of this period, which has been written by
critics and artists much more sympathetic to conceptual art’s theoretical dimension. As art
historian Tony Godfrey points out: “Those who supported the most theoretical tendencies
in Conceptual art have remained the most vocal, with the result that much that was poetic,
witty or humorous, has been, in comparison, underrated or neglected.”
121
Art historian

120
M. M. Mikhail Mikha ĭlovich Bakhtin, “Rabelais and His World,” in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin,
Medvedev, and Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London; New York: E. Arnold, 1994).
121
One of the few authors who attempted to bring out the lightheartedness in conceptual art, Godfrey is also one of the
few chroniclers of conceptual art that mentions Marioni. Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 15.
57
Michael Corris elaborates on Godfrey’s point, observing that “[t]he academic seriousness
and the philosophical respectability projected by Kosuth’s works from the late 1960s
onwards has done much to contribute to the view of Conceptual art as a practice of
difficulty and remoteness with respect to lived experience.”
122
Assessing the conceptual art
movement retrospectively in 1995, critic Lippard also described it as dry and analytical:
“Austerity took precedence over hedonism, even to the point of deliberate ‘boredom’….
There was a decidedly puritanical cast to much Conceptual art, as well as a fascination with
pseudo-scientific data and neo-philosophical gobbledygook.”
123
While some conceptual art
was certainly austere and somber, my dissertation seeks to recover the humorous aspects of
this work by giving prominence to Marioni, who foregrounds the non-serious pleasure and
sheer fun often involved in the making and experiencing of art.
This is not to say that there was no ascetic or theoretical art in San Francisco, or that
there was no humorous or lively art on the East Coast (although as mentioned, a New York
artist who emphasized the humor of her work would only risk being dismissed as an
unserious artist).
124
Rather, the goal of my dissertation is to expand the interpretative lens for
all conceptual art and to recognize the irreverence and pranksterism in what previously has
been considered high-minded, serious works of art. Existing histories of conceptual artists
tend to gloss over any humor or silliness detectable in the work as though these were foreign

122
Michael Corris, “Joseph Kosuth,” in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery
(Oxford; New York: Berg, 2007), 23.
123
Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” 30.
124
Marioni himself created works that were quite meditative and somber including many drum brush drawings, which he
began making in 1972. To produce one of these works, he would hold a drum brush in each hand and alternately swish
each brush across a piece of paper; eventually the friction of the steel wires being rubbed across the paper would leave a
trace that would become his drawing. In addition, one of Marioni’s closest San Francisco conceptual artist colleagues, Terry
Fox, created a large body of work that was ritualistic and shot through with the artist’s experiences of suffering from and
being treated for lymphoma.
58
to the spirit in which they were designed.
125
For example, critics have treated Vito Acconci’s
Seedbed, 1972, in which the artist masturbated while hidden beneath a wooden ramp in a
gallery installation, as though it were simply about transgressing boundaries between
performer and audience, and have described it as a minimalist object intruded on by
language, but never do they describe it in terms of its most obvious reading, that it is a
puerile joke that turns on the disruption of the staid and pristine gallery space with the taboo
of voyeuristic sex.
126
Similarly, historian Alberro analyzes Weiner’s Two Minutes of Spray Paint
Directly upon the Floor from a Standard Aerosol Can, 1968, by quoting a dry passage by Kosuth
that reflects on whether it qualifies as conceptual art by the latter’s standards. Although from
one angle this work, which is illustrated in a photograph as a circular patch of spray paint on
top of wooden floorboards, is a serious gesture by Weiner, it is, from another angle, a
boorish act of vandalism, which is precisely what makes the work funny and meaningful as a
contradiction of accepted art conventions. Instead of exploring the appearance of the work
and its connection with defacement, humor, and satire, Alberro does not even address the
possibility that the work can be seen as silly.
127

Finally, let us consider Dan Graham’s Detumescence, 1969, in which the artist put out
an advertisement for a “professional medical writer” in the newspaper asking for a scientific
description of the “post-coital detumescence” of an erect penis that the artist wanted to use
for subsequent publication. Godfrey highlights the fact that it is a magazine advertisement

125
The furthest that most scholars have gone is to call the work absurd, as demonstrated by Rosalind Krauss in her 1978
essay on Sol Lewitt. Krauss argues that Lewitt’s systematic way of working should be considered not rational, but obsessive
and absurd. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Lewitt in Progress,” October 6 (Autumn 1978): 46–60.
126
Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 218-220, Kate Linker and
Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s : Redefining Reality (New
York: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 215.
127
Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 45-46.
59
and discusses it as “a strategy for intervention.” While this work is notable for its
manifestation as an advertisement, once again, the erotic content and the puerile fascination
with male anatomy and sexual experience is ignored. The three works I have mentioned and
the failure of their critical reception to connect to the humorous connotations of the work
point to a disconnect between theorizing about conceptual art and understanding the realm
of the ludicrous in which such pranks, chance gestures, sexual lewdness and carnivalesque
inversions gain their meaning. My project, in contrast, seeks to accept the productive tension
between the juvenility of so much conceptual work and the intelligence it serves,
understanding Marioni’s work as both wittingly critical yet also utterly immature.

Marioni and Institutional Critique
Marioni’s affection for irreverent gestures and convivial settings is perhaps also the
reason his relationship to the subset of conceptual art called institutional critique has been
ignored. Like many artists who worked within the premises of an institutional critique,
Marioni made the museum his arena of interrogation; perhaps more than many artists, he
understood from his own personal experience how institutions shaped the production and
reception of art. And like these artists, he depended on the museum, with its rules and
strictures, to be his dialectical foil. If we accept artist Fraser’s characterization that artists
associated with institutional critique unveiled the myth of the autonomy of the artistic
sphere, “which maintained an illusory separation between the paradigmatic and epistemic
forms that constitute art’s symbolic systems and the practical and economic relations that
constitute its material conditions,” then Marioni’s work – which foregrounded his relatively
low status within the art world, the asymmetric power of the institution over the artist, as
60
well as his impoverished state as a materially-bound individual – certainly fits in with this
mode of practice.
128

Yet scholars constructing histories of this subcategory of conceptualism have
overlooked Marioni. Perhaps this is because he, unlike some institutional critique artists who
criticized the ideological power of art institutions, seemed not to rebuke the museum for its
power so much as he sought to tap that power for himself and certain other conceptual
artists. For The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, he held a social event at the museum where
the only invitees were artists. By hosting a party for artists only – and by excluding the
moneyed and powerful trustees and socialites normally in attendance at museum receptions,
as well as the general public – he not only privileged the status of the contemporary artist,
but he also underscored how these special events reserved for art world insiders are
decidedly exclusionary, undemocratic occasions. Thus, what looks on the surface to be an
act of pure sociability was also an act of resistance – but not in the way that fit within the
dominant history of institutional critique, in which the artist figured as the perspicacious,
even heroic critic (even if the artists did not present themselves in this way, their critics have
celebrated them as such) of a tainted commodity-driven art world.
129
By designating the
artist the beneficiary of the exclusive privilege of using the museum’s galleries for a so
gathering, Marioni implicated the artist in the elitist art system that institutional critique
exposed.
cial

128
Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere? Part II,” 77.
129
See, for example, Buchloh’s extolling of the “critical resistance” against the onslaught of the culture industry that served
to make art into a commodity of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Michael Asher in Hal Foster and et al, Art Since
1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 553.
61
Nevertheless, perhaps Marioni’s absence in the histories of institutional critique is
warranted on one account. If institutional critique concerned itself with how art institutions
staged and reified the mystification of the artistic subject and the work of art, then Marioni’s
position was ambiguous. Much of his work plays on the fact that he did not have the status
of a famous artist and did not enjoy the rewards that accrued to one. His works have the
effect of highlighting the ways in which the art institution perpetuated the myth of the great
authentic artistic subject, yet fundamentally he also yearned to be that extolled subject. Thus,
in spite of the fact that he willingly thrust himself into the role of the profiteering villain vis-
à-vis the museum, Marioni nevertheless accepted the existence of the authentic artistic
subject, a concept that sanctioned institutional critique often contested.
It may also be difficult to square Marioni with the aims of institutional critique
because of his shameless careerism. Seeking to divert the power of the museum to himself in
order to advance his own career, he did not conform to the ideal of the intrinsically
motivated artist (rather than one motivated by external rewards), and thus presents a
challenge for art historians accustomed to celebrating – if unconsciously – artists as critical
subjects abstracted from the competitive, materialistic modern world.
130
Indeed, art history
still does the work of obscuring the material demands that impinge on its production.

Marioni and Me: Methodological Issues
It is hard for me to remember how I first learned about Marioni; I only know that it
happened after I left New York City for Los Angeles to pursue my graduate studies. When I

130
Clearly it is impossible to untangle purely selfless motives in artmaking from purely careerist ones. For more on the ways
in which selflessness and commercialism are connected, see Hans Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of
the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 81–102.
62
did start learning about Marioni and his participation in the explosion of performance-based
activity and alternative art venues in San Francisco during the 1970s and 1980s, I was
astonished and perturbed that I had never heard about this scene before. Although the
perilous, endurance pieces of Los Angeles artist Chris Burden and the early video works of
Bruce Nauman (who lived in Northern and Southern California in the late 1960s and
throughout the 1970s) claim a prominent place in dominant art histories, they are the
exceptions. I realized just how much dominant art histories were biased toward New York
City, and decided to center my research on California in an attempt to redress this
imbalance. I eventually chose to focus on Marioni, because as a vociferous defender of body
art, video art and process art since the late 1960s, and as a curator as well as an artist, he was
instrumental to the development of San Francisco as a center for performance, video and
installation art in the 1970s and 1980s, and also served as an early mentor to Southern
Californian artists including Burden and his classmate Barbara Smith.
131
In addition, because
Marioni was an organizer of exhibitions and founder of an alternative space, focusing on
him allowed me to consider the practices of a range of other artists with whom he worked as
well as to explore the changing definition of artistic labor and the ambivalent relationship of
artists to museums.
Despite his inclusion in major museum exhibitions in recent decades, Marioni’s work
is still relatively unknown in the United States outside of California. In the early 1970s,
Marioni received a fair amount of press, and even national notice in magazines like Artforum,
but throughout the 1970s he never was invited to show at any institution in New York, and

131
Marioni gave both Burden and Smith their first shows outside of Southern California (Burden, I Became a Secret Hippy,
October 3, 1971 and Smith, Feed Me, April 20-21, 1973).
63
he was not included in any major international exhibitions. The first time that his work was
shown in a New York museum was in 2009 as part of the exhibition, The Third Mind:
American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.
132
Even in his hometown of San Francisco, he
was hardly a household name. In a 1986 interview, Marioni mentions that the then President
of the Board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had never heard of him.
133

Because my subject is relatively unknown, it creates an immense pressure on me to
justify Marioni’s importance to art history. And given the way that the art history of
modernism prizes inventive and original criticality in its artists, it would seem that the best
way to assert Marioni’s importance would be to show how his work embodies these
characteristics. While it is part of my intention to demonstrate that some of his work is
critical and original, and while I seek to show that his work is more complex and interesting
than the scant attention it has been given would suggest, for me, the most interesting aspect
of Marioni as a subject lies in his failure to achieve the fame and prestige (despite his dogged
self-promotion) that more celebrated artists have. In other words, it is not only an artist’s
achievements but also his failures that need investigation, and it is not only successful artists
but also less successful ones that merit art historical analysis. Yet my study is not such a
departure from conventional art history in that it still remains firmly grounded in the high art
world; I do not, after all, write about a complete outsider to this sphere, but one who was
simply unable to advance to its upper echelons.

132
The publication of Marioni’s engaging memoir in 2003 by his wife Kathan Brown’s Crown Point Press also may have
helped to raise his profile; it certainly provided me with an intriguing source with which to begin my research. Marioni’s
issuing of a memoir corresponds to his longtime interest in writing about art as well as his penchant for self-promotion.
133
Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986.”
64
Marioni’s inability to gain the recognition and material comfort that he desired as an
artist in the 1970s profoundly affected his career decisions, obliging him to find creative
ways to acquire power – and money – in, at least, the local art world. His lack of success in
making a living as an artist in the 1960s, for example, compelled him to apply for a position
as a professional curator at the Richmond Art Center, and it also drove him to create his
own exhibition space as a venue to promote his work. Given Marioni’s career ambitions, the
question might be raised as to why he did not move to New York as so many other young,
driven artists from the Bay Area and other parts of the country did. The answer is that
Marioni simply enjoyed living in San Francisco too much to leave.
134

As an artist who was always “on the make” – that is, seeking a higher status in the art
world and struggling for greater recognition – Marioni is more representative of most
working artists in the United States than an art star. Focusing on a lesser-known artist from a
“peripheral” yet thriving art community, my study then relates more directly to the
experience of most American artists than do those that concentrate on canonical artists.
Indeed, my interest in pursuing this project is not only to uncover the history of a particular
period of artistic experimentation and political activism in a specific place, but also to bring
to light the larger conditions of late capitalism that determine the function of the artist in the
postwar era as well as the challenges of making a living as an artist in the “winner-takes-all”
art star system, one in which a just a few winners gain a hugely disproportionate amount of
the accolades and wealth.
135
Through the careers of less well-known, perpetually struggling

134
As he asserted in his 1986 interview with Jamie Brunson, “[San Francisco] is really the best place [to live] in the world.”
Ibid.
135
For more on the winner-takes-all star system in the arts, see Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?, 107–110; Françoise
Benhamou, “Artists’ Labour Markets,” in A Handbook of Cultural Economics, ed. Ruth Towse (Cheltenham, U.K. and
65
artists, the machinations of the art world exhibition apparatus – particularly the processes of
exclusion – are clearly enunciated. Reflecting on non-canonical artists like Marioni allows us
to see more clearly the biases of art history and canon-formation.
My work is inspired by sociological approaches to art that understand artists as
embedded in networks of cooperation and interaction. Despite my dissertation’s retention of
the monographical approach that obtains to traditional art history, I strive to consider
Marioni’s art not simply as the work of one individual, but as the result of a process of
coordinated activities by various members of society. My dissertation is indebted to
sociologist Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, which provides a fundamental analysis of art world
dynamics and social organization, describing the playing field upon which Marioni acted as
well as sociologist Diana Crane’s The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art
World, 1940-1985, which also provides a model for understanding the important effects of
cooperative networks and institutions on artmaking.
136
Considering Marioni from a
sociological standpoint, my dissertation shows that social, material and economic structures
both delimit and enable artistic agency. Although Marioni did not receive the recognition by
official channels that he desired, it did not stop him from making art, and in fact compelled
him to do things that he may not have tried otherwise.
Although the late 1960s and early 1970s has been an area of considerable scholarly
interest in recent years, no substantive art historical studies of San Francisco art in this era

Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2011), 53–58; Günther G. Schulze, “Superstars,” in A Handbook of Cultural Economics,
ed. Ruth Towse (Cheltenham, U.K. and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2011), 401–407.
136
Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed., updated and expanded. (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of
California Press, 2008); Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde.
66
exist.
137
The lack of precedent made it even more necessary for me to do archival research of
unpublished sources and to conduct numerous interviews of artists, curators and critics
active at the time in order to construct a credible account.
138
Moreover, because almost all of
the works of art that I discuss were ephemeral and durational performances rather than static
objects that I could view in person or glean its essence from a photograph), the most
significant hurdle in completing this study was trying to ascertain what actually happened in
any given performance or exhibition. While some of the works were documented in
photographs, videos and reviews, the documentation was necessarily partial, and oftentimes
I had to rely on the fading memories of my interview subjects in order to reconstruct the
artworks and events surrounding them. I strove to eliminate major oversights and mistakes
by seeking out and comparing multiple sources where possible, but certainly many details of
the original works are lost in my reconstruction.
One of the great challenges that I faced was seeking to maintain positive relations
with Marioni while being respectful of his ego and feelings. When I first began meeting with
him, he repeatedly pointed out to me the “errors” of previous writings about his work,
which naturally made me wary of criticizing and potentially antagonizing him, fearful that I

137
Books that focus on this period include Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (New York: Thames
& Hudson, 2001); Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers; Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge,
Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2004); Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2008); Green, The Third Hand.
138
Despite the lack of sustained art historical attention to this work, several exhibition catalogues and articles published in
the late 1970s and 1980s proved to be valuable research sources for my dissertation including Suzanne Foley, Space, Time,
Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s (San Francisco; Seattle: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
Distributed by the University of Washington Press, 1981); Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong, eds., Performance Anthology:
Source Book of California Performance Art, updated ed. (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press: Contemporary Arts Press, 1989);
Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History; Moira Roth, “Towards a History of California
Performance: Part One,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 6 (February 1978): 94–103; and the recently released Constance Lewallen
and Karen Moss, eds., State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). In
addition, Marioni’s 2003 memoir provided a rich retrospective overview of the artist’s career from his personal perspective.
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir.
67
would jeopardize my access to him and his archive. (Although I could freely access most of
Marioni’s papers at the MOCA archives, which are now housed at the Berkeley Museum of
Art, the artist also kept a large amount of ephemeral material from his experiences at the
Richmond Art Center and at MOCA in his personal files, which I had to obtain through him
directly.) Yet ultimately Marioni has remained available and open to fielding all of my
questions. Certainly he must have felt flattered and honored that I decided to make him the
focal point of my study, and realized that the successful completion of my project would
ultimately benefit him.
Perhaps the main limitation of this dissertation is that I had to rely so much on
Marioni in order to simply to get the facts straight because so little published information is
available. Because he is the center of the narrative, I feel justified in giving his voice more
weight than that of the supporting characters, but I have also attempted to amplify and
complicate his perspective – to shed light on his blind spots – by supplementing it with the
voices of the many others with whom I spoke as well as with information gleaned from
archival material and historical documents.
From my twenty-first century vantage point, I could see that one of Marioni’s most
glaring blind spots was the way that his work reproduced the sexist attitudes and chauvinism
dominant at the time. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, for example, included only male
participants. Perhaps there was no conscious desire to exclude women, but the fact remains
that the event served to create a space for consolidating relationships among men, and
affirmed the idea that only men were qualified to participate in this raucous artists-only
affair. Indeed, the event, which entailed getting drunk and fooling around with the art at a
museum, under no official supervision, is reminiscent of a college fraternity party, when male
68
bonding is also achieved through the collective experience of rebellious rituals and often at
the expense of women. Though this dissertation argues that the culturally rebellious actions
endorsed by Marioni related to a deliberate countercultural strategy against repressive civility,
it also acknowledges that the personal freedoms that the era offered often accrued only to
men.
MOCA, too, was a boys’ club. Particularly in early shows, Marioni did not invite
women artists to show, and instead the women served as secondary helpmates to the male
artists, either as models or audience members to the male artist’s antics or actions.
Traditional gender roles were not so easily overturned. As art historian Reesa Greenberg
argues, even the physical qualities of an alternative space like MOCA could be coded as
masculine. The raw or unfinished industrial space in an off-the-beaten-track locale gave
visitors the feeling of being trespassers or explorers pioneering new frontiers; in other words,
it produced a sense of rugged individualism and adventurousness associated with the
masculine experience.
139
Yet, despite the “rampant sexism” that characterized MOCA, as
female artist Bonnie Sherk put it, she nevertheless found it to be “the most interesting game
in town” and found a “special camaraderie” with the other artists involved with MOCA.
140

As such, MOCA was, to borrow an observation that historian Bradford Martin made about
the Diggers, “contested terrain, in which a shared sense of purpose between…men and

139
Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W
Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 352.
140
Bonnie Sherk, interview by author, January 17, 2008, San Francisco, Calif.
69
women on the one hand and gender-based exploitation on the other existed in a dynamic
and complex relationship.”
141

Of course, the situation at MOCA mirrored the dynamics that characterized the art
world as a whole, and society at large. Lippard routinely witnessed discrimination against
women within the field of conceptual art, noting that many art world denizens justified the
exclusion of women from conceptual art exhibitions by claiming that no women made
conceptual art. In retort, Lippard organized c. 7,500, a show of all women conceptual artists
in 1973, but she, too, admits that her earlier shows of conceptual art included few women.
142

Although Marioni’s San Francisco conceptual art scene was not progressive in terms of
gender equity, many art historians have remarked how the field of conceptual art provided
an opening for women artists (as well as artists of color). As Lippard observed, “the
inexpensive, ephemeral, unintimidating character of the Conceptual mediums themselves
(video, performance, photography, narrative, text, actions) encouraged women to participate,
to move through this crack in the art world’s walls.”
143
Certainly the work of Sherk, and
other such artists as Linda Montano and Lynn Hershman who later became associated with
San Francisco conceptualism, attest to this opening that conceptual art provided.
Marioni dismisses critiques of MOCA as being inhospitable to women and does not
see how his work reproduced a masculinist climate. In fact, Marioni prides himself in
organizing what he considered “one of the first feminist art shows” (California Girls, 1971) at

141
Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2004), 110.
142
Including twenty-five artists and one collective, the exhibition opened in Valencia, California and traveled to five other
venues in the U.S. before ending in London. This was the fourth of a series of shows of conceptual art in which the title of
the show was drawn from the population of the city in which the exhibition was mounted. The earlier shows were title
557,087, 1969 (Seattle), 955,000, 1970 (Vancouver) and 2,972,453, 1970 (Buenos Aires). Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” 23.
143
Ibid.
70
the Richmond Art Center.
144
But if we take feminist art to mean an art practice that advances
feminist values like the critique of patriarchy or that which foregrounds the experience of
women, most of the work in the show would not be deemed feminist. Marioni’s description
of the show as a feminist one is a misattribution or an exaggeration; a more accurate
characterization of the show would be that it was a show of all female artists. It must be
noted, however, that Marioni was fired from Richmond in part for sanctioning the
performance of an unequivocally feminist piece on the opening night – during which Cheryl
Zurligen, a student in artist Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College,
crawled along the floor on all fours while trailing cow’s blood from her body. In addition, at
a time when most art exhibitions included only men, the fact that a show of all female artists
was mounted at all could be said to have been a feminist statement through its countering of
the institutional bias against women. As Richardson commented in a review of the show,
“there was enough there to make a valid ‘political’ point, since many of the women in the
show are not represented in the commercial galleries and have not exhibited previously.”
145

But ultimately Marioni was not fully supportive of the principles of the burgeoning feminist
art movement and the women’s liberation movement (in fact, he had a falling out with his
friend Judy Chicago in the late 1960s because of his unwillingness to support her feminist
interests), nor did he understand how traditional gender roles were reinforced in the art
circle he created and in the individual works that he presented.

144
Tom Marioni, interview by author, January 30, 2007, San Francisco, Calif.
145
Brenda Richardson, “Bay Area,” Arts Magazine 45, no. 6 (April 1971): 75.
71
Parsing the Roles of Artist and Curator
Deciding how to parse the various projects pursued by Marioni as artist on the one
hand, and as curator on the other, was particularly challenging because so much of Marioni’s
curatorial and artistic practice overlapped. His experiences in one role influenced the other,
and by the mid-late 1970s, he even began to call the founding of MOCA, an artwork. Yet, I
decided to address his curatorial works and his individual artworks as two separate genres
because they originated as distinct roles in Marioni’s mind. One reason that he continued to
be both artist and curator throughout the 1970s was because he never became successful
enough in either realm to forsake the other, even though, in the end, Marioni unquestionably
thought that he was, by vocation, an artist. Perhaps if he had become a professional curator
at a large, prestigious art museum (rather than at Richmond and at MOCA), then the
increase in responsibility and the heightened ethical scrutiny that such a job would entail
would have prevented him from pursuing his art career as vigorously as he did. One can turn
this hypothesis around, too: if Marioni received more attention and exhibition opportunities
for his artwork in the 1970s, he likely would have been content to abandon his
administrative roles in the art world.
Although we cannot absolutely and cleanly segregate his work into distinct curatorial
and artistic areas, each of the first three chapters will take up one or the other of these
activities as its starting point and theme. In the first chapter, I focus on Marioni’s tenure as a
curator at the Richmond Art Center, a community museum outside of San Francisco, where
he worked from 1968 to 1971. Marioni’s appointment put him in the relatively powerful
position as gatekeeper, given the smallness of the Bay Area art community. This chapter is
an important introduction to Marioni’s budding curatorial practice, revealing his growing
72
interest in conceptual art, and his emerging style of collaborating with artists as an “artists’
co-worker” or “creative curator.”
Chapter Two describes how Marioni bypassed the established institution altogether
by founding MOCA as a space for cultivating a community of like-minded artists and
supporters, and as a base to which to attach himself and his self-fashioned San Francisco
conceptual art scene. For Marioni, the social bonds created during MOCA events or
exhibitions – which at a conventional art museum were understood as incidental or ancillary
to the art that was exhibited – were a fundamental, constitutive aspect of the program.
MOCA was not a static, lifeless “white cube” vessel for displaying art, but rather a charged
space in which interpersonal exchange was implicated in the making and display of art itself.
Highlighting MOCA’s unique role in early 1970s San Francisco as a site exclusively devoted
to time-based, situational conceptual art, this chapter describes MOCA’s opening event plus
five additional exhibitions held in association with the space.
Whereas the first two chapters address Marioni’s work as a curator, the third chapter
investigates Marioni’s work as an artist, considering four works of performative, conceptual
art that he created in museums in his prankster style of institutional critique. By using
exhibition monies to fund experiences that appeared to simply enhance the artist’s lifestyle –
a private party, a catered dinner, and a working car – he highlighted the heteronomy of the
artistic sphere. This chapter argues that Marioni used these provocative gestures to expose
his (and every other artist’s) dependence on the museum for career advancement while at the
same time to enhance his reputation as an avant-garde artist.
The fourth and last chapter examines MOCA as a pioneer in the do-it-yourself
alternative art space movement that emerged in the 1970s across the United States. Focusing
73
on San Francisco, I describe the factors that made the city a particularly hospitable place for
alternative spaces in the 1970s. The chapter also addresses the fate of alternatives spaces
later in the decade, by examining how government grants made them increasingly
bureaucratized and professionalized, and how MOCA and conceptual art became objectified
and institutionalized as the subject of two exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art in 1979.
The conclusion examines later manifestations of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends,
from 1980 to the present, comparing Marioni’s ongoing, private weekly salons to recent
iterations of the event in which art institutions from around the world invite Marioni to host
free beer drinking parties, open to the public, on their premises. I discuss how this
significant change in the work aligns it more closely with a body of work that emerged in the
1990s called relational aesthetics and how these practices are easily critiqued as complicit
with the encroaching commodification of the cultural sphere. Yet given Marioni’s years of
struggling to be recognized by the international art world, perhaps this opportunity to
collaborate with museums is the natural conclusion to his lifelong desire.
74
Chapter One: Artist as Curator: Marioni at the Richmond Art Center

Part One: Marioni Becomes a Curator
In his 2003 memoir, Tom Marioni describes his appointment as curator at the
Richmond Art Center almost forty years earlier when he was thirty-one years old: “In 1968, I
went to work at the Richmond Art Center, and my life changed. That’s when I moved into
the real art world.”
146
Because Marioni had little curatorial experience, besides a stint in art
school as a preparator and another as assistant to a curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, he
seemed to lack the resume for assuming the single curatorial position at this admittedly small
but reputable institution for contemporary art; yet Marioni did get the job, apparently in part
due to his success in passing a test in which the candidates were asked to identify hand tools
and their uses, implying that one important responsibility of the job was the ability to
physically install the artwork for exhibitions. The other candidate – a woman – was
perceived by the apparently sexist hiring committee as either incapable of or uninterested in
doing the physical work required.
147
Whatever the reasons for his appointment, Marioni
himself later characterized the job as a “lucky break.”
148
As it turned out, it was a lucky break
for conceptual art on the West Coast as well.
The Richmond Art Center was located twenty miles east of San Francisco in a town
with a population of approximately seventy-nine thousand in 1970. Established in 1936 as a
place to hold community art classes, the organization that Marioni joined continued to offer

146
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 83.
147
Ibid., 84.
148
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3; Lynn L. Hershman and Alec Lambie, “Tom Marioni on
Record,” Artweek 3, no. 19 (June 6, 1972): 2.
75
art and craft courses as well as exhibitions.
149
The courses included oil painting, ceramics,
watercolor, weaving and jewelry making, among other creative pursuits.
150
Cecile McCann,
editor of Artweek, the Oakland-based weekly newspaper that covered art world happenings
in California, commented in 1970 that “[Richmond’s] classes are taught by highly trained
professional instructors. Students who attend them can develop professional-level skills.”
151

The Richmond Art Center routinely presented work by instructors and students of the
organization’s courses, and it directly supported the community by exhibiting art made by
local schoolchildren and sponsoring popular “Annuals,” or juried competitions, in painting,
sculpture and craft. Open to anyone who wished to submit, both professionals and
amateurs, and culminating in large group exhibitions of fifty or so of the submissions, the
Annuals represented an important way in which the Center connected with the community.
However, the Richmond Art Center also engaged in an ambitious, contemporary art
exhibition program featuring Bay Area professional artists throughout the 1960s and early
1970s, an unusual and risky program for a civic art organization. In the 1970 article quoted
above, McCann observed that the center had an “excellent reputation among artists” and

149
In the early 1930s, Hazel Salmi, a town resident and artist, obtained funding from the New Deal art programs to teach
art to schoolchildren. Although Salmi began by traveling to schools with her supplies in a suitcase, she decided in 1936 to
formalize her educational outreach efforts by securing a building in which to hold art classes and establishing what would
later be called the Richmond Art Center. Fifteen years later, in large part due to Salmi’s leadership, the center had grown
enough to merit its own purpose-built building in the newly erected Richmond Civic Center Plaza complex along with the
City Hall and the public library. (Stephanie Juno and Nic Paget-Clarke, “An Interview with Performance Artist Stephanie
Juno,” In Motion Magazine, October 4, 2000, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/sjuno.html.)
150
Although Marioni’s primary role was to organize exhibitions, the official job title listed in his contract was Curator-
Educator. John J. Deasy, City of Richmond, California Personnel Department, to Thomas Marioni, June 7, 1968, Museum
of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif. Marioni taught classes on contemporary art and
jazz appreciation to docents and other volunteers at the art center, although never to the general public. Marioni, interview,
August 17, 2009, San Francisco, Calif.. The contemporary art class was called “Current Trends in Art” and included lectures
on contemporary art, numerous tours of local art exhibitions, and screening of art films. Syllabus titled “Current Trends in
Art - Fall 1968,” Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
151
Cecile N. McCann, introduction to “Black Art” by Tom Marioni, Artweek 1, no. 3 (January 17, 1970): 3.
76
“present[ed] excellent exhibits of stimulating vanguard art.”
152
According to George
Neubert, who was an art student in the Bay Area in the 1960s and later became curator at
the Oakland Museum of Art, the highest endorsement for a young Bay Area artist in the late
sixties was to have a show at the Richmond Art Center.
153
Indeed, by the time that Marioni
began working at Richmond in June 1968, a tradition of dynamic contemporary art
programming had already been established by Rudy Turk, who served as Director from
1960-65.
154

The Richmond Art Center was not technically a museum, in that it did not collect or
preserve art on any scale, but even so it was a member of the Western Association of Art
Museums, and it was often referred to as a museum.
155
Marioni certainly considered it a
museum, and always referred to his time there as his “museum” experience, and to himself
as a “museum person.”
156
Marioni represented Richmond in the Western Association of Art

152
Ibid.
153
Neubert, interview.
154
Turk is best remembered for securing a Jasper Johns exhibition for presentation at the Richmond Art Center (Jasper Johns
Retrospective Exhibition, 1962), which was the first one-person exhibition in the Bay Area of the internationally prominent
New York artist. This example, while notable, is not representative of most of the exhibitions at Richmond as it was
probably the only time that a major avant-garde New York artist was shown until Marioni arrived, yet Turk led the museum
down the path of showing serious contemporary art. Neubert, interview; Jim Melchert, oral history interview with Mady
Jones, April 4-5, 1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Rudy Turk, “The Richmond Art Center: July
1960-July 1965,” in Richmond Art Center Thirtieth Anniversary Exhibition (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Art Center, 1967).
155
The list of Western Association of Art members included community art centers like the Richmond Art Center and the
Walnut Creek Civic Arts Center; galleries attached to universities like the De Saisset Gallery at Santa Clara University and
the University of Washington Art Gallery in Seattle as well as full-fledged museums like the Newport Harbor Art Museum
in Orange County, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Art. “New Directions for
WAAM,” Artweek 2, no. 27 (7 August 1971): 2.
156
The American Association of Museums defines a museum as “an institution that collects, preserves, exhibits and
interprets a permanent collection of art.” Edith A. Tonelli, “The Art Museum,” in The Museum: A Reference Guide, ed.
Michael Steven Shapiro and Louis Ward Kemp (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 31. During his tenure at the
Richmond Art Center, Marioni actually began assembling a permanent collection that consisted of works that were shown
in the galleries and subsequently donated by the artists. The first work was Dennis Oppenheim’s One Hour Run (1968)
which was included in The Return of Abstract Expressionism, discussed later in this chapter. The collection totaled about twenty
works at its peak and was sold off years later to benefit the Richmond Art Center. Tom Marioni, interview by author,
August 10, 2009, San Francisco, Calif., Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, February 24, 2010. Marioni refers to
himself as a museum person in Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
77
Museums, and he took this role seriously, attending conferences and networking with
museum officials at more established, prestigious institutions. He even designed a new logo
for the group, which served, perhaps, as a way to increase his own visibility as an artist
among an audience of curators and administrators.
157

Marioni’s museum position gave him credibility in the art world that he had never
had as an artist, and up until he left in 1971, he was able to play gatekeeper and tastemaker in
the San Francisco Bay area scene. To the extent that Richmond had a degree of prestige,
Marioni could affirm the “quality” of an artist or legitimize works as important art. In a 1976
interview, Marioni observed that becoming a curator at Richmond gave him “a kind of social
position, more so than a private one, like being concerned with getting things to the
public.”
158
In other words, not only did the position elevate his status in the art world, but it
also compelled him to be more accountable to a broader audience.
Yet Marioni was not thinking of himself in the role of an art world kingmaker when
he applied for the position at Richmond, but was trying to survive financially, which he
could not do as a full-time artist. Marioni thought of himself as an artist and desperately
wanted to succeed as one, but the occupation provided little income for a relatively
unknown practitioner like himself. Despite the fact that he showed his large-scale abstract
sculptures in a few gallery exhibitions from 1965 to 1968, Marioni had to take on odd jobs in
order to support himself and his family. Married with three young children, Marioni viewed
his work for Richmond as a means to provide for his family in a job that was still connected

157
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
158
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
78
to the art world. His turn to curating was not so much to fulfill an ambition to be a curator,
but to elude the poverty and insecurity of being a freelance artist.
While Marioni was undoubtedly happy that Richmond gave him a more prominent
status in the relatively small Bay Area art world, it also required a kind of sacrifice in terms of
his art and the way he could present it. Yet Marioni would not give up his ambition as an
artist, a decision that created a tension in his career as a curator. In 1976 he maintained, “I
was an artist who happened to be a curator rather than the other way around,” and though
the perceptibly exasperated tone of this remark might reflect Marioni’s irritation that his
curatorial work was overshadowing his art work, this chapter will demonstrate that his
resolute investment in being an artist pervaded his actions from the very moment that he
began working as a curator in the late 1960s.
159

Marioni’s work at the Richmond Art Center took up a lot of time, and this meant
that he had less time to devote to his artistic practice. Athena Spear, an artist who was also
employed as Curator of Modern Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College,
lamented in a letter to Marioni about the difficulties of maintaining an art career while
working as an administrator:
everyone has to make a choice as to how he/she wants to manage [financially]. Some
artists may choose to dedicate their whole time to their art and live on welfare....I
chose a full-time job as a museum curator...at the great detriment and delay of my
personal development as an artist. Some kind of job for making a living is always
available, if one is willing to sacrifice part of one’s art work.
160

159
Ibid.
160
Athena T. Spear to Thomas Marioni, April 19, 1973, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art,
Berkeley, Calif.
79
Marioni, too, had to forego working full-time on his art career for the sake of earning money
as a curator. While Marioni’s art ultimately benefited from his work as a curator, it is true
that his public identity as an administrator had a negative impact on his reputation as an
artist. As he observed in a 1976 interview, it was difficult “to be an artist and a curator at the
same time because nobody [took] you seriously as an artist.”
161
It was as if taking on another
important job in the art world – aside from one like teaching art, which was a position that
one obtained because of one’s skills as an artist – detracted from one’s authenticity as a
devoted artist. Because Marioni occupied an official administrative position within the art
world, it led most of his colleagues to see him first as a functionary, and only secondly as
artist. And along with his power as a curator was his position as a member of the entrenched
establishment, which was especially mistrusted by artists during this time when many public
institutions were under attack.
Marioni’s response to this difficult position was to surreptitiously include himself
into the very exhibitions that he curated at the art center. Putting himself in his own
exhibitions constituted an obvious conflict of interest and violated the accepted rules of
curating, but the fact that he acted in flagrant violation of the moral code of curating reveals
how strongly he desired to work as an artist. The first part of this chapter examines three
exhibitions where Marioni wore both hats of artist and curator – Tom Marioni: Sculpture
(August 29-September 22, 1968), Invisible Painting and Sculpture (April 24 - June 1, 1969) and
The Return of Abstract Expressionism (September 25-November 2, 1969) – and explores the

161
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
80
ethical negotiations inherent in Marioni’s dilemma – that of an artist who is the gatekeeper
of the very structure he seeks to penetrate as an artist.
The second part of this chapter addresses the marked transformation of the roles of
artist and curator that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led to the blurring of
the boundaries between the work of the artist and the work of the curator. Artists were
taking on the roles of administrators in their art practices, and curators were making an art
out of putting together exhibitions, taking a position of visible authorship. Marioni’s
unyielding identification as an artist compelled him to redefine his curatorial work in light of
his artistic practice. Just as the test Marioni passed seemed eccentric to the traditional task of
curating, the hands-on style of curating he began to practice moved the curator from the
distanced, objective broker of works created by others into the that of an artists’ co-worker
or collaborator who was, in critic Teresa Gleadowe words, “completely engaged in the
conception, production, presentation and dissemination of the art of his or her own time.”
162

This was made possible in the realm of conceptual art, where the artist, freed from the
demand to make a technically proficient object, could delegate the fabrication of the objects
to other parties or could designate an activity from one’s lived experience as art.
The third section of this chapter addresses the challenges that arose as a result of
having an aspiring avant-garde artist work at a community art institution. As curator, Marioni
was hired to represent the Richmond Art Center, an institution that had been dedicated to
art as an aesthetic, handcrafted object, but in large part because he identified as a conceptual
artist, he was not satisfied with the conventional definition of the curator, premised on

162
Gleadowe, “Introduction: Exhibiting the New Art,” 9.
81
maintaining the distance and neutrality that conditioned the exhibition of object-based art
and craft that was already familiar to the Richmond audiences. Rather, he used his position
within the institution to challenge received ideas about the definition of art and the role of
the curator, and in his three years at Richmond, he transformed it into a platform from
which to promote a temporal, situational conceptual art that was at odds with Richmond’s
previous institutional sense of itself. At a time when even the most cosmopolitan modern art
museums in New York City were struggling with the increasing demands of contemporary
artists to be better represented in museum exhibitions and collections, and in particular, how
to handle the new forms of contemporary art that resisted traditional museological display, it
is instructive to see how a regional art center like Richmond received these radical art
practices.
163
Ultimately, Marioni’s interests clashed with those of an institution that despite
its historical support of contemporary art, came under new leadership that was more
interested in continuing Richmond’s competing dedication to traditional arts and crafts. Part
Three of this chapter discusses the Richmond Sculptural Annual (February 12 - March 15,
1970), Terry Fox Levitation (September 17, 1970), and California Girls (February 11-March 7,
1971), three exhibitions featuring unconventional artworks and performance pieces that
sparked a strongly negative public response, and ultimately resulted in Marioni’s termination
from the Art

Center.

163
Reiss, From Margin to Center, 70–106.
82
Exhibitions at Richmond: Marioni Installs Marioni
As we have seen, a psychological tension between the roles of artist and curator
colored Marioni’s career at the Richmond Art Center from the very beginning. In a peculiar
twist of events, one of the first exhibitions in which Marioni was involved placed him in the
unusual position of simultaneously playing the roles of artist and curator: as the newly
appointed curator, he installed a solo show of his own work (Tom Marioni: Sculpture, August
29-September 22, 1968). Prior to Marioni’s application for the position of curator, Hayward
King, the Director of the Richmond Art Center and interim curator, had already selected
Marioni for this one-artist exhibition.
164
The display in the Richmond galleries featured
eleven minimal, abstract sculptures in the vein of the Los Angeles “finish fetish” school
including Bent Wood #8, 1967-68 (Figure 1.1), a curving and geometric form on a specially-
built block pedestal, all constructed out of painted wood; Wall No.1, 1966-67 (Figure 1.2), a
curved wall sitting directly on the floor made out of fiberglass; and others made from the
aforementioned materials as well as glass, Lucite, plastic, resin, and aluminum.
165

King’s decision to mount a show of Marioni’s work was made long before Marioni
was considered for the job at Richmond, but nevertheless the fact that the new curator’s first
well-publicized exhibit was of his own work was bound to strike many as a conflict of
interest. Marioni could have chosen to avoid the perceived conflict of interest altogether by

164
King, who had been an artist prior to doing museum work, is most well known as one of the founders in 1954 of the Six
Gallery in North Beach, San Francisco along with Wally Hedrick, Jack Spicer, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan, and
David Simpson. Like Marioni’s own sculpture exhibition, many of the shows that went on display at the Richmond Art
Center in 1968 had been arranged by King prior to Marioni’s appointment, but once Marioni was fully in charge of the
schedule the following year, he turned to more conceptual projects.
165
Critics used the term “finish fetish” to refer to elegant, polished, minimalist sculptures that used new industrial materials
such as plastic and resin. Artists who worked in this vein include Larry Bell, Craig Kaufman, DeWain Valentine and Robert
Irwin. The checklist of the exhibition is listed in Tom Marioni: Sculpture, exhibition brochure, Museum of Conceptual Art
Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
83
forgoing the exhibition – particularly because the work represented a direction that he had
discontinued, a decision that will be elaborated on in the next section – but instead, he chose
to actively promote the show. Marioni wrote a letter to San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred
Frankenstein to inform the latter about the former’s exhibition along with the two
concurrent one-artist shows at Richmond, remarking, “I hope you will have a chance to see
the show – naturally I have a personal interest.”
166
Marioni assured Frankenstein that King
organized the shows, as if to exonerate himself from the misperception that he abused his
curatorial position in order to mount an exhibition of his own art, yet at the same time,
Marioni was not coy about asserting his self-interest. While it may not be surprising or
ethically suspect that Marioni promoted his own exhibition, this example hints at more
questionable resolutions Marioni hit upon to resolve the conflict between his ambition to be
recognized as an artist and his power to curate artist’s shows.

Conceptual Exhibitions at Richmond: Invisible Painting and Sculpture, 1969 and The Return of
Abstract Expressionism, 1969

By the time Tom Marioni: Sculpture was installed, Marioni was no longer making the
minimal, abstract sculptures included in the exhibition and had made a complete break with
conventional object-based art in favor of conceptual and performative pieces. Like other
artists who took up conceptual practices, Marioni was interested in conceptual art’s
emancipatory potential, that is, its freedom from traditional forms of artistic value. As
Marioni tells it in his memoir, in 1968, he realized that the “finish fetish” sculptures he had

166
As was typical practice at the Richmond Art Center, multiple artists were given independent one-artist shows at the same
time using different spaces of the building. During the same month as Marioni, artists Terence Choy and Larry Foster also
had one-artist exhibitions. Tom Marioni to Alfred Frankenstein, September 3, 1968, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive,
Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
84
been making were merely derivative of Los Angeles art and irrelevant to his surroundings in
San Francisco. While his first forays into conceptual art – including the refrigerator graphics
– involved the use of language, Marioni’s first performative conceptual piece was called One
Second Sculpture (1968), where he tossed an unhoused metal tape measure into the air, creating
a momentary line drawing in space (Figure 1.3).
167
Far from the formal, abstract sculptures
that made up his oeuvre in the mid-1960s, One Second Sculpture embodied Marioni’s idea that
the most cutting-edge art of the time was an ephemeral action rather than a permanent
object. According to Marioni, this shift to temporal and performative art made him feel
more “in synch” or in line with the San Francisco mode of artmaking.
168

As Marioni’s personal art practice grew more conceptual, so did the shows he
organized at Richmond, creating a Bay Area art space that was supportive of avant-garde
work that the museum culture of the time largely ignored. Although many of the shows that
Marioni organized involved traditional painting and sculpture in the usual Richmond format,
the exhibits that are remembered from his brief period there were more radical. Two of the
most important conceptually-oriented group exhibitions, Invisible Painting and Sculpture and
The Return of Abstract Expressionism, illustrate the penetration of conceptual art and
performance on the West Coast and Marioni’s own evolving curatorial approach. Because
the experimental form of the artwork broke with many of the standard conventions of
artmaking and viewership, it required a more creative, unorthodox approach to the task of

167
Marioni created this work independently of an exhibition. Artist Paul Kos recalls that Marioni demonstrated the work to
him in his office at the Richmond Art Center when they first met. Paul Kos, interview by author, August 8, 2009, San
Francisco, Calif.
168
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 83.
85
the curator and the understanding of the art space, which ultimately blurred the boundary
between organizing the exhibition of art and making art.
In spite of the title of the show, which suggested an absence of anything to see,
Invisible Painting and Sculpture (April 24 - June 1, 1969), consisted of thirteen tangible works of
art by thirteen different artists. Indeed, although conceptual art’s focus on the idea rather
than the object led to a de-emphasis or diminishing of the work’s material quality, this form
of art rarely became completely invisible or, to borrow critics Lucy Lippard and John
Chandler’s term, “dematerialized.”
169
In a brief text printed in the exhibition catalogue,
Marioni explained that the exhibition consisted of two different types of art: works made by
“minimal artists, who through a process of reduction have either arrived at partially invisible
objects, or the absence of an object completely,” and works that represented “the negation
of formal art or a new Dada.”
170

In the first category, the exhibition included a group of works that existed as
relatively traditional objects in space, but had literally become less visible through some
process of attenuation of the physical aspects of the artwork. This “minimal” camp was
represented by Los Angeles artist Larry Bell’s glass cube sculpture, which although large and
imposing, allowed one to see through it to the other side (Figure 1.4); Los Angeles artist
Lloyd Hamrol’s installation of monofilament coated in red vinyl, creating two planes of open
space “drawn” into the air (Figure 1.5); and local artist George Neubert’s life-size steel post
and lintel sculpture that outlined an architectural space (Figure 1.6). In these works, the

169
Lippard and Chandler in their 1968 essay also acknowledge that “very little of their [conceptual artists’] work is really
conceptual to the point of excluding the concrete altogether.” Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 34.
170
Tom Marioni, Invisible Painting and Sculpture (Richmond: Richmond Art Center, 1969), n.p.
86
notion of sculpture as a solid, three-dimensional mass was transformed into something open
and transparent. The second group of works in the Invisible exhibition went beyond a mere
attenuation of the sculptural object and instead, substituted a concept or a situation for the
object. San Francisco artist Bruce Conner mailed an empty envelope emblazoned with a
sticker “Do Not Bend” to Marioni (Figure 1.7); while another work by Bay Area artist
William T. Wiley consisted of the words “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH YOURSELF”
lettered onto the glass door at the entrance.
171
A third non-object-based piece consisted of a
recording of electronic music by local experimental musician Warner Jepson.
While Invisible Painting and Sculpture was as much a show of minimal art as it was one
of conceptual art, Marioni ventured fully into conceptual territory with the larger and more
ambitious exhibition The Return of Abstract Expressionism (September 25-November 2, 1969)
(Figure 1.8). Invisible Painting and Sculpture took up only one gallery of the Richmond Art
Center, whereas the later exhibition spilled into all three galleries and the outside courtyard.
Fourteen primarily Bay Area artists or collectives were represented: Bob Anderson, Paul
Crowley, Allan Fish, Terry Fox, Ron Goldstein, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Phil Linhares,
N.E. Thing Co., Ltd., Dennis Oppenheim, Sherry Stewart, Jo Ann TeSelle, Peter Veres and
Tony Gnazzo, and John Woodall. With an emphasis on using mundane, raw materials and
investigating natural processes, the works included temporary installations, sculptural
arrangements, documentation of interventions into the natural landscape, a poetry reading
and a dance piece.

171
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
87
In the brief text printed in The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, Marioni
explained the meaning of his title:
This exhibition of abstract expression is a direct extension of the painting of the ‘50s;
the action is the same only the dimensions are different. The gesture is the same and
the procedure similar if more athletic. The artists exhibit the same love of organic
and natural forces, [sic] they place a familiar emphasis on the role of accident and
chance.
172

In other words, abstract expressionism is revisited through the taking up of techniques such
as gesture, process and chance, and divorced from the fixed trace that was formerly the
focus of artistic interest. Although Marioni does not expressly articulate it in the essay, his
selection of works for the exhibition – which included no paintings, but only temporary
sculptural installations or performances – clearly asserts that the ironizing “return” to
abstract expressionism was manifested not in painting, but in other three-dimensional,
experiential and temporal media. In other words, the “return” actually entailed a major break
with the painterly tradition, whose last, heroic manifestation in modernism was precisely in
the abstract expressionists. The legacy of abstract expressionism loomed large in the San
Francisco area due to the enduring influence of painter Clyfford Still, who taught at the
California School of Fine Arts (which later changed its name to the San Francisco Art
Institute) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, attracting a coterie of dedicated followers that
continued his legacy into later decades.
173

In Marioni’s view, abstract expressionism marked the end point of innovation in
painting, yet it was a source of inspiration for artistic exploration beyond the canvas. His idea

172
Tom Marioni, ed., The Return of Abstract Expressionism (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Art Center, 1969), n.p.
173
A discussion of Still’s legacy can be found in Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History,
188. For more on Still’s connection to younger artists, who became known as part of Bay Area Figuration, see Caroline A.
Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 6–11, 156–162.
88
echoes that of artist Allan Kaprow, who in his essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”
(1958), argued that Pollock “destroyed painting” through his innovation, yet at the same
time created a new realm of possibility outside of the canvas.
174
Kaprow explained:
“Pollock…left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by
the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be,
the vastness of Forty-second Street.”
175
In other words, Pollock showed artists that the locus
of art should move from the sequestered canvas to the everyday environment. In The Return
of Abstract Expressionism, Marioni featured artists who took up Kaprow’s call to make the
quotidian the subject of one’s art, although Marioni displaced Kaprow’s focus on the urban
environment for an emphasis on the natural world, and shifted the geographical coordinates
from Forty-Second Street to the San Francisco Bay.
In recent interviews, Marioni retrospectively refers to The Return of Abstract
Expressionism as an exhibition of conceptual art, but in 1969 Marioni had not yet settled on
the term “conceptual” to describe the avant-garde practices that he featured in his
exhibitions. A small, single printed line of text that appeared on the cover of the catalogue
and poster (Figure 1.9) that Marioni created for the exhibition employed a host of terms to
describe the work: “anti-form soft funk-minimum idea conceptual gravity-produced raw
material earth process impossible ecological performance anti-illusion event art.” The loosely
constructed sentence served as a kind of challenge to traditional writing, and represented an

174
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 2.
175
Ibid., 7.
89
experiment with sound and text in its mimicking of concrete poetry.
176
More importantly,
although Marioni’s jumbled list of descriptive terms may have signaled the imprecision with
which he conceived of the exhibition, it also revealed how these various categorizations of
artmaking overlapped and interconnected. What the terms had in common was a reference
to the kind of art – installation, process or performance – that defied traditional object-
bound painting and sculpture and subverted the terms of the museum’s traditional
legitimizing role. The phrasing also, perhaps unwittingly, marked the difficulty of sorting art
practices into neat categories and caricatured the entire enterprise of labeling art movements.
Although Marioni did not use this word in the poster, “post-studio” is another term
from the late 1960s that can be productively applied to the works in The Return of Abstract
Expressionism. Unlike the notion of conceptual art, this rubric draws attention to the shift in
the conditions of production under which the artwork is made. Coined by artist Carl Andre
in the late 1960s, the phrase “post-studio” referred to a production model in which an
artwork was constructed outside of the artist’s studio, whether at the site of exhibition or
elsewhere, as well as to the type of site-specific art that emphasized the event over the
object, spontaneity over planning, and the intervention of the artist into the world rather
than her segregation away from it. Andre’s understanding of post-studio practice is revealed
in an excerpt from a 1969 interview with art historian Patricia Norvell:
When the Abstract Expressionists were working there was a lot of talk about post-
easel painting and the idea that the easel tradition was over because it was a
limitation. Well, I think a lot of the work being done now is post-studio work. You

176
Marioni’s interest in concrete poetry and word play is demonstrated in his inclusion of a language piece by David R.
Smith in Invisible Painting and Sculpture, as well as a selection of sound poetry in the Return of Abstract Expressionism. While it
was not represented in the installation in the galleries, the artist-composers Peter Veres and Tony Gnazzo were listed in the
catalogue, and during the opening event, the artists sat at a table surrounded by audience members and read their work.
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
90
don’t sit alone in your studio and conceive of things and draw and sketch models
and then make them bigger and larger in the studio and ship them out to a gallery
and then show them and then bring them back to the studio. Now, you go out into
the world and you find in the world what you want and take it to the gallery and put
it together. This is to me like post-easel painting, only it’s post-studio art.
177

Andre is pointing to a trend in the late sixties that implicitly critiqued the traditional model
of an individual artist crafting a work in his personal studio, and thus also the social
separation of the aesthetic and one’s everyday lived experience. Referring to artists like Mark
di Suvero whose sprawling, pedestal-less sculptures were “assembled right in the gallery,”
Andre contrasted the cult of the artist as expert handcrafter or a specialist in expressing the
individual consciousness to the artist as explorer and assembler of mundane, found objects –
objects produced outside the artworld that reflected other intentionalities and processes.
178

Thus, the post-studio artist embraced the everyday materiality of the world and opened up
its processes to the aesthetic sphere. In her book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist (1996), art historian Caroline Jones perceptively noted that the post-studio
shift meant that “[i]nstead of turning away from the world, art became a way of
incorporating its intrusions.”
179
For many vanguard artists in the 1960s and early 1970s, the
incorporation of materials and processes from the world into the event of creating art
constituted a witting critique of studio-made work and the art support structure that
undergirded it. French artist Daniel Buren, for instance, advocated that artists flee the studio

177
Carl Andre, “The Green Gallery Show (1969),” in Cuts: Texts 1959-2004, ed. James Sampson Meyer (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2005), 89.
178
Ibid.
179
Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, 9.
91
because it was so tied to the notion of a discrete, “portable,” “eternal” object that
supposedly carried all of its meaning within it.
180

Whereas the paradigmatic studio object was a unique, static, finished piece, the
“post-studio” end product was event-based and site-specific – that is, made with the specific
exhibition context in mind. As Marioni remarks in his catalogue text, most of the works in
The Return of Abstract Expressionism embodied the archetypal conceptual, post-studio work of
art:
The majority of the pieces exist only for the duration of the show. There are no
photographs in the catalogue because some work cannot be seen before installation.
In fact, several artists have sent only instructions for the creation of their works.
181

Unlike traditional objects of art forged out of art materials in the studio, the post-studio
artworks represented in The Return of Abstract Expressionism were made using easy-to-find,
expendable raw materials and did not bear the obvious mark or hand of the artist; moreover,
they could have been fabricated wholly outside the art world. For example, artist Paul Kos
made an ephemeral, atmospheric work that consisted of simply placing scented oils in the
entry foyer (Odor Displacement, 1969). He also contributed Condensation of Yellowstone Park Into
64 Square Feet, 1969) (Figure 1.10), a bubbling mini-volcano caused by the chemical reaction
of mud mixed with sulfur. Similarly lacking in handicraft were Ron Goldstein’s untitled one
hundred fifty pound heap of sand (Figure 1.11) and Terry Fox’s twin Untitled sculptures,
comprised of two sheets of plastic, one outside blowing in the wind, and another inside

180
Although Buren wrote this text in 1971, it was not published until 1979. Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio,”
trans. Thomas Repensek, October 10 (Fall 1979): 53; Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, eds., “The Function of the
Studio Revisited: Daniel Buren in Conversation,” in The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (Chicago: School of the Art
Institute of Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2010), 163.
181
Tom Marioni, “Introduction,” in The Return of Abstract Expressionism, ed. Tom Marioni (Richmond: Richmond Art
Center, 1969), n.p.
92
being blown by a fan (Figure 1.12). In the case of Mel Henderson’s contribution to the
exhibition, which comprised several dozen logs of split oak wood piled up neatly in the
gallery’s outdoor sculpture court, the artist underlined the blurring of the boundary between
art and serviceable material by specifying that after the show closed, the oak should be sold
to someone to be used as firewood (Figure 1.13); that is, the materials used in making the
artwork could be put to a utilitarian use. Dennis Oppenheim’s contribution involved
documentation of a piece made in the landscape, in this case, the tracks made by a
snowmobile’s skis running over untouched snow over the course of an hour (One Hour Run,
December 1968) (Figure 1.14). Featuring the tracks left by a machine, the work parodies the
fetishization of the artist’s mark that was characteristic of abstract expressionism. Prior to
the exhibition, the artist sent a negative of a photograph to Marioni, and gave the latter
instructions to enlarge it to a scale appropriate for exhibition. (This arrangement most likely
also had to do with the museum’s small budget; mailing a negative that could be enlarged at
the destination was much more economical than shipping a large photograph.) Like many
post-studio works, because One Hour Run was produced outside of the museum and because
the action itself was not expected to remain in perpetuity, the work itself was not exhibited,
only its recording.
Thus, the art on display in The Return of Abstract Expressionism did not gesture in any
way to their preservation, but underlined their ephemerality in existing only for the duration
of the exhibition – making the exhibition the only moment when the works came into being
in a literal, physical sense. As Marioni commented in the catalogue text quoted above, the
absence of images in the catalogue was due to the fact that the works were assembled only
for the installation of the show. As we will see in the next chapters, the temporary, fugitive
93
status of these artworks suggests the central direction in Marioni’s oeuvre, as his work
becomes performative and event-based.

Marioni the Artist in Marioni the Curator’s Shows
One piece in The Return of Abstract Expressionism that epitomized the conceptual, post-
studio ideas outlined by Marioni in the introductory text was attributed to the artist Allan
Fish. The artist’s statement in the catalogue described the work Birds in Flight, 1969 (Figure
1.15) as follows:
Enclosed is a packet of multi-colored construction paper. To install sculpture, sit in a
chair about 10 feet from a wall. Take one sheet at a time and crumple each
one….[as] if you were in a hurry and…[were] throwing it into a waste paper basket.
Throw each piece at the wall trying to keep them generally in a confined area. The
result should be multi-colored birds at the moment of flight after being frightened by
the stamping of feet.
182

In reality, Allan Fish was a pseudonym for Tom Marioni, who wanted to keep his identity
hidden from the Richmond staff and the general public. Like other post-studio works, Birds
in Flight was constructed at the site of installation out of pre-fabricated materials. In other
words, it did not aspire to the ideal of the immutable art work, but instantiated itself in
various configurations that changed based on the particularities of the site of installation.
Marioni further complicated the ontology of the work by mailing instructions for creating
the work (as Fish) to the curator (as Marioni), so that the curator could execute the work on
the artist’s behalf. Like other works in the show, which were not sent by the artist fully-
formed, this piece, too, was constructed on site using instructions by the artist followed out
by the curator – which endowed the curator with the artist’s function. And as with the other

182
Allan Fish in Marioni, The Return of Abstract Expressionism, n.p. The syntax in the original statement is somewhat
confusing; Marioni corrected it in a later version
94
works in the exhibition, the process of making the Birds in Flight shifted it away from the
mark or the skill of the artist. Indeed, insofar as an institutional employee executed the piece
– or performed the handiwork of the artist – even the simple process involved in fabricating
this work is demystified. Although the works in The Return of Abstract Expressionism were
supposed to be seen as extensions of the principles animating the 1950s art movement, the
return operates as a negation on one important level: the trace of the artist’s gesture is
systematically divorced from the artist’s corporeality. Yet one principle embraced by abstract
expressionism that was continued in Birds in Flight is the idea of chance. Just as the
purportedly spontaneous and uninhibited expression of the body created a chance
composition in an abstract expressionist painting, the paper balls in Marioni’s work were
allowed to randomly fall on the floor in arbitrary fashion.
Birds in Flight also embodied the ideas of post-studio, conceptual art in the materials
used. Rather than construct it out of durable materials like marble or bronze that were
sanctified by tradition, Marioni opted to create the sculptural installation out of ordinary
colored construction paper, a product typically used for art projects by children, and then
crushed each piece of paper into a ball as if it were destined for the trash. In addition, the
paper was not employed in the usual manner – as the substrate on which a drawing or
painting was made – but served as the very material that formed the three-dimensional,
sculptural mass. Finally, the finished installation of the piece for this particular exhibition,
that is, this particular instantiation of the instructions written by the artist, was not intended
to be preserved and could be easily swept up and tossed in the garbage at the closing of the
exhibition.
95
While two local reviewers viewed the exhibition positively – Cecile McCann
concluded that “[i]t is a show to think about” and Bill Parker called it “fun (and funny)” –
the exhibition drew strong rebuke from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Thomas Albright,
arguably the most prominent Bay Area art critic.
183
Faced with Birds in Flight and other
conceptual works of art in The Return of Abstract Expressionism, Albright employed a sarcastic
tone throughout his review, using hyperbole to explicitly mock the work.
184
The critic
concluded his review by turning the words of artist Marcel Duchamp on Marioni, suggesting
that reviewing the exhibition was not the purview of a serious art critic like himself:
As Marcel Duchamp once stated that art is anything the artist says it is, I hereby
propose the corollary that nothing will be reviewed by me unless I say it is art. Press
releases and other information relating to unstructured natural and man-made
phenomena will henceforth be referred to the Chronicle’s…editor Margot Patterson
Doss [who authored a weekly column about interesting walks around the city], or the
travel editor, Stanton Delaplane.
185

Albright was appalled by the work’s mocking of the art object as a “thing” made by the
artist’s hand and its glorification of the absence of craft. A work like Birds in Flight implied
that art was easy to make and that it was not a question of skill. Though the aesthetic sphere,
in high modernism, was exempted from the standards of usefulness, artworks were still
supposed to reflect the artist’s intention and labor. Birds in Flight was exemplary in this
respect, as it explicitly required no artistic technique to create and was constructed out of
crushing balls of paper, a gesture that signified throwing them away. If the conceptual artist

183
Cecile N. McCann, “Abstract Expressionism,” unknown source, clipping from Tom Marioni, personal archive. Bill
Parker, “The Artsy-Woodsie Among Us!, New Vistas, October 4, 1969, 4, 10, clipping from Tom Marioni, personal archive.
184
Thomas Albright, ‘Critic Takes a Firm Stand,” San Francisco Chronicle, clipping from Tom Marioni, personal archive. Art
historian Jeffrey Weiss observes that in early twentieth century Paris, the general press also responded to what they
perceived as incomprehensible art by employing strategies of sarcasm and parody. Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art:
Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-gardism, C. 1909-17, xvi, 163.
185
Doss’s popular Sunday column, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1991, was alternately titled “San
Francisco at Your Feet” or “The Bay Area at Your Feet” depending on the destination.
96
– through her disregard for skill, beauty and permanence in the art work – was doing
something that confounded traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment, then Marioni pushed
on this feeling even more, provoking the audience’s outrage by presenting a piece that not
only required no specialized talent whatsoever and the least amount of labor possible, but
also one that equated the art object with rubbish.
Although Albright was satirizing the Duchampian notion that an artist could
nominate anything as a work of art, he astutely noticed that the spirit of Duchamp, perhaps
more than Jackson Pollock’s, haunted Marioni’s conception of The Return of Abstract
Expressionism. Indeed, Marioni considered Duchamp the father of conceptual art, and when
he gave himself the pseudonym Allan Fish, he might have been thinking of Duchamp’s
submission of Fountain, under the pseudonym R. Mutt, to an exhibition held by the Society
of Independent Artists of New York in 1917.
186
The Society board of managers, of which
Duchamp was member, had agreed beforehand to exhibit all works submitted in the sprit of
democracy.
187
A fellow member of the Society board, the painter George Bellows, suspected
that Fountain, essentially a prefabricated porcelain urinal “signed” by the artist, was a ruse
intended to delegitimize the committee rather than a serious submission, and ultimately the
work was not accepted into the show. Following Duchamp’s effort to undermine the
received understanding of art as a handcrafted object by a skilled artist, Marioni took
Duchamp’s gambit to a further extreme; whereas Duchamp’s urinal appeared at least
somewhat sculptural in its solid, clearly delimited and bounded, anthropomorphical form,

186
In his memoir, Marioni declares, “As a Conceptual artist, I would say Duchamp is the father of us all.” Marioni, Beer,
Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 70.
187
See William A. Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” in Marcel
Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Rudolph Kuenzli (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 71, 78.
97
Marioni’s piece departed further from traditional sculpture because it was physically
dispersed and disposable.
Of course, Marioni accepted the Fish piece, whereas the Society’s committee rejected
Duchamp’s, yet the parallel between Marioni and Duchamp goes deeper. Although both
primarily identified as artists (or at least Duchamp did during the readymade period), they
were both involved in the management and selection process of the exhibitions. In their
capacities as official institutional representatives of the Richmond Art Center in the case of
the former and the Society of Independent Artists in the case of the latter, they could only
do so much to change the organizing art institution of which they were a part.
188
To
circumvent this limitation, they employed pseudonyms under which to submit radical
artworks to their respective shows, and ultimately found ways to slyly undermine the
conventions of the institution.
Marioni’s choice to include himself in his show not only stemmed from a desire to
challenge the boundaries of art, but also related to his abiding, ardent desire to be recognized
as an artist. Knowing that it was ethically suspect for a curator to include himself in a show
that he organized, Marioni used the pseudonym as a way to secretly show his own work at
Richmond. As he admitted in a 1985 interview, “I worked under the name Allan Fish so that
I could exhibit my own work and it wouldn’t look like a conflict of interest.”
189
In a sense,
out of the need to be covert, Marioni’s pseudonym became a conceptual piece: Marioni even
went to the trouble to create a paper trail by drafting a letter to Fish inviting him to

188
Duchamp ended up resigning from the board of managers in protest of the Society’s refusal to display Fountain.
189
Barbara T. Smith, “Tom Marioni: A Conversation with San Francisco’s Premier Conceptual Artist,” High Performance 8,
no. 4 Issue 32 (1985): 29.
98
participate in The Return of Abstract Expressionism, and filing a copy of the letter with the other
exhibition documents (Figure 1.16).
190
Although Marioni’s decision to surreptitiously include
one of his own works in this show was clearly a self-interested, unprincipled move, it also
represented a challenge to the institutional order of the museum in its disregard of the
standard operating procedures of curating, and demonstrated Marioni’s willingness to take
both professional and artistic risks. Ultimately, by inserting himself into the exhibition as an
artist, he literally removed himself from the traditional position of the curator as a
disinterested impresario of the art he selects to show, and begins to reveal himself to be an
artist’s co-worker.
In fact, this was not the first time that Marioni had included himself as an artist in a
show that he curated. Marioni had also found a way to subtly insert himself into Invisible
Painting and Sculpture. The catalogue to the show was arranged so that each artist had two
facing pages, and each pair of pages was ordered alphabetically by artist’s last name. Marioni
left two blank pages where his name (he had not yet invented Allan Fish) would have been
according to the alphabetization scheme.
191
Even simpler than Birds in Flight, this gesture of
inserting blank pages was, in a sense, the inversion of the fetishized signature that Duchamp
mocked in “Fountain” – it was a pure act of abstaining from mark-making that nonetheless
marked itself. Following the organizing theme of invisibility, Marioni’s non-
signature/signature takes the notion of dematerialization to an extreme, with the erasure of
the artist’s hand, and even the artist’s name. As Marioni later commented, “My contribution

190
Thomas Marioni to Allan Fish, August 20, 1969, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art,
Berkeley, Calif.
191
Marioni, interview, June 27, 2008.
99
to the show was so invisible that no one even knew that I was in it.”
192
I would not be
surprised if Marioni in fact had informed his friends about his maneuver at the time of its
execution, but nevertheless it was not widely known until many years later when Marioni
publicized the anecdote in his memoir or related the story to historians like myself. This
example illustrates that Marioni was not simply driven by a need to be recognized; while
evidently receiving no credit for a secret artistic intervention that nobody perceived, he still
made a point of doing it.
The catalogue for The Return of Abstract Expressionism contained another of Marioni’s
interventions. Conceiving the cover as a print, Marioni employed a special offset printing
process called scumming or toning, which allows ink to build up onto the printing plate by
regulating the amount of water used in the process (Figure 1.17). By shutting off the water,
ink accumulates on the plate, and by adding water, the plate is “cleaned up.” To print The
Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, the plate was inscribed with the title of the
exhibition, and the printing took place while the water was gradually turned on and off to
create alternately blotchier and cleaner prints. Thus each copy of the catalogue had a unique
cover, which meant that each catalogue constituted a unique work of art. In addition, as a
group the catalogues represented a work of conceptual art, specifically a kind of process art,
or work that emphasized the process of making over the end-product.
193
Marioni’s
understanding of the catalogue as a work of art is confirmed by the fact that in the same
week that he printed the catalogues, he created a related work, Process Print, 1970, that also
employed the scumming process. Composed of a series of offset lithographs, Process Print

192
Ibid.
193
Ibid.; Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, June 28, 2011.
100
(Figure 1.18) started off with a blank sheet of white paper and finished with a sheet of solid
brown ink, literally depicting the building up of ink on the roller plate that normally occurred
in the process of printing a multiple.
Marioni’s meaningful intervention into The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue is
also revealed in the unorthodox format. Because photographs of many of the works were
not available (as mentioned earlier, many of them existed only in concept prior to the show
and would be constructed solely for the exhibition), Marioni opted to represent the works
through artist’s statements and project plans, and to this end, wrote to the artists asking
them to send him sketches and statements to be reproduced in the catalogue.
194
This was
common to many post-studio and conceptual art exhibitions, including curator Lippard’s
557,085, 1969 and curator McShine’s Information, 1970. Indeed, art historian Altshuler argues
that the “creative curator” tends to reveal himself in an unorthodox treatment of the
exhibition catalogue. In the catalogue to When Attitudes Become Form, for instance, Szeemann
reproduced both the list of addresses of New York artists that he used in his research for the
exhibition, along with letters written by the artists in response to invitations to participate in
the exhibition, thus underscoring the process of organizing the show.
195
Curator Irene
Calderoni observes that this method of having artists “edit their own pages” is “a strategy
which not only turns this instrument into another creative medium, but also amplifies the
suggestion of a continuous and spreading artistic production.”
196

194
Marioni, interview, June 27, 2008.
195
Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, 245.
196
Calderoni, “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the End of the Sixties,” 75.
101
But rather than following the artist’s instructions on what to reproduce in the
catalogue, Marioni printed what he determined should be included, often ignoring the artist’s
instructions. For example, the catalogue reprinted a facsimile of a handwritten note by Bob
Anderson that requested “only my name (and description of piece)…appear in catalogue and
nothing else,” indicating that Anderson only wished to have his name and the description of
the work printed, but Marioni included the Anderson’s explanatory sentence in its entirety
(Figure 1.19). Likewise, the catalogue included a reproduction of a letter from Oppenheim,
which stated that “The beginning of my letter is irrelevent [sic]. Reproduce only the part
referring to the projects [sic] specifications” (Figure 1.20). Marioni, however, printed the
entire letter including the “irrelevant” part. In one sense, Marioni’s catalogue cavalierly
disregarded the artist’s instructions, but on the other hand, the overwhelming effect of his
reproduction of the artist’s correspondence to the curator – like Szeemann’s When Attitudes
Become Form catalogue – made the conditions of representation transparent to the spectator,
revealing the exhibition as a type of process art as well as highlighting the curatorial process
of putting together the exhibition. Ultimately, through his unorthodox treatment of The
Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, Marioni took a license normally reserved for artists,
acting as if the show as a whole was his personal work of art. In the next section, we will
further explore Marioni’s participation in the growing conflation of curator and artist that
pervaded the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Part Two: Marioni Redefines Curating as Art
Marioni’s decisions to include his own artwork in exhibitions he curated as well as to
creatively intervene into his exhibition catalogues foreshadow how Marioni began to
102
consider all of his curatorial work as part of his artistic practice. In a 1972 interview, he
stated: “all my creative energies went into the presentation of other people’s work. Dealing
with it on that level. So I saw all my activities as a curator[,] as sculpture.”
197
Thus Marioni,
who always considered himself an artist – and in particular, a sculptor, with his attendant
sensitivity to the way forms occupy space – began to broaden his notion of what curating
was. He began to see it as the task of arranging artists and artworks into dialogue with each
other in the service of a larger artistic project. Instead of an art exhibition being the
transparent medium in which the work of art is displayed, with maximum effort made to
allow the spectator access to the work, the exhibition became itself, as Calderoni put it, a
vehicle for a curator’s creative thinking. In moving towards this more activist notion of
curating, Marioni combined his museum job and his self-fashioning as an artist. Evidently,
one of the motives here was the desire to be taken seriously as an artist, but the re-purposing
of curating into a type of artmaking and the blending of the two roles also made sense in the
context of conceptual art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As artists challenged the
institutional parameters of the traditional sites of art exhibition, on the other side, curators
were treating exhibitions more like works of art. And when the curator was an artist and the
art in question was conceptual, the dynamic of identifying exhibition and art derived from
the logic of the art practice itself.
Beginning in the 1960s, vanguard artists began not only to nominate pre-existing,
commonplace objects as artworks as Duchamp did, but also to consider everyday activities
and occurrences as art. Fluxus, a loosely connected international art movement (which since

197
Hershman and Lambie, “Tom Marioni on Record,” 3.
103
1966 had an outpost in San Francisco – called Fluxus West – headed by Ken Friedman,
whose work Marioni showed in a one-artist exhibition at the Richmond Art Center in 1970),
adopted as one of its hallmarks the tactic of designating as art simple daily tasks such as
making a salad (Alison Knowles, Make a Salad, 1962) or just sitting and being (Ben Vautier,
Living Sculpture, 1962). Kaprow, who had moved to California in 1969, also thematized
mundane phenomena like melting ice (Fluids, 1967) in his many Happenings of the sixties
and seventies. In the early 1970s, Kaprow penned tracts declaring that the artist’s role was to
blur the boundaries between art and life by emulating everyday features of life.
198
George
Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, and Kaprow both aimed for the dispersal of art into life,
with the result that the elitist and auratic category of art could be eliminated altogether.
The incorporation of everyday activities into art also became part of the politically
charged agenda of the conceptual art of the time. For instance, artist Mierle Laderman
Ukeles declared her “maintenance” activities – primarily the housekeeping duties of
vacuuming, dusting, and even emotionally supporting her spouse – as art (“Manifesto on
Maintenance Art,” 1969). Ukeles redefined what could be art through a string of words:
I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order.) I do a
hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc.
Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things,
and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.
199

198
See Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,” “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II” and “The
Education of the Un-Artist, Part III” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 97-109, 110-126, 130-147. Part I was originally published in 1971, Part II in 1972, and Part III in
1974.
199
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto – Proposal for an Exhibition,” 1969,
http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/pdfs/Ukeles_MANIFESTO.pdf. Laderman Ukeles proposed that she perform
these activities at a museum.
104
Not only does this statement draw on the idea that an artwork can be simply a proposition
or language, but again it invokes Duchamp’s nominal theory of art: art can be whatever the
artist says is art as long as the artist and work are legitimized and made legible by the
institutions that make up the art world. Ukeles’s manifesto records the first stirrings of the
feminist intervention into the art world, bringing forward the situation where the artist, a
new mother, did not have the luxury of having free time to make art. Ukeles’s situation,
however, was clearly not equivalent to Marioni’s; Ukeles’s activities were unpaid, tedious acts
of housekeeping that were traditionally responsibilities of women (and the working class).
Marioni’s activities of assembling exhibitions, however, were carried out as part of a paid
professional and culturally elite job. Indeed, the motivation behind Ukeles’s work stemmed
from a desire to elevate devalued housework performed by women – and as curator Helen
Molesworth has argued, to make public what was normally confined to the private sphere –
whereas Marioni’s work was already recognized as legitimate, professional, wage-earning
labor.
200
By making housework count as paid labor, Ukeles’s feminist conceptual art – in
contrast to Marioni’s – was thus connected, in its object and method, to questioning the
definition of work outside the aesthetic sphere as well.
I am, however, pointing to a formal similarity between the two artist’s practices.
Ukeles, like Marioni, was creating a space through which artistic activity and housekeeping
duties, or “work,” could contaminate one another. That is, while Ukeles had to attend to her
responsibilities at home, and Marioni had to perform his curatorial duties, they nevertheless
wanted to be defined as artists, and using the tactic of nomination, they could have it both

200
Helen A. Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 71–97.
105
ways. As I will demonstrate in later chapters, this tricky principle of nomination will prove to
be central to Marioni’s practice, where he designates not only curatorial activity as art, but
also leisure activities like socializing and drinking (e.g. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is
the Highest Form of Art, 1970). Yet as we will see, this tactic did not always work for low-
ranking artists like Marioni; he did not always convince his audiences of the idea that he as
an artist was empowered to do the nominating, or of the notion that his quotidian life
activities constituted art. An artist needs first to be recognized as a legitimate, serious artist in
order to gain the kind of power to determine what is and is not art.
In a similar vein, some self-described conceptual artists began to consider the act of
theorizing about art as part of their art practice. Beginning in 1969, Art & Language, a
collective of British conceptual artists Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin
and Harold Hurrel, produced a magazine titled Art-Language, in which they published texts
about the nature of art as well as critiqued the commercialism of the art world and the
commodification of the art object. The introduction to their first issue declared:
The development of some work by certain artists both in Britain and the U.S.A. does
not, if their intentions are to be taken into account, simply mean a matter of a
transfer of the function from that of artist to that of art theoretician, it has
necessarily involved the intention of the artist to count various theoretical constructs
as art works.
201

Further on in the article, they explain that the notion that the writing of art theory could be
considered artmaking was connected to the principles of conceptualism, where art was often
reduced to an abstract proposition: “[i]nside the framework of ‘conceptual art’ the making of

201
Art & Language, “Introduction,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 100.
106
art and the making of a certain kind of art theory are often the same procedure.”
202
Thus,
like Ukeles declaring her housework to be art and thus claiming the power to pronounce on
art, Art & Language felt justified to designate their theorizations about art as art as well.

Artists like Marioni and Ukeles began to think of their extra-artistic labor (whether
unpaid or paid) in large part because of the changing status of artists in American society.
The shift to a new post-studio model of artmaking, referenced, as we have seen, by Andre,
implies that the artist’s role is to have a certain function that parallels that of the manager in
a commercial enterprise – working in any number of sites in collaboration with others,
including outsourcing production of their art to fabricators or laborers. Occupying the role
of the administrator or overseer rather than the laborer or handcrafter, the artist became
increasingly professionalized in a way that made her more similar to the professional curator,
while at the same time the substance of the art itself became increasingly open to activities
that did not require traditional specialized artistic skill.
In “Work Ethic,” Molesworth discusses the larger societal shifts in the late 1960s and
early 1970s that resulted in artists coming to be seen as credentialized professionals, which
she sees as driven by both the U.S. economy’s shift from manufacturing-based production to
service-based, as well as the proliferation of graduate-level art programs and art schools.
203

Part of Molesworth’s argument is drawn from Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American
University, Howard Singerman’s in-depth study of the art school in post-World War Two
America. Singerman argues that the rise of MFA programs enabled the production of
conceptually-based art practices as well as the professionalization of the artist. The programs

202
Ibid.
203
Molesworth, “Work Ethic.”
107
taught art as an autonomous academic discipline and shifted the subject of art education
from learning manual craft skills to developing an awareness of art history and trends,
including, increasingly, theory.
204

Molesworth observes that in the reimagining of the artist as the producer of
intellectual labor, requiring professional training, a distance emerged between the
management of art and the production process or manufacturing of art.
205
As the 1960s and
1970s saw a lessening of the social value accorded to “brainless,” manual labor, the artist
shifted to the side of privileged, intellectual labor, recapitulating a long trend in the division
of labor throughout postwar late capitalist America. In Machine in the Studio, Jones also notes
that artists in the 1960s adopted industrial production as the primary metaphor – and at
times the literal program – for artistic production, with the artist occupying the role of
manager. An exemplary figure of an artist as administrator in the 1960s and 1970s was Pop
artist Andy Warhol, who famously ran a self-described “factory” to produce his artworks.
Though the shift in artistic subjectivity from craftsman to administrator was
prefigured in such artists as Warhol and Donald Judd, it was the logic of conceptual art –
one that held that a work of art was defined by the idea of it rather than its physical
manifestation – that solidified this new approach to artmaking, and what made it possible for
Marioni to conceive of curating as part of his art practice. In conceptual art, the artist could
be credited with the intellectual labor of conceiving the idea for a work (that is, the artist’s
claim to authorship could remain intact), while the manual production could be delegated to

204
Singerman also argues that another result of the art school education was the production of artists who theorized about
their own work. Indeed, art programs taught students to translate their artwork and their intentions as artists into language.
Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, 162–163.
205
Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” 151–152.
108
another party. Thus Sol Lewitt could conceive of a design for a wall drawing that others
could execute based on his written instructions, and in an extreme version of conceptualism
as suggested by Lawrence Weiner, an artwork could exist solely as a concept and need not be
fabricated at all.
206
Given this understanding that the conception of the work and its
realization or fabrication were distinct functions, and given that the artist’s primary
responsibility was with the former, we might understand Marioni’s exhibition-organizing not
only as an instance of an artwork, but as a conceptual, post-studio work of art in particular.
Marioni served as the artist-author-intellect of the exhibition while the included artists
constituted the workforce that fabricated the individual elements. That is, the curator
defined the parameters of the exhibition, and the exhibiting artists realized the curator’s
concept by producing works that corresponded to the show’s thesis. Indeed this is exactly
what Lippard did in the organization of Groups, 1969, the exhibition mentioned in the
introduction, which gave artists loose instructions to be followed to create a set of
photographs.
In addition, post-studio art allowed for the world’s “intrusions,” meaning that the
quotidian, para-artistic activity of the artist was no longer deemed peripheral, but could be
appropriated for art. Thus the presence of post-studio, conceptual art, premised on
accepting the intrusions of the world into one’s art and defining the artist as a manager,
conditioned the way Marioni began to think of his curatorial work as art. Needless to say,
this conception was not part of the self-understanding of the Richmond Art Center at the

206
Lawrence Weiner, “Declaration of Intent,” January 5-31, 1969 (New York, Seth Siegelaub, 1969), n.p. reprinted in
Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” xxii.
109
time, as the series of conflicts between Marioni and the Center’s Director and Board
demonstrate.
Yet even as the issues were being drawn that would put Marioni at odds with his
museum, elsewhere, curators of conceptual art began to absorb the idea of their more
creative role in packaging art. As described by art historian Julie Reiss in her book From
Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, when organizing exhibitions of newer forms of
conceptual, post-studio art, a museum curator could not simply make a selection from a
group of finished objects laid out in the artist’s studio, but rather had to select the artist
based on previous work or future plans.
207
The curator of conceptual art typically had to ask
artists to construct new works for exhibition (or at least to re-enact old ones), and thus had
to make judgments on works that were not yet created. Thus not only did the organizing
institution, at a potential risk to itself, have to place greater trust in the artist, but the curator,
too, became more responsible for the work itself in the process. The curator’s role was
rapidly transforming from that of displaying canonically approved and completed works of
art, and at the most demonstrating trends or patterns in art practice, to that of collaborator
and advocate of an artist whose intent was often provocative and anti-institutional. This put
curators in the position of allying with the artist against other functionaries in the
museum.
208
The curator-advocate took on a role that was foreign to the norms and even
ethics of more conventional curators. Thus Calderoni compared this new kind of curator to

207
Reiss, From Margin to Center, 81–83. See also Marcia Tucker, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World,
ed. Liza Lou (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 83–84.
208
Reiss, From Margin to Center, 101; Calderoni, “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the End of the
Sixties,” 76.
110
a critic, in the sense of openly endorsing and allying with certain artists rather than clinging
to a principle of objectivity.
209

Rather than identify the curator with the critic, Altshuler and Gleadowe likened the
conceptual curator to an artist. No doubt Marioni acted like an “artists’ co-worker” or
“creative curator” because he was in fact a practicing artist himself. Whether the new curator
resembles a curator or a critic, Marioni certainly conforms to this new type of tendentious
curator that worked alongside artists making work that challenged traditional methods of
museological collecting and display.
As Calderoni observes, however, the problem with this partial curator is that she was
often at odds with the aims of an established museum, which banked on the appearance of
objectivity and nonpartisanness to shore up their institutional credibility.
210
When an
exhibition becomes a platform of creative expression itself, the curator can become too
biased and too affiliated with a certain group of artists that she begins to represent the
interest of the artists rather than those of the museum. As we will see in the next section,
Marioni, like Szeemann, was accused of being too much of an advocate of conceptual art for
the Richmond’s mission and was forced out of the museum as a result of this advocacy.

Part Three: Marioni Loses His Job
Controversy Brews: Sculpture Annual 1970, 1970

In 1970, Marioni’s exhibitions drew rebuke from his superiors in the city government
and he faced the prospect of losing his job over the repeated controversies. The first

209
Calderoni, “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the End of the Sixties,” 76.
210
Ibid.
111
exhibition to draw public criticism was the Sculpture Annual 1970 (February 12 - March 15,
1970), which was one of the yearly medium-specific competitions sponsored by the
Richmond Art Center. Because this was a juried competition, Marioni’s responsibility was
not to curate but to select an outside person to serve as judge. For this Annual, he chose the
esteemed Los Angeles artist Larry Bell, an artist whose work Marioni had admired and
included in the Invisible exhibition. Local artists submitted their works to the Annual by
physically delivering their work to the art center galleries for presentation to the judge, and in
previous years of the competition, about fifty or so pieces were selected for exhibition and
the top entries were awarded prizes. But Bell, apparently dismayed by what he saw as the
lack of imagination of the entries, selected only three works out of over one hundred fifty
submissions to be exhibited, and as a token of acknowledgement, gave the rest of the artists
“first prize.” Marioni was held accountable for Bell’s unorthodox judging process, but the
former claims that he had no hand in Bell’s decisions despite that fact that he was
“delighted” by them.
211

None of the three pieces selected for exhibition resembled conventional sculpture.
The first work was a “process sculpture” by Paul Kos, in which the artist asked the viewer to
write a check to him in any amount, and in turn he would mail a check back to the
participant in the same amount. Kos described his work as the following: “Process becomes
art. Patron becomes artists. Artist becomes patron. Banks become museums.” The second
selection was Jim McCready’s This Year, Burn the Church of Your Choice, (Figure 1.21)
represented by a photograph of the local Catholic institution, Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral, in

211
Tom Marioni, interview by author, February 2, 2007, San Francisco, Calif.
112
the midst of flames. A friend of Marioni’s, McCready was a lawyer by occupation and did
not consider himself an artist. Marioni gave McCready the idea of submitting this
photograph to the exhibition when the two were smoking marijuana together one day, so
while Marioni did not publicly claim this at the time of the exhibition, he was actually the
author behind McCready’s submission.
212
Documenting the burning of a church, a real event
that took place several years prior, the photograph, according to Marioni, was simply a
record of the “actual work.”
213
As Marioni explained in the exhibition catalogue, “The
documented proof is entered for exhibition in the form of a photo, since the actual work can
no longer be seen.”
214
The final work selected for exhibition was Terry Fox’s polyethylene
sheet being blown by a fan (similar to the work in The Return of Abstract Expressionism), but in
fact the work was not present in the galleries, and it was never brought to the Richmond Art
Center for evaluation as all of the other submissions had been; Marioni had taken Bell to
visit Fox in his studio.
215
Instead, a sign in the galleries instructed the viewer to go to the
artist’s San Francisco studio to see the work, where it could be seen “to best advantage.”
216

In addition to coming up with the idea for McCready’s entry, Marioni submitted
another work, inspired by Yves Klein, to the Sculpture Annual under the pseudonym Allan
Fish, which consisted of a splattering of blue pigment on a short square pedestal (Figure

212
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
213
Although the church burning recalls the retaliatory bombings of Southern black churches by white conservatives during
the Civil Rights Movement, this choice of subject matter seems more likely motivated by Marioni’s fascination with
parodying Catholic rituals and symbology rather than any studied attempt to examine race relations. Although certainly
meant tongue-in-cheek, nevertheless the title of the work – inviting one to burn a church – reflects the artist’s lack of
awareness and insensitivity to the real deaths and intimidation caused by these church burnings.
214
Sculpture Annual 1970, exh. cat., (Richmond: Richmond Art Center, 1970), Richmond Art Center archive, Richmond,
Calif.
215
Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
216
Sculpture Annual 1970.
113
1.22).
217
By entering a work to a competition for which he had the power to select the judge,
Marioni demonstrated once again his unwillingness to confine himself to the professional
norms of curating when they limited his chance to publicize himself as an artist. As with The
Return of Abstract Expressionism, Marioni also left a heavy imprint on the exhibition in the
unorthodox way that he handled the catalogue, which consisted of a monochrome black
folder holding three individual sheets of heavyweight glossy paper that each represented
works by Kos, McCready and Fox. A text on the back side of the folder explained that the
catalogue itself could be transformed it into an installation of the exhibition: “To recreate the
Richmond Art Center Sculpture Annual 1970 disassemble this catalogue and attach the three
documents to any three walls.” Marioni thus rendered the representation of the exhibition
portable and reproducible, and transformed into a conceptual artwork itself. Indeed, one of
the hallmarks of conceptual art and its exhibitions was their ability to be easily disseminated
at low cost, whether packaged as a piece of mail or packed into a suitcase.
218
Reflecting on
the portability of his Sculpture Annual exhibition, Marioni commented: “If contemporary art
continues to evolve in the same direction, art museums will have to operate from a post
office box number.”
219
Indeed, because Marioni transformed the art show from a craft-
oriented community event to a site of avant-garde activism, the Sculpture Annual exhibition
was dispersed to institutions outside of the East Bay including the San Jose State College Art

217
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
218
For more on conceptual art as an easily distributable art form, see Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” 32–33.
219
Cecile N. McCann, “Richmond Sculpture Annual,” Artweek 1, no. 9 (February 28, 1970): 6.
114
Gallery, Arizona State University Museum (where the former Director of the Richmond Art
Center, Rudy Turk, was now working) and the Toledo Museum of Art.
220

In the installation at Richmond, Marioni cordoned off a small section of three walls
in the center of the main gallery leaving empty the remainder of the spacious room. This
iteration of the Sculpture Annual, with only three eight and a half inch by eleven inch sheets of
paper mounted on the walls, was in stark contrast to previous years when the exhibition
consisted of a jumble of three-dimensional sculptures crowded into the gallery.
221
This
meager display drew outrage from local artists, critics and representatives of the community
alike. Excluded artists were angered that only three works were chosen – leaving most of the
gallery space ostentatiously empty – because they felt cheated out of one of the few
opportunities where they could be shown at a respected institution and apparently counted
on the exhibition as a chance to advance their own careers.
222
One artist wrote to complain
about the evident bad faith in Bell’s decision to award him a first place prize when really the
former was being refused. Indeed, Bell’s generous awarding of first prize made a mockery of
the tradition of prize-giving and rendered the prize meaningless.
223
Although his action may
have reflected his disappointment with the general quality of the entries, on the other hand it
also may have been motivated by a sense that ranking submissions was a highly subjective
and hence futile process.

220
Tom Marioni to Art Center Board and Hayward King, Memorandum, April 3, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art
Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
221
Kos, interview by author.
222
Kos, interview by author; Rolf [Merd Rochen?] to Thomas Marioni, January 26, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art
Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
223
Carrie Abramowitz to Richmond Art Center, February 6, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum
of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
115
Yet Bell’s critique of the hierarchy sanctioned by the institution was not the primary
focus of the controversy. Art critic E.M. Polley in the Oakland Sunday Times-Herald reported
that much of the debate centered on the fact that the exhibition was advertised as a sculpture
show, but that the works selected did not appear to be sculptures.
224
San Francisco Chronicle
critic Albright disapproved of the specific (conceptual) works selected for exhibition and
argued that the Annual did not merit consideration as a bona fide exhibition, opening his
review with the gambit: “This is a non-review of a non-show that grew out a non-
competition from which a non-juror selected only three works of non-art.”
225
Although
Albright’s use of the language of negation might first suggest an affinity with the Dada anti-
art sensibility, in fact the critic meant it in a pejorative, deprecatory sense, incensed that a
true vetting process had not occurred.
The unorthodox exhibition also drew criticism from City Councilman Albert Silva,
who considered the Sculpture Annual “a waste of time and talent” and urged his fellow
council members to keep the show in mind in next year’s budget deliberation when funding
for the position of curator at the Richmond Art Center was decided.
226
Marioni was held
accountable for the exhibition, even though he did not encourage Bell to make such a radical
selection. Presumably, the show was problematic to the Councilman because Bell’s selection
of only three artworks for exhibition seemed elitist and against the ethos of the inclusiveness
and community-building that was supposed to guide the Richmond Art Center. In addition,

224
E.M. Polley, “Men’s Fashions Shown at Museum, Conceptual Art, Rocks Area Art Scene,” Sunday Times-Herald, February
22, 1970, clipping from Marioni, personal archive.
225
Thomas Albright, “A Kind of Non-Art Show,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 1970, 33.
226
“‘Waste’ Sculpture at City Art Center Is Slammed,” Richmond Independent (Richmond, Calif., February 17, 1970). The
curatorial position had nearly been cut in the previous year’s budget. “Richmond Cuts Out Art Job,” San Francisco Chronicle,
August 6, 1969, 44; “Richmond Keeps Art Curator Post,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 1969.
116
perhaps because the works did not possess the aesthetic qualities of traditional art, the show
was seen as a wasteful expenditure of the city’s resources. In response to the conceptualist
devaluation of the aesthetic and labor involved in making the work, the Councilman did not
see why money should be spent on non-art that required neither “time” nor “talent.”
In April 1970, following the controversy elicited by this exhibition, Marioni
submitted a memorandum to the Richmond Art Center’s Board of Directors defending his
curatorial choices over the past year.
227
Marioni emphasized the attention he received from
leading national art publications including the fact that upcoming articles in Arts and
Artforum would mention the Sculpture Annual and The Return of Abstract Expressionism. He also
explained how The Return of Abstract Expressionism and Invisible Painting and Sculpture prompted
“requests for information” from people in Amsterdam, Holland, London, New York,
Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Portland as well as the U.S. Information Agency in
Washington, D.C. and Time magazine.
228

As well, Marioni defended himself in the letter by pointing out that he actually
programmed a broad range of types of art in his exhibitions, but that “[n]aturally, the most
imaginative shows are the ones which stand out in our minds and we tend to forget the more
conservative shows.”
229
He continued, “I feel that both kinds of exhibits are important. It is
possible to relate to large numbers of people with a variety of shows, each kind being
important.” In support of his point, Marioni added that he reinstated the Richmond Unified
School District Junior and Senior High School art departments show. In a recent interview,

227
Marioni to Art Center Board, Memorandum.
228
Ibid. Apparently the USIA was publishing a booklet on environmental art and included an image of Invisible Art.
229
Ibid.
117
he affirmed that as an employee of a public institution, he felt a responsibility to show more
conventional art that appealed to a broad populace and made serious efforts to this end.
230

But apparently the radicality of the works in his conceptual shows outweighed the
conservativeness (at least in terms of medium) of the works in the other exhibitions he
organized. A case in point occurred in September 1970, when Marioni mounted a show of
conceptual artist Terry Fox. Although he also installed two other one-artist exhibitions of
more conventional artwork at the same time as Fox’s show – Carlos Villa’s paintings on
unframed canvases adorned with feathers, bones, beads, and mirrors, which were shown in
foyer and small gallery; and John Lewis’ colorful spherical and ovate blown glass sculptures,
shown in the glass cases, Fox’s work was so offensive to his superiors in the city government
that it overshadowed Marioni’s selection of other exhibits of more traditional, craft-based
work.

The Beginning of Marioni’s End: Terry Fox’s Levitation, 1970
Fox’s Levitation (September 17, 1970) was a private performance and environment in
which the artist “created a space that was conducive to levitation” by covering the walls and
floor with white butcher’s paper to create an ethereal atmosphere, and forming a giant
square mound of earth with dimensions twice the height of the artist in the middle of the
room (Figure 1.23).
231
Extending from the dirt out to the gallery walls were four fifty feet
long transparent tubes filled with blood, urine, water, and milk “in order to exteriorize

230
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
231
Fox quoted in 1971 interview cited in “Terry Fox…I wanted to have my mood affect their looks,” in Metaphorical
Instruments, in Metaphorical Instruments, edited by Felix Zdenek (Essen; Berlin: Museum Folkwang; Berliner
Künstlerprogramm des Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienstes, 1982), 17.
118
[Fox’s] mind/body and leave a shell capable of levitation.”
232
In a performance that was
sealed off from other visitors, Fox lay down on the mound for six hours and attempted to
levitate off the ground. After he finished his performance, audience members were allowed
to enter the room, where they witnessed only the indentation left by Fox’s body in the earth
and the tubes of bodily fluids left behind. Posted on the wall was a description written by
Marioni that explained:
The piece exhibited here is a total environment – The gallery has been transformed
into an area used for the act of creating work. This work of art did not exist before it
was created in this area. The space contains the debris of an action and everything in
the room has been directly involved in the action.
233

Joseph Salvato, the newly appointed City of Richmond Director of Parks and Recreation,
which had jurisdiction over the Art Center, did not approve of the piece. Despite Fox’s
instructions that he remain alone while attempting to levitate, Salvato asked the Art Center’s
custodian to enter the room to perform a perfunctory maintenance duty, and after the
installation opened to visitors, Salvato called in the health inspector, the police chief and the
fire chief, evidently in the hopes of finding a public safety reason to shut down the show.
234

When the fire chief declared the sheets of paper that shrouded the gallery a fire hazard,
Salvato found his reason to close the exhibition. A local newspaper noted: “Apart from any
artistic misgivings Salvato might have, he was definitely disturbed by the overpowering smell

232
Tom Marioni, “Marioni on Terry Fox,” exhibition posting, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of
Art, Berkeley, Calif.
233
Ibid.
234
Fox cited in “Terry Fox…I wanted to have my mood affect their looks,” 18.
119
arising from the earth.”
235
Salvato’s “artistic misgivings” stemmed from his refusal to
recognize Levitation as a work as art at all, but rather as a provocation. To Salvato, the work
must have appeared to be a malodorous mound of dirt that defiled public property, rather
than a serious artwork worthy of exhibition in a city museum. Indeed, the appearance of
many examples of post-studio, conceptual art was so different from traditional aesthetic
objects that they often drew negative responses like Salvato’s. Their use of mundane
materials, references to the body, event-based work (Marioni, for instance, seems to intensify
the complete identification of the artwork with a momentary action by explicitly referring to
the materials left in the room as “debris”) and their strategies for breaking out of literal or
conceptual frames meant that they attacked conventional museological practices and
transgressed official norms, with the result that they were often counter-attacked, censored
or condemned.
Salvato singled out Marioni as the guilty party responsible for organizing the
offensive show, and punished Marioni for his indiscretion by forcing the latter to single-
handedly shovel out all of the dirt from the room without help from maintenance personnel
or anyone on city payroll. In addition, The Independent reported that Salvato insisted, “From
now on there will be a screening committee. As Salvato says, ‘If I’m going to be chewed out
for a show at least I want to have some say about it before it comes in!”
236
Although it is
unclear who “chewed out” Salvato for this show and for what reasons, it is clear that he was

235
“The Question Mark Column,” The Independent (Richmond, Calif.), no. 100, October 3, 1970, p.13, clipping from
Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
236
Ibid.
120
held responsible for showing the controversial piece and that he now wanted take the power
of selecting exhibitions out of the hands of the curator.
237

As Marioni recalls, “Salvato was trying to get rid of me because I was doing all of
these far-out shows. And his wife was a Sunday painter and she was always telling him that
the Art Center should have shows of more traditional art, flowers.”
238
Marioni’s
characterization of Salvato as being hamstrung (and emasculated) by his wife’s protestations
and his wife as an amateur artist who dabbled in painting “flowers” on the side, albeit sexist,
nevertheless reveals the kind of tension that existed between him and his superiors in the
city government, and their investment in more conventional forms of art. But Salvato could
not simply fire Marioni because city government regulations required that a case be built in
order to lawfully terminate him.
239
According to Marioni, Salvato tried to persuade Marioni’s
direct supervisor, King, the Director of the Richmond Art Center, to find a way to fire
Marioni, but King refused and was himself forced to resign earlier in the year for his
refusal.
240
Ernie Kim, one of Salvato’s supporters, hitherto Director of Education at
Richmond and a potter associated with American Studio Movement (1930-1972) – a
movement that espoused a return to handcrafted pottery and rejection of machine-made
mass production methods – became the new Director of the Art Center in October 1970,
making Kim Marioni’s new direct boss.
241
Kim was responsible for building a case about

237
Marioni says that no one would have criticized Salvato except for the latter’s wife. Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
238
Marioni, interview, February 2, 2007. Also see Cecile N. McCann, “Richmond Curator Out,” Artweek 2, no. 11 (March
13, 1971): 8.
239
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
240
Ibid.
241
“New Director in Richmond,” Artweek 1, no. 35 (October 17, 1970): 8.
121
Marioni and wrote a memo to Marioni on December 14, 1970 accusing the latter of various
acts of misconduct including tardiness and using the Art Center clerical staff for unofficial
business.
242
Marioni insists that all of Kim’s accusations were baseless.
243

Indeed, in the same letter, Kim revealed that perhaps his biggest problem with
Marioni had nothing to do with his work ethic, but instead concerned Marioni’s inordinate
interest in conceptual art:
It is my opinion that your ultimate purpose is to promote Conceptual Art. This shall
not be the case. I advise you to use your own private gallery for this purpose. I do
not oppose your feelings for a certain trend, but I disapprove of the use of the Art
Center galleries for continued exploitation for this form. In other words, ‘limit it.’
244

In this letter, Kim refers to Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art, a private exhibition space
that Marioni had founded in March of that year as a backup art exhibition venue, knowing
that Salvato was already looking for a way to fire him. Marioni’s involvement with an
organization solely dedicated to an avant-garde art form meant that his artistic commitments
were completely public and served as fodder for Salvato and Kim’s suspicions of Marioni’s
insubordination and narrow-minded dedication to promoting a “certain trend.” Later in the
letter, Kim threatened to take severe disciplinary action if nothing changed. Marioni,
however, responded by continuing to organize “far-out” shows, including an exhibition of
women artists from California titled California Girls.

242
Ernie Kim to Tom Marioni, Memorandum, December 14, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum
of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
243
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
244
Kim, Memorandum.
122
Marioni’s Last Stand: California Girls, 1971
Los Angeles artist Janet Webb suggested that Marioni title his exhibition of all female
Californian artists “California Girls,” in ironic reference to the Beach Boys 1965 hit pop
song. Well aware of the burgeoning feminist critiques of patriarchy, Marioni recalls,
“especially then you didn’t say ‘girls.”
245
Unlike the shows discussed above, California Girls
(February 11-March 7, 1971) was not predominantly made up of conceptual or post-studio
art, but was a more eclectic mix of such unorthodox works as Gigi VanderNoot’s water-
filled canvas placed over a tub, Bonnie Sherk’s documentation of her performances sitting in
the animal cages at the zoo, Karen Kimura’s fingerprints of gallery visitors, as well as works
in more traditional mediums like watercolor, figurative painting, stained glass, and ceramics.
Other artists included in the show were Andrea Brown, Judy Chicago and the Real California
Girls (which consisted of students from Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at Fresno State
College), Marsha Fox, Kathy Goodell, Terri Keyser, Karen Kline, Nancy Haigh, Gae
Landrum, Judy Linhares, Judy Raffael, Ann Shapiro, Pat Tavener, Ellen van Fleet, Janet
Webb, and Rita Yokoi.
Although Marioni claims in recent interviews that it was a feminist show, the Artweek
critic, Margaret Crawford, thought otherwise: “it succeeds neither as a social statement nor
as an artistically coherent exhibition.”
246
Perhaps, however, Marioni’s point is that the
exhibition of only female artists qualified it as a progressive and feminist act, in contrast to
the predominantly male artists featured almost exclusively in shows at the Richmond Art
Center (as well as other institutions in the Bay Area). Interestingly, a definitively feminist

245
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
246
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007. Margaret Crawford, “Real California Girls,” Artweek (February 27, 1971): 2.
123
performance is what incited the controversy that ultimately led to Marioni’s resignation from
his job. Marioni had become friends with artist Judy Chicago in the 1960s (when she went by
the name Gerowitz), and although they subsequently had a falling out by the late 1960s, he
nevertheless invited her to be in this exhibition because he considered her an important
female artist in California.
247
Chicago decided not to submit an object for the exhibition, but
agreed to enact a performance, and instead of coming herself to the opening, sent one of her
students, Cheryl Zurligen, as a proxy. Dressed in a white robe, Zurligen rolled out a long
sheet of white paper on the floor and crawled on it, leaving a trail of cow’s blood in her
wake. Crawford observed, “[s]ome literal metaphors about the treatment of women were
acted out in the piece.”
248
Artist Faith Wilding, while one of Chicago’s students in the
Feminist Art Program slightly later than the time of the California Girls exhibition, after it
moved to the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, also provides some clue to the tenor of
the performance. Wilding recalls that the students in the program made daily visits to
slaughterhouses where they collected cow’s blood to be used as a principal medium in their
performances that mimed “ritual sacrifice and domination.”
249

Although Salvato typically did not attend openings at the Art Center, Marioni claims
that Kim, who knew in advance about the provocative nature of the scheduled performance,
notified Salvato, who then made a point of attending the event, and the next day asked
Marioni to resign. It is not clear what Salvato objected to, but his previous statements

247
Marioni explains that they had a falling out because he would not submit to her feminist cause. Marioni, interview,
August 17, 2009.
248
Crawford, “Real California Girls,” 2.
249
Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 1970-75,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American
Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 38.
124
suggest that the graphicness and political subtext of the work was too much for him, and
that he considered it indecent and inappropriate for the museum setting. The idea that the
bodily aspect of Zurligen’s performance was deemed offensive is also supported by the fact
that some watercolors of nude figures in the exhibition also raised objections among the
Richmond staff, so that the artist was made to cover the depicted genitals with painted fig
leaves.
250

Reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, Albright wrote that Marioni’s departure
“appears to signal an abrupt retreat from the center’s history as an important innovative
force in the Bay Region art world.” In light of Albright’s earlier mockery of Marioni’s shows,
this assessment may seem uncharacteristically supportive of the curator, but it also reveals
Albright’s recognition of Marioni’s serious contribution to the community through his
shows of new art.
251
The article continued by explaining that Marioni was asked to resign “as
the result of longstanding disagreement over exhibition policies, specifically a number of
important displays of far-out environmental, process and conceptual art that Marioni has
organized,” and it stated that “Salvato affirmed that recent exhibitions have drawn ‘a lot of
public complaints’ and said ‘we might well have a better balance in our exhibitions.’”
252
The
Richmond Independent added that “Marioni was noted for a tendency toward the avant garde, to
the point of ignoring many of the artistic and cultural ‘grass roots’ of the community,” and
that “Marioni was often characterized as ‘far out’ by this critic for recent shows, not
necessarily for their singularity but for the seeming refusal to mingle them with the more

250
McCann, “Richmond Curator Out,” 8.
251
Thomas Albright, “Richmond Art Curator Quits,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 1971, 48.
252
Ibid., 48.
125
traditional forms.”
253
Indeed, in a Letter to the Editor of the Chronicle responding to
Albright’s article, Kim voiced his objection to Marioni’s “attempt to promote and emphasize
just one phase of art in such a diversified field.”
254

Thus Salvato and Kim perceived that Marioni’s priorities were in the wrong place.
Rather than focusing on the “community” of art enthusiasts and amateur artists, or “Sunday
painters,” who took classes at the Richmond Art Center, he appealed to a vanguard Bay Area
audience that was interested in the latest expressions of avant-garde art – an audience he
sought to legitimate in his letter to the Board in 1970, pointing out that both the more
advanced art shows and more “conservative” ones attracted important audiences. While
Marioni was excited about building an international reputation in the high art world for his
innovative exhibitions (as was shown by his mention of the attention received by the
national art press and requests for information from cities around the world), he was
operating in a venue where such a goal was not shared by the other Art Center officials, who
had set up the Center to make art accessible to its local population through an embrace of
traditional arts and crafts. Marioni’s problems with the Richmond Art Center stemmed from
the mismatch between his goals and those of the institution. In addition, Marioni did not fit
the mold of a traditional curator and revealed himself to be too much of an artist, an artist’s
co-worker, or a creative curator. Although the Richmond Directors believed that the
museum should tolerate an eclectic blend of art styles, they also believed that Marioni had
become too partial, too much an advocate for a certain type of art, and too identified with

253
“Art Center Will Stay Innovative,” Richmond Independent, February 26, 1971, clipping from Tom Marioni, personal archive,
San Francisco, Calif.
254
Ernie Kim, Director, Richmond Art Center, Letter to the Editor, San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 1971, clipping from
Tom Marioni, personal archive, San Francisco, Calif.
126
the artists in the exhibition. Rather than acting as a representative of the museum, which had
a catholic view of art, he revealed a preference for the kind of art that he practiced.
Marioni’s three year stint had been a useful lesson in the boundaries of curatorship,
and for various reasons, Richmond was able to support his development as a creative curator
for a time, but ultimately Marioni was not suited to a job at an institution that needed to
cater to the broader public. Indeed in her article on curating in the late 1960s, Calderoni
contends that, due to its tendency toward advocacy, the creative curator type gave rise to the
figure of the independent curator, who would disperse his efforts among several sites rather
than being employed by one established institution.
255
She cites as an example Szeemann,
who resigned from his position at the Kunsthalle Bern after When Attitudes Without Forms
prompted extreme negative public reception (mostly due to the fact that public funds were
spent on art that did not appear to be art), and caused the Kunsthalle exhibition committee
to cancel an upcoming Joseph Beuys show that Szeemann had already planned.
256
The
conceptual, post-studio and sometimes politically-charged works presented by Szeemann
and Marioni were too radical for their institutions, and the curators were seen as too aligned
with the artists making those gestures.
Like Szeemann, Marioni was also forced out of the official institution and compelled
to become an independent curator because of his tendentious curatorial style and advocacy
of conceptual art. Foreseeing that his term at the Richmond was coming to an end, Marioni
had established MOCA in March 1970. Although Marioni enjoyed the freedom of being
independent, he also appreciated the credibility and publicity that an institution could bring.

255
Calderoni, “Creating Shows: Some Notes on Exhibition Aesthetics at the End of the Sixties,” 76.
256
Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, 254.
127
By establishing MOCA, he sought to retain a measure of institutional power and combine it
with his sense of himself as an artist. Marioni’s experience of being expelled from the
Richmond Art Center deeply affected his work at MOCA, turning him away from the
mission embraced by city institutions to reach a broad public and towards a personal goal of
serving a specialized audience of avant-garde artists and their audiences. The next chapter
examines how Marioni forged a community of conceptual artists through MOCA and the
exhibitions that took place there.
128
Chapter Two: The Museum of Conceptual Art: Making Avant-Garde Art Among Friends

The Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) opened its doors on a weekday evening in
March 1970 with “A Participation Piece” led by Willoughby Sharp, a New York artist and
critic who was best known for founding the avant-garde art publication Avalanche with Liza
Bear, and for curating the 1969 show entitled Earth Art at Cornell University. Like Marioni,
Sharp’s artistic career was overshadowed by his work within the art world as an impresario
of other people’s art.
257
Marioni announced the event with a small black and white card that
he sent to a couple of hundred individuals in the Bay Area art world, mostly people with
whom he had made connections during his tenure as curator at the Richmond Art Center.
One side of the card displayed a photograph of an “Office Space For Rent” sign taped inside
the entrance to the building in which MOCA was located, alluding to the dilapidated state of
the building and the neighborhood, and the other side bore a sloppily misspelled text
advising invitees to “weare old clothe,” indicating the possibility that the event would
involve getting dirty (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). About fifty people, consisting mostly of artists and
their friends, attended the three hour or so long event.
258

This was no standard art opening where visitors stood about drinking wine, eating
cheese on crackers, and gazing at art on the walls. Instead, the walls themselves were in
question, with the invitees being asked to “participate” by helping to paint them. The floor
was covered in black plastic sheeting, and the attendees were supplied with buckets of white

257
Artist Dennis Oppenheim, who grew up in Richmond, California and whom Marioni included in 1969 The Return of
Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, introduced Sharp to Marioni. Marioni, interview, January 30,
2007.
258
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
129
paint, brushes, and rollers in order to collectively rehabilitate the walls. By organizing a large
group of people to work together, Marioni hoped to transform what would be the tedious
labor of painting into a situational, participatory artwork as well as an enjoyable party. As he
wrote in a letter in 1970, in addition to the practical matter of “[getting] the place painted,”
Marioni also sought to “creat[e] an environmental work at the same time.”
259

(Environmental art, in the argot of the time, referred to what is now called installation art.)

The event also involved Sharp, naked, standing on a ladder inside a black plastic
enclosure taking Polaroid photographs. Marioni recalled in the letter, “As the photos were
taken they were exhibited on the windows. The documentation of the event was
immediate.”
260
With a naked, that is, uncivilized, performer at the center, this piece broke
with basic rules of propriety and partook of a countercultural sensibility that dispensed with
societal rules considered arbitrary and repressive. The stress on the near instantaneous
recording of the night’s events, and more importantly, the immediate exhibition of the
images, suggests the ways in which the collective painting activity constituted a kind of
artwork. Indeed, “A Participation Piece” introduced what would become the typical features
of event-based art at MOCA: collective action, transgression (Sharp’s nudity) and
documentation. What was, perhaps, different was that the art project converged with
Marioni’s practical, self-interest in getting his museum painted. This rather mocking
assimilation of the utilitarian by the aesthetic – which transformed the normally (at least for

259
Tom Marioni to Brian O’Doherty, National Endowment for the Arts, May 14, 1970, Museum of Conceptual Art
Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
260
Ibid.
130
artists) creative act of painting into a practical, laborious one – would also prove to be
characteristic of Marioni’s art over the next decade.
Part-painting party, part-festive reception, part-participatory artwork and part-
community barn-raising, “A Participation Piece” prefigured the kinds of hybrid art
exhibition-social gatherings that were presented at MOCA throughout the 1970s.
Freewheeling and casual in its structure, centered on new forms of conceptual art rather than
objects, designed to build a community of vanguard artists as well as to provoke the larger
art audience that was more accustomed to artwork in traditional media, the event showed
how much the organization of MOCA was also an ongoing art project. Although Marioni
called MOCA a museum to give it a sense of importance, it barely qualified as an institution,
as it lacked a staff, a board, policies or even a schedule of events. Operated almost
exclusively by Marioni, it was a loosely structured artist’s space dedicated to the promotion
of conceptual art. Conceptual art for Marioni encompassed a broad range of post-studio,
time-based, situational work, including process art, sound art, body art, video art,
performance art, site-specific environments or installations, and participatory art. His
exhibitions at MOCA insisted on a dynamic component or action at the center of the work,
which often involved an artist in live performance, but also could mean the participation of
the spectator. Thematically many of the works dealt with the everyday lived experience, and
constituted what has been called life-art. Marioni curated nearly all of the exhibitions held
there, often including his own work in these shows.
Although MOCA was in existence from 1970 to 1981, this chapter focuses on the
first five years of its operation, which was its busiest period, leaving the later, quieter years to
Chapter Four. In the early 1970s, MOCA was the only place in the Bay Area that exclusively
131
focused on showing conceptual art and one of only a few places that showed this work at all.
Brenda Richardson, in her role as San Francisco correspondent for Arts Magazine, wrote in
1970: “It looks as if the Museum of Conceptual Art will lend a very lively and creative
freedom to the Bay Area arts, and permit artists who never had an outlet for their work in
non-traditional media finally to find a sponsor and an audience through the channels of this
new organization.”
261
In fact, as one of the few places in San Francisco where vanguard art
was welcome, MOCA was one of San Francisco’s primary connections to the international
avant-garde art scene. Artforum critic Jerome Tarshis called MOCA in 1970 “one of the few
institutions in the Bay Area that clearly exists in the same world as New York and London
and Düsseldorf.”
262
Indeed, when international curators of contemporary art like Harald
Szeemann came to town, they would stop by MOCA.
263

In this chapter, I examine the circumstances and details of five of the most
important group exhibitions that took place at MOCA between 1970 and 1974 – Sound
Sculpture As (1970), Body Works (1970), The San Francisco Performance (1972), All Night Sculptures
(1973), and the Wednesday afternoon open house (1973-74) – to emphasize how MOCA
functioned as a social center for conceptual artists and an incubator of conceptual art in San
Francisco. At the same time, the chapter provides a condensed institutional history of
MOCA.
MOCA never adhered to the protocols that a publicly-run art museum must abide
by, or to a mandate to reach out to a general audience. As seen in the previous chapter,

261
Brenda Richardson, “Bay Area Survey: The Myth of Neo-Dada Arts,” Arts Magazine (Summer 1970): 47.
262
Jerome Tarshis, “San Francisco,” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970): 85.
263
James Melchert remembers bringing Szeemann to MOCA to see All Night Sculptures in 1973. Melchert, interview.
132
Marioni was rebuked for showing avant-garde contemporary art at the Richmond Art
Center, and thus he became disillusioned with the goal of enlightening a broad public
audience. Marioni lamented in a 1972 interview, “I realized it [was] impossible to do things
that [were] right on and to reach the public....I spent a long time trying to do that [at
Richmond].”
264
When he founded MOCA, he was determined to keep it a privately run
space that would appeal to those artists and audiences interested in conceptual art, without
concession to any practice of art that defined itself in terms of producing traditional art
objects. At MOCA, Marioni’s exhibitions were never set up in such a way that they explained
themselves to the spectator; instead, they spoke to a narrow group of like-minded artists and
supporters: “when MOCA was going I didn’t have any of the concerns of trying to please
people….I knew that it would be accepted by my contemporaries. And that was the only
public I was concerned with.”
265
In another interview, Marioni made the difference between
the mission of MOCA and that of other museums (with their goal of enlightening the
public) very clear: “I don’t encourage the public to come, cause I don’t want to spend a lot
of time starting from the beginning trying to educate them. So it’s really for a specific
audience. You know, an educated audience.”
266
By establishing MOCA using his own money
and operating it according to his own rules, Marioni did not have to defer to unsympathetic
public administrators or cater to members of the general public. MOCA afforded him the
freedom to show whatever he wanted. As will be explained in further detail in Chapter Four,
it did not take a lot of money to run MOCA, the modest, no-frills institution that it was, and

264
Hershman and Lambie, “Tom Marioni on Record,” 3.
265
Ibid.
266
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
133
at first, Marioni simply ran it using part of the salary that he earned through his full-time
employment at the Richmond Art Center. When he lost his job, however, he ended up
having to close MOCA and was only able to reopen it when he received a federal grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Even if he was not concerned with the general public, Marioni still had to build a
following within the educated, elite artistic circles he was targeting. At the time of MOCA’s
founding, conceptual art was not widely practiced in San Francisco art circles, and
consequently it was new and strange to art audiences. While some artists in the Bay Area
explored non-traditional, temporal and situational media in the late 1960s, they did not call
what they did conceptual art per se. William T. Wiley and his circle of colleagues and
students in the art department at the University of California, Davis (including William
Allan, Robert Hudson and Bruce Nauman), for example, experimented with temporal art
forms like film, video and performances but these pieces were never made under the rubric
of conceptual art and they tended to build themselves around theatrical settings and
narratives, unlike the kind of concise, non-representational gestures supported by Marioni
Marioni recognized that in order gain validation and approval for conceptual art –
which, importantly, was his own preferred art practice – he needed to fashion it into a
distinctive artistic movement. Marioni remarked later, “I knew that the only way that I could
break into the scene [in San Francisco] was to start my own scene. And so I started the
Museum of Conceptual Art so I could create my own support system.”
267
Perhaps because
of his experience in working collaboratively with artists that he curated into shows at

267
Marioni, interview by Karen Tsujimoto.
134
Richmond, Marioni, in the first five years at MOCA, displayed a remarkable insight into the
need for creating a community out of the Bay Area art world in order to put conceptual art
on the map as a viable alternative to funk art and figurative painting. Through the formation
of a group of conceptual artists, he sought to emulate not only prominent artistic groups like
the New York School painters in the 1950s, but also Bay Area countercultural groups like
the Beats and the hippies, alternative communities that grew out of the members’ shared
aesthetic and that consciously self-identified as outsiders.
268

How did Marioni go about creating a scene? The first move, as we have seen, was to
establish a “museum” to which he could attach himself. With a mixture of irony and
earnestness, Marioni purposively appropriated the term “museum.” Although the word
museum could only apply to MOCA, which was utterly antithetical to the traditional
museum, in an ironic sense, on the one hand, it could also give MOCA an air of
respectability and distinction, and help to persuade others in the art world to take it seriously.
Indeed, Marioni liked to cultivate the myth that MOCA was an established institution. When
given a free advertisement in Avalanche by Sharp in 1971, Marioni arranged for all of the
docents with whom he formerly worked at the Richmond Art Center plus artists Terry Fox,
Larry Fox and a couple of other friends to gather at MOCA for a group photograph, which
was published in the magazine as the backdrop for the advertisement. The resulting image
included a total of seventeen people, none of whom had any official affiliation with MOCA
except for Marioni and Terry Fox, whom Marioni named MOCA’s “artist-in-residence”
(which will be explained below). Although the other men were casually attired, Marioni wore

268
For more on the importance of a social support system for artistic communities, see Crane, The Transformation of the
Avant-Garde, 25–35.
135
a suit and tie for the picture, perhaps to convey an air of seriousness. In recent interviews,
Marioni boasts that European readers of Avalanche, who had no exposure to MOCA except
through this advertisement and some brief descriptions of events taking place at the space in
the publication, were convinced that MOCA was much bigger than it actually was.
269

Second, Marioni contacted certain artists who shared an interest in temporal,
situational conceptual art – including Terry Fox (b. 1943 - d. 2009), Howard Fried (b. 1946)
Paul Kos (b. 1942), Mel Henderson (b. 1922), James Melchert (b. 1930) and Bonnie Sherk
(b. 1945) among others – and invited them to show at MOCA, thereby hoping to assemble a
recognizable art community. Marioni first came into contact with the work of these artists
through his position at the Richmond Art Center, where, as we have seen, he acted the part
of an advocate for avant-garde art. Being a curator gave him a reason to conduct studio visits
with artists both locally and in Los Angeles, visit exhibitions at other institutions, and
correspond with curators regarding artists and artistic trends.
One of the key artists that Marioni got to know in this capacity was Fox, whom the
former included in The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition in October 1969. Fox, who
had traveled and lived Europe in the 1960s and participated in the May student protest in
Paris in 1968, ended up going in with Marioni in his rental of the former office space that
became MOCA in 1970. Fox used the main open space as his studio while Marioni’s studio
was a small ten-by-ten foot room walled off at the back end. The small room also served as
the administrative office for the museum. Marioni dubbed Fox the “artist in residence,” as
though MOCA were a museum with the resources to sponsor artists. Normally, an artist in

269
Marioni, interviews, January 30, 2007 and February 2, 2007.
136
residence is supplied with lodging, a stipend, private studio space, and meals so that she can
work undisturbed by the distractions of everyday life and the burden of making money. Fox,
however, was not financially supported by Marioni, as they split the rent (the total rent was
one hundred dollars a month or about five hundred fifty dollars today). Marioni’s calling Fox
an artist-in-residence was, like the advertisement in Avalanche, more of a publicity stunt than
a reality, but it also pointed towards Marioni’s sincere aspiration for MOCA.
Another artist that Marioni met in his position at Richmond was Paul Kos, who had
by chance wandered into the Richmond Art Center in 1969 and ran into Marioni in his
office. Marioni demonstrated his tape measure piece, One Second Sculpture, 1969, for Kos, and
Kos described a proposal for public sculpture along the highways of Nevada that he had
dreamed up on his long drives back to his home state of Wyoming.
270
When the two realized
they had a similar sensibility, Marioni subsequently gave Kos a solo show at Richmond
(ParticipationKinetics, July 1969) and included him in The Return of Abstract Expressionism. As
detailed in Chapter One, both Fox and Kos were also selected as two of the three exhibitors
by Larry Bell in the Richmond Sculpture Annual 1970.
Mel Henderson was another artist included in The Return of Abstract Expressionism
whom Marioni subsequently invited to exhibit at MOCA. Henderson taught at San
Francisco State University, where Bonnie Sherk was his student, receiving her Master’s
degree there in 1970. While Henderson was officially a sculptor, he, together with several
colleagues at San Francisco State University, was engaged in large-scale public actions that
grew out of his political interests. In Oil, 1969, for instance, he and a group of colleagues

270
Kos, interview.
137
from San Francisco State protested a recent oil spill using biodegradable dye to write the
word “oil” five times in the San Francisco Bay. Bonnie Sherk, whom Marioni also included
in the 1971 California Girls exhibition at Richmond, was also interested in doing public
performance, including her Sitting Still pieces begun in 1970, where she sat in formal attire in
a stuffed chair in various outdoor locations. Henderson was married to Susan Rannells, who
worked at the Berkeley Museum alongside Brenda Richardson, both of whom also had an
important role in connecting the artists that became associated with MOCA. Howard Fried,
for example, met Marioni through the organizational meetings held in connection with the
museum’s exhibition titled The Eighties (March 17-April 12, 1970).
271
Marioni also brought
into the MOCA circle artist James Melchert, a ceramicist who taught at the University of
California, Berkeley art department, who in turn introduced his graduate students Stephen
Laub and Jim Pomeroy, who showed in exhibitions in 1973 and 1975, respectively.
272

To form his conceptual art scene, Marioni assembled a group of artists from
different communities in the San Francisco area – Kos who was educated at the San
Francisco Art Institute, Fried from Davis, Henderson and Sherk from San Francisco State,
and Melchert from Berkeley. Marioni saw his primary role as a facilitator, while the artists he
recruited were drawn to the idea of a conceptual art space, vague as that idea may have been.
Although all had toyed with performance, installation and action pieces prior to coming into
contact with each other, Marioni’s contribution was to bring these disparate individuals
together and to create a safe, supportive environment that nourished the exploration of
these new forms of art.

271
Fried, interview.
272
Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 14.
138
Although MOCA began as a way to carve out a niche as an alternative to the
entrenched painting and sculpture art scene, it soon gained a reputation for being highly
exclusionary itself. Critic Moira Roth wrote in 1978, “For many artists outside the scene,
MOCA was an inaccessible world, but for those inside it was inventive, supportive, and rich
in activities.”
273
This was probably a fair assessment of MOCA’s effect on those within it;
however, as the 1970s went on and younger artists became more interested in conceptual
practices, they found it curiously difficult to break into Marioni’s circle and to obtain
exhibition opportunities at MOCA. Constance Lewallen, a curator in the Bay Area for thirty
years, observes that Marioni was “very judgmental; you’re in or you’re out.”
274

Among the artists I have listed as MOCA’s core group, there is only one woman.
Like the larger art world that it was a part of, the MOCA community was male-dominated
and sexist. Many of the activities associated with MOCA and Marioni, such as drinking beer,
cultivated a decidedly masculine identity. Artist Bonnie Sherk, the single woman who was a
central part of Marioni’s clique, observed about MOCA in a recent interview:
Sexism was rampant. It still is [today], but [in the early 1970s] it was even more what
guys did. It was sort of obnoxious. Nevertheless [MOCA] was the most interesting
game in town for me at that moment. There was always this kind of edginess. And I
think it had to do with this sort of sexism, but I respected all of them [the male
artists at MOCA], and I think they respected me. So I think there was a camaraderie
that was very nice. It was special, it was very special, and frankly, the work we were
doing was so exciting to all of us.
275

273
Roth, “Towards a History of California Performance: Part One,” 99.
274
Constance Lewallen, telephone interview by author, October 14, 2011.
275
Aside from Sherk, the only other female artists that showed at MOCA in the early years was Linda Montano, who, for
her piece Handcuff, 1973, lived for three days at MOCA handcuffed to Marioni. Sherk referred to Montano as another
woman artist who was “let in” and mentioned artist Lynn Hershman as a woman who was “let in sometimes.” Sherk,
interview.
139
Sherk seems to have balanced the excitement of the collective art endeavor against the
sexism that pervaded the MOCA environment. She, at least, was accepted in the group as an
artist and found there a sense of camaraderie. Marioni, as demonstrated by his mounting of
the California Girls exhibition in early 1971, was aware of the dawning feminist sensibility, but
he resisted some of feminism’s ambitions, which as mentioned, resulted in the fallout of a
friendship with artist Judy Chicago, and he was too imbedded in the sexist culture to be fully
conscious of how he enabled this culture at MOCA.
Because the primary constituents of MOCA were other conceptual artists and their
supporters, MOCA was a friendly, low pressure environment for presenting one’s work.
Artist Melchert later remarked about this type of artist-run space:
It was like a laboratory. There was no pressure of the kind you get when a museum
or gallery is involved. No pressure that it [had] to be good. We could take chances –
if it failed, it wasn’t the end of your career. Because the space was free and you were
among friends, people tried things they wouldn’t have otherwise.
276

As Melchert observed, MOCA allowed artists to try out new things in a space that was half
exhibition, half workshop, with standards that were in flux themselves. It was not about
judging or evaluating, but about experimenting and practicing. A space that seemed, on the
surface, to accept anything, at least for those who were MOCA insiders, provided an
important impetus for a newly emerging art movement like San Francisco conceptual art.
In summary, MOCA was neither a conventional museum, where static artworks were
assembled for admiration by the public, nor a gallery, where the final concern was the sale
and the cultivation of the commercial side of art. Instead, MOCA served as a social center, a

276
Melchert cited in Alice Steinbach, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Space,” The Cultural Post, no. 12 (August 1977): 7. Melchert
made this statement when he was Director the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, a position
that he held from 1977-81. The contribution of the NEA to the development of alternative spaces will be addressed in
Chapter Four.
140
type of clubhouse or artist’s salon for artists to gather, socialize, make and share their work.
In a 1976 interview, Marioni explained: “what I wanted to make in MOCA, instead of
making a thing…an object, I wanted to make a space, a place that was like a social and
public artwork.”
277
Although Marioni refers to his desire to make MOCA a space that served
the public, it must be emphasized that his idea of the public was extremely limited, extending
to the conceptual art community and its audience. Marioni’s experience at Richmond soured
him on the idea of reaching a general public. Yet his turn to conceptualism – and its
acceptance of mundane life activities as art – made him even more interested in creating a
free flow between art and social interaction. Ultimately, Marioni’s project was to merge the
audience, the artist, and the museum into one movement, shot through by a feeling of
camaraderie and solidarity through literally fostering interactions among its members.
MOCA would serve the public of its choice by providing the space for these relations to
occur.
In the same interview quoted above, Marioni explained that, at MOCA, “the social
activity was part of the program.”
278
In other words, the social situations created as a result
of people gathering together during exhibitions – which at a conventional art museum were
considered incidental to the art on display – were a fundamental, constitutive aspect of
MOCA’s program. This was a radical departure from serious artistic and museological
practice. Although so much of the art world lifestyle centered around openings, parties and
other get-togethers, no one would think to equate that social activity with the art itself. Critic
Claire Bishop argued that in Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles,

277
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 7.
278
Ibid.
141
1968-72, the “peripheral supports and simulacra of bureaucracy,” which included
inaugurations, stamped letterhead, the mailing list of art world notables, “all these were as
significant as the Musee's individual exhibitions.
279
Like Broodthaers, Marioni also highlights
one of the “peripheral supports” of the museum – the social activity – which becomes as
important as the individual exhibitions.
MOCA, then, was never intended to be a lifeless “white cube” within which art
objects would be displayed, but instead was always supposed to be an activated space for
interpersonal exchange in which the spectator’s pretense of passivity was abolished. MOCA
was not simply a gallery, but a participatory space according to Marioni’s precept that social
situations were not only the ground of creativity, but had a double aspect: on one side art, on
the other side ordinary life. Still, it was not simply interacting with anybody, but interacting
with other artists that held this potential. That the interpersonal, communal activity
constituted a central part of the purpose of MOCA is reflected in the exhibitions that were
held in the space, for the exhibitions invariably doubled as social events. As we saw with “A
Participation Piece,” the opening reception was merged with the exhibition itself, which was
conditioned on the fact that the exhibitions were not traditional displays of art objects, but
were instead one-time events lasting only a few hours. They often involved a series of live
performances or actions, many of which required audience participation. The temporal
parameters that bounded the work, erasing the difference between exhibition and artwork,
encouraged the simultaneous attendance of all of the artists and interested audience

279
Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005), 33.
142
members. As such, all of the artists also became active spectators for each other’s work, and
an atmosphere of sociability was created.
Marioni’s personal interest in producing interactive social situations for artists
provides the central theme for my discussion of the five exhibits and events from the early
1970s with which this chapter is concerned. It also, incidentally, forefronts MOCA’s decisive
role as an incubator of a performative, participatory type of conceptual art – and of
performance and installation art in general – on the West Coast. In each analysis of the
exhibitions, I provide a general overview of the show and briefly describe the works
included. Since these exhibitions were conceptual, simply getting the description right is a bit
more complicated than it would be to describe “static” art works. Rather than provide an
analysis of individual works by other artists in each exhibition, I will instead focus my
attention on Marioni’s curatorial and artistic contribution to each show. As discussed in the
previous chapter, Marioni had devised a way of merging his curatorial practice and his
artistic aspirations by doing such things as submitting work under a pseudonym, inventing
new catalogue formats, and imposing his interpretation upon the instructions issuing from
other artists. Throughout this chapter, we will see Marioni putting his imprint even more
bluntly on the exhibitions at MOCA and the conceptual artists that congregated there.

Sound Sculpture As, 1970
MOCA’s first official group exhibition was Sound Sculpture As (April 30, 1970), a one-
night event consisting of one installation and eight performances involving the use of sound.
Around 1970, more and more Bay Area visual artists began to utilize sound as an artistic
143
medium that was different from music, even dissonant music.
280
Indeed, in the 1960s the
Bay Area was a center for experimental electronic music, which involved the exploration of
non-tonal sounds rather than melodic music. One landmark event in this history is the
founding of the San Francisco Tape Music Center by Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, Pauline
Oliveros and Morton Subotnick in 1962. The organization moved to Mills College in
Oakland in 1966, later becoming the Center for Contemporary Music. This musica
undoubtedly contributed to Marioni’s interest in experimental sound, and he was certainly
aware of the avant-garde music scene, as attested to by his inclusion of electronic musician
Warner Jepson in his 1969 Invisible Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Richmond Art
Center and in MOCA/FM (March 1971), a show that Marioni organized one year after Sound
Sculpture As, which consisted of one-minute sound recordings designed for the radio.
Marioni also included a performance by experimental composer and poet Anthony (Tony)
Gnazzo in the Return of Abstract Expressionism (1969), and showed experimental composers
alongside artists in a later exhibition, Notes and Scores for Sounds, held January 1972 at Mills
College. Certainly, the Northern California avant-garde musicians were also indebted to
musician and artist John Cage, who taught and performed at Mills in the late 1930s and early
1940s, and returned to perform in 1964 along with pianist David Tudor, as part of a music
festival at the invitation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
l tradition

281

280
Some sound exhibitions in the early 1970s include Sound III at Mills College held January 11- February 1, 1970 (see
“Sound III,” Artweek 1, no. 3 (17 January 1970): 1) and Sound Show at the Walnut Creek Civic Arts Gallery held in January
1972 (Hayward King, The Sound of Art (Artweek v.3 n. 1 (1 January 1972): 8).
281
Alfred Frankenstein, “Modest and Vital Drive: Tape Music Center’s New Goal,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1964,
p.46. See also “Survey: Center for Contemporary Music,” Art Spaces Archives Project, http://www.as-
ap.org/content/survey-center-contemporary-music, post dated August 5, 2010.
144
Interested in this trend of using sound in art, Marioni called up a number of artists
and in his typically freewheeling way, threw out a title for the artists to chew on and a date of
the show, asked them to create a work that conformed to the title.
282
Arlo Acton, Allan Fish
(Marioni’s pseudonym), Terry Fox, Paul Kos with Richard Beggs, Mel Henderson, Peter
Macan, Jim McCready, James Melchert, and Herb Yarmo all participated in the exhibition.
The live pieces were all performed one after another in succession, as they would be in a
musical concert. A common stylistic trait was that of paring down the action or movement
to a point that it would seem effortless and rudimentary, such as Fox dragging a shovel
across the linoleum floor, vibrating a piece of plexiglass, or Kos, who with the help of sound
engineer Beggs, trained eleven boom microphones on two twenty-five pound blocks of ice
and amplified the (silent) sound of them melting (Figure 2.3). Marioni, performing in place
of Fish whom the former said was unable to be there, urinated into a galvanized tub from
atop a ladder (Figure 2.4), and Melchert, who was out of town, had his student Jim Pomeroy
telephone MOCA at an appointed hour, wait for the phone to ring fifteen times and then
hang up and call back again. The performances in Sound Sculpture As were not meant to be
sustained or monumental, but signaled their own modesty and ephemerality. Generated
from the most elementary of props, the actions – of a stream of urine hitting a hard surface
or of a metallic object dragged along the floor – required no specialized artistic skill or
training and resembled manipulations of sound that might be enacted by children or by idle
people in quotidian life. But these most simplistic sound-making activities were combined

282
Kos, interview.
145
with a studied precision with which these sounds were enacted, creating an absurd and funny
performance.
By inviting the audience to participate in generating the sounds, some of the works
fostered the notion of tapping into one’s inner child, so that banal actions became cause for
wonder and excitement. Macan spread bubble wrap over the floor of the elevator used to
access MOCA’s fourth floor loft space, inviting visitors to trample over and burst the
bubbles. Acton walked around the room, distributing cricket noise-makers to everyone in
the audience, so that as he made his way around the space, the volume of the sound
increased. As one critic commented, “[t]he room was soon filled with the sound of artificial
crickets, and we were all suddenly at a nine-year-old kid’s birthday party.”
283
Indeed, like
many exhibitions at MOCA, the lighthearted subject matter and involvement of the audience
in Sound Sculpture As had the effect of transforming the art exhibition into a sociable event.
What also made the event more collegial and interactive than a typical exhibition was that all
of the artists were present at the same time, so that each artist saw and participated in the
work of the other artists from the viewpoint of the spectator.
Although the relationship of the works in the exhibition to the word “sound” in the
title of the exhibition is straightforward, the connection to the other descriptive word in the
title, “sculpture,” requires some explaining. Marioni, while embracing an identity as a
conceptual artist, nevertheless always considered himself a sculptor, and he claimed that all
of the work in the show constituted a type of sculpture despite the fact that the works
scarcely resembled conventional, object-bound sculpture. Marioni believed that traditional

283
Tarshis, “San Francisco,” 91.
146
sculpture was evolving from a static, three-dimensional form (here, he may have been
referencing minimalism’s three-dimensional “object”) into something that included a fourth
dimension, time, as a controllable feature with which the artist could manipulate.
284
Thus
temporal movement in space became redefined as sculpture, and the brief, mundane actions
that produced a sound in Sound Sculpture As were instantiations of this evolved four-
dimensional sculpture. Marioni insisted on connecting this new ephemeral, action-based
work to sculpture because he strongly believed that his concerns as a sculptor were different
from those of artists with backgrounds in painting, theater or performance, with the
difference arising from a sculptor’s enhanced sensibility to the appearance of forms in space.
The sculptor’s sensibility was critical to the ability to conceive of the act of making sound as
art.
285
As Marioni explained in a later interview:
[I]n theater the intent is to direct your activities to the audience. For me, as a
sculptor, I make an action that is directed toward the material, the material I’m
manipulating. The audience is a witness to my experiment, or ritual. My work has no
literary base; it’s visual.
286

Marioni’s distaste for anything theatrical did not stem from the same reasons that critic
Michael Fried opposed it in minimalist art. For Fried, theatricality meant that minimalist art
was not medium specific and that its meaning was contingent on the site and the viewer.
What concerned Marioni was not these aspects, but the narrative, scripted and illusionistic

284
Tom Marioni, “Out Front,” Vision 1, no. 1 (1975): 8.
285
Marioni’s understanding of what it means to a sculptor can also be gleaned from statements that he wrote about MOCA
artist Fox: “Fox is a full-time sculptor and has a heightened awareness to ordinary objects and actions….His sensibilities
and concerns are completely sculptural in that he uses materials in a direct and honest way. The objects in his everyday life
are potential works of sculpture.” Tom Marioni, “Marioni on Terry Fox,” 6-7, exhibition posting, Museum of Conceptual
Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
286
Tom Marioni, “A Conversation with Tom Marioni,” in Tom Marioni: À La Limite, Le Consortium, 2 Mai-26 Mai 1984
(Dijon: Bureau d’étude et de diffusion de l’art contemporain, 1984), n.p.
147
nature of (conventional) theater. Marioni preferred art that presented a direct, non-
representational, spatial experience.
Marioni’s anti-theatrical bias also explains his rejection of the association of his work
to Fluxus, the international art movement led by New York artist George Maciunas that
began in the early 1960s.
287
When asked in a recent interview if his early 1970s work related
to Fluxus, Marioni insisted “[Fluxus] wasn’t a sculptor’s sensibility. And for me and [Joseph]
Beuys and all the artists at MOCA, [we] all came from sculpture.”
288
(Marioni first learned
about Beuys in the late 1960s, and the MOCA artists had a direct connection to Beuys
through Terry Fox, who had lived in Europe in the 1960s and on a return visit in 1970,
performed with Beuys in the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf in a piece titled Isolation Unit,
November 1970.)
289
Oddly, Marioni seems to forget Beuys’ early association with Fluxus; he
would forever idolize Beuys while spurning Fluxus. In a previous interview he explained
“Fluxus, like Dada, involves many disciplines: poetry, dance, theater, music – these
disciplines, more than visual art, dominated Fluxus, whose roots are in performance. I never
liked the term ‘Performance Art,’ because of these associations.”
290
Despite Marioni’s

287
However, Marioni did show Fluxus artist Ken Friedman at the Richmond Art Center. After Friedman became
acquainted with Dick Higgins and George Maciunas in New York in 1966, Maciunas named Friedman the head of “Fluxus
West,” and in this capacity, Friedman set up two Fluxus locations, one in San Diego in the fall of 1966, and one in San
Francisco at the end of 1966. Karen Moss, “Beyond the White Cell: Experimentation/Education/Intervention in California
Circa 1970,” in State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, ed. Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), 154. A rival Fluxus impresario in the Bay Area was Jeff Berner, who organized a Fluxfest at the
Longshoreman’s Hall in March 1967 and a exhibition consisting primarily of Fluxus art at the San Francisco Museum in
May 1967. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, 190.
288
A more complete version of Marioni’s statement is as follows: “I put up some Fluxus works at Richmond Art Center.
But they were more like Dada artists, they were engaged in street theater, concrete poetry, new music. It wasn’t a sculptor’s
sensibility. And for me and [Joseph] Beuys and all the artists at MOCA, [we] all came from sculpture. The Happenings
artists all came from painting, except for Oldenburg. And for me it’s two different worlds. I sometimes say a conceptual
artist can work in any medium except for painting.” Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007. For more on Marioni’s views on
Fluxus, see Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 94.
289
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
290
Marioni, “A Conversation with Tom Marioni,” n.p.
148
dismissal of his work’s connection to Fluxus, Marioni nevertheless deeply admired avant-
garde musician John Cage, who was the most important teacher and greatest inspiration for
many Fluxus artists including Dick Higgins and George Brecht.
291

In a 1984 interview, Marioni reports that his Piss Piece was influenced by Cage’s Water
Music, 1952.
292
Cage’s piece involves a sequence of sounds that includes playing the piano
keys, turning the dial on a radio, blowing different kinds of bird-whistles, shuffling a deck of
cards and dealing them over the piano strings as well as the shaking of water receptacles;
another piece titled Water Walk, 1959 (which was subtitled Water Music no. 2 in one
notebook), incorporates all kinds of sounds created by water. Inspired by the possibilities of
making art through the use of ordinary objects and processes, Marioni took one of life’s
most primal and private everyday actions and made it the centerpiece of Piss Piece.
Given Cage’s importance for both Marioni and Fluxus, it is no surprise that
Marioni’s work resembled Fluxus pieces, and I argue that the “Fluxus event” was the direct
forerunner to the works in Sound Sculpture As, even if Fluxus works emerged from
experiments in music and Marioni came to his work through investigations of sculpture.
293
I
suspect that in addition to Marioni’s dislike of its roots and orientation in (musical)
performance, Marioni rejects linking the work in Sound Sculpture As to Fluxus because to

291
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1.
292
Marioni, “A Conversation with Tom Marioni,” n.p.
293
Although the works in Sound Sculpture As share a formal affinity to Fluxus and the same embrace of the banal and the
humorous, Fluxus was governed by a political orientation not shared by Marioni’s idea of conceptual art. Where one of
Maciunas’ primary objectives for Fluxus was the total dispersal of art into life or the elimination of art altogether, Marioni
was not interested in doing away with art altogether, but wanted the artist to be the one who could dictate what was and
was not art. Maciunas also believed that art should be pedagogical and devoted to social reform. For more on Maciunas’
goals for Fluxus, see Elizabeth Armstrong, “Fluxus and the Museum,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong,
Joan Rothfuss, and Janet Jenkins, 1st ed. (Minneapolis; New York: Walker Art Center; Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed
Art Publishers, 1993), 16.
149
admit that it was the same as works being done fifteen years ago seemed to detract from the
uniqueness of what he was doing at MOCA. The Fluxus event typically involved fleeting,
mundane actions using household materials and included such actions as releasing a helium
balloon into the air or eating an ice cream cone. The minor movements and gestures that
made up Sound Sculpture As closely resembled Fluxus actions. A piece by Brecht, Three
Telephone Events (1961) is described as follows: “When the telephone rings, it is allowed to
continue ringing until it stops./When the telephone rings, the receiver is lifted, then
replaced. When the telephone rings, it is answered.”
294
Clearly, this work closely resembles
Melchert’s telephone piece featured in Sound Sculpture As.
Indeed, Cage’s work was an inspiration not only for the Tape Center musicians and
Marioni’s Piss Piece, but also for Brecht’s Drip Music, 1959. A photograph of the version
performed by Maciunas at the “Festum Fluxorum Fluxus: Musik und Antimusik” in
Dusseldorf on February 2, 1963 (Figure 2.5) depicts Maciunas standing on a tall stepladder
in a suit and tie and pouring water out of a large jug onto the floor. Not only do the images
of each performance bear a formal resemblance – because the stepladder figures in the
Fluxus event as a prop just as it does in Marioni’s – but the essence of both works is in the
creation of a sound made by a stream of water.
295

Both Marioni and Fluxus artists had classical music training and their fixation on
pedestrian sounds emerged in response to the restrictions and conventions of classical

294
Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn, eds., Fluxusworkbook.pdf (application/pdf Object) (Performance Research
e-Publications, 2002), 23, http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf.
295
Ladders were a common feature of Fluxus performances, presumably to elevate the performer when there was no real
stage.
150
music.
296
Indeed, Marioni observed that Piss Piece, in which the emitted pitch changed as the
container filled with urine, “was like a musical scale.”
297
The central action of the work,
which overlays the act of pissing with a musical interpretation, is shared by another Fluxus
piece by artist Nam June Paik. In Paik’s Fluxus Champion Contest (aka Physical Music), 1962
(Figure 2.6), a group of men urinate into a bucket while singing their national anthems, and
the last man to remain pissing and singing “wins” the contest.
298
Although Paik’s piece has
been interpreted as a critique of the nationalism existing in Western art music, it does so
through its masculinist and loutish overtone (celebrating the vigor of a man in terms of his
ability to urinate), which is common to many works of Fluxus art as well as pieces in Sound
Sculpture As. At about the same time, artist Andy Warhol also purportedly created his first
Piss Painting, 1961, in which he urinated onto a blank canvas to create a work of art. Warhol
created this series of work, which were not publicly shown and are only known through
anecdote, as a parody of Jackson Pollock, who famously urinated in his dealer-patron Peggy
Guggenheim’s fireplace.
299
Although Warhol lampooned Pollock’s undisciplined display of
virility, I read Marioni’s work as complicit with the instantiation of a macho masculinity.

296
Fluxus artists incorporated classical musical instruments in their work, but in a way that rejected the traditions of the
music. In Nam June Paik’s One for Violin (1962), for example, the violin is raised overhead and smashed against a hard
surface.
297
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
298
The event score of this piece reads: “Performers gather around a large tub or bucket on stage. All piss into the bucket.
As each pisses, he sings his national anthem. When any contestant stops pissing, he stops singing. The last performer left
singing is the champion. 1962” Friedman, Smith, and Sawchyn, Fluxusworkbook.pdf (application/pdf Object), 88.
299
None of the 1961 paintings exist today and there is some doubt as to whether Warhol made them in the early 1960s. See
Georg Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, vol. 1, Sponsored by Thomas Ammann Fine Art Ag Zurich
and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York (London; New York: Phaidon, 2002), 469. For a
collection of anecdotes about these paintings and Warhol’s later related Oxidation Paintings, 1977-78, see Gary Comenas,
“Andy Warhol’s Piss Paintings,” http://www.warholstars.org/aw76p.html and “Andy Warhol’s Footprint Paintings,”
http://www.warholstars.org/art/artlx/ftprt61.html.
151
Like Paik’s Fluxus Champion Contest, Marioni’s Piss Piece appealed to a typically male
and adolescent fascination with the scatological, its boorish sense of humor turning on the
incongruent introduction of a base and normally private physiological act into the space of
public high art. Marioni was not interested in theatrically exposing his genitalia to the
spectators and made a point to urinate with his back to them, but nevertheless, urinating in
public – especially the space of the gallery – was meant to provocatively breach decorum. In
addition, Marioni’s steady stream of urine was produced while he was intoxicated, having
imbibed copious amounts of beer to generate enough piss to sustain the performance.
Because masculinity was associated with the drinking of alcohol to excess, this work has the
effect of reproducing stereotypical tropes of maleness. Marioni’s work was relatively tame in
comparison to other more overtly carnal and corporeal artistic offerings coming out of San
Francisco at the time – from experimental film (Kenneth Anger’s films) to underground
“comix” (R. Crumb’s comic books) – but equally at risk of perpetuating a kind of hyper-
masculinity in its tendency to publicize and glorify behaviors of a sexual or scatological
nature that had been relegated to the private sphere, or that were considered nasty or sinful.
Yet, the performance was not as outwardly silly as it might seem from my
description so far. Despite the fact that he had drunk a large amount of beer in preparation
for the act, Marioni was extremely anxious before his turn and performed the work with an
air of high seriousness.
300
Curator John Hanhardt’s description of Fluxus festivals in the
1960s – “specific everyday gestures and absurd propositions of attitudes…presented with
outrageous solemnity and precision” – could be equally applied to Piss Piece.
301
In addition,

300
Neubert, interview.
301
John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 31.
152
this ostensibly indulgent and farcical work contrasted with the artist’s everyday comportment
and manner; Marioni did not drink excessively in “real” life and had a serious and staid
demeanor. The embrace of excessive beer drinking was thus the assuming of a persona, a
kind of performance rather than a transparent act of autobiography. Although Marioni
rejected theater’s artifice, including its dependence on acting, his performance here was more
of an act rather than a true reflection of his day to day behavior.
According to artist and curator George Neubert who attended Sound Sculpture As,
Marioni also surrounded the performance with the attributes of serious aesthetic reflection
by prefacing it with a three to four minute homily in which he linked Piss Piece, for which he
created a small fountain of urine, to the great sculpted Italian fountains of the Renaissance as
well as to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the readymade urinal discussed in the last chapter.
302

Marioni does not recall giving this homily, but it also seems odd that Neubert would
fabricate the story. I suspect that perhaps Marioni conveyed his ideas to Neubert in a private
conversation rather than as an announcement to the entire audience, but in any case, I think
Marioni’s interests as revealed in the anecdote are worth exploring.
Marioni’s citation of Italian fountains both acknowledged his Italian heritage as well
as revealed his interpretation of his art career as being in continuity with the mainstream
(figuratively and literally) of Western art.
303
Indeed, Piss Piece also had a more recent
predecessor, Bruce Nauman’s photograph Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966, which pictured the
artist spurting water from his mouth. Nauman’s version was certainly less lewd and more

302
Neubert, interview.
303
In his memoir, Marioni describes his childhood in Cincinnati as follows: “I grew up in a very European household,
where everything was from the old country: Dante and Leonardo and Puccini.” Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir,
47.
153
distanced (as the documentation of a performance) than Marioni’s, the work nevertheless
betrays a kind of slapstick humor that likewise can be attributed to Marioni’s piece, and
certainly was meant to parody the fountains that occupy a significant place in Western art
history. As mentioned in Chapter One, Duchamp was one of Marioni’s most important
models for producing artwork that challenged existing definitions of art and pushed the
limits of what was acceptable. Marioni, like Duchamp, reveled in the contrast of maintaining
an air of high seriousness while launching into seemingly outlandish works of art, as though
testing the audience to see what they would accept as art. Marioni embraced this aesthetic
approach with the idea that broadening the concept of art would energize the aesthetic
sphere. MOCA was the permissive space that allowed this kind of experimentation, for both
Marioni and other artists.
Yet the permissiveness of the space was a privilege that was confined mostly to men.
Piss Piece and some of the other works in Sound Sculpture As had a masculinist and even sexist
posture that the artists were either unaware of, or even gloried in. One such piece involved
Henderson pacing up and down the room with a thirty caliber rifle and shooting at various
intervals at an image of a tiger projected onto a paper-covered saw horse. While I do not
mean to argue that the gun is solely a masculine instrument, this work clearly referenced a
fascination with weaponry, hunting and violence associated with men. In one of the
surviving images of Henderson’s piece (Figure 2.7) that depicts the bearded and rifle-bearing
Henderson, a woman dressed in a bikini standing atop an approximately two feet high cube
with her arms folded is also pictured in the background. Presumably this woman carried out
another work (that was a collaboration between Fox, Kos and Yarmo), which involved her
holding a galvanized drain pipe with one end held to her chest and the other on the floor
154
through which the artists released thousands of bb gun pellets that spilled onto the floor into
the audience.
304
Because there seems to be no practical reason for the model to be wearing a
bathing suit, the costume seems to have been selected to emphasize her sexiness, in contrast
with the fully-clothed man brandishing a rifle. In other words, the scenario in which the
performances were elaborated is bracketed by, on the one side, a scantily-clad woman in the
background standing on display on a pedestal, and on the other, men in almost comically
exaggerated postures of masculinity, which even if meant mockingly, does not negate the
subordinate and objectified place of women in this milieu.
Another work that featured women as performers was McCready’s contribution, in
which four women with plump legs clothed in shiny stockings paraded down a three by nine
foot rug placed on the floor. As the women walked, their stocking-clad thighs rubbed against
one other, producing a swishing sound.
305
While this work cleverly highlighted an unusual
banal source of sound, the work nevertheless focused attention on the women’s legs and had
the effect of objectifying women in a classically fetishistic gesture.
306
Indeed, in Sound
Sculpture As, as in many MOCA events, women were only present in the supporting roles as
models or onlookers rather than as artists.
The boy’s club atmosphere at MOCA that pervaded the design of the exhibitions of
Sound Sculpture As also pervaded the community that MOCA sought to create. Despite

304
This image is reproduced in Performance Anthology, a compendium of performance events in the Bay Area in the 1970s,
which identifies the image as one of Henderson’s piece with no mention of the woman. Loeffler and Tong, Performance
Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, 10–11.
305
As mentioned in Chapter One, McCready, a practicing lawyer, was a friend of Marioni’s and did not identify as an artist,
but Marioni coached him into making artworks. Marioni, interviews, August 10 and 17, 2009.
306
The pervasive sexism of the period is also reflected in the use of the term “girls” to refer to these women by art critics
reviewing the show. See “Rumbles: The Museum of Conceptual Art,” Avalanche, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 6; Tarshis, “San
Francisco,” 91.
155
Marioni’s protests in recent interviews that MOCA was equally open to men and women, in
1970, the art world was a man’s world, and MOCA was one of many settings where men
dominated.
307
Berkeley Art Museum curator Brenda Richardson remarked recently that
MOCA and the larger San Francisco art world
was just about as macho as you could get. [Generally,] [t]he women were wives,
stayed home to take care of the kids. It was a profoundly sexist time…women’s
liberation didn’t happen [un]til much later. It was really sexist. If you were a woman,
you were a woman.
308

My point is not that women were completely excluded from MOCA (as we will see later in
this chapter), but to acknowledge the conditions that made it difficult for women to
participate equally as artists at MOCA. If American culture in the 1960s and 1970s already
endowed men with the privilege to engage in sexist behavior, the freewheeling, transgressive
environment of MOCA sometimes allowed for even more aggressive assertions of
masculinity. Although MOCA was a safe, open place for radical exploration of new art
forms, rather than promoting a break with dominant gender roles and cultivating an equally
radical exploration of ways of inhabiting the world that were not permitted in the larger
social sphere, it ended up reinscribing individuals into traditional gender types.
MOCA was, of course, not alone: the history of avant-garde movements like Fluxus
is shot through with sexism and misogyny. And in a sense, the freedom and privileges that
belonged to men at MOCA were precisely what made it possible to produce such works as
Marioni’s Piss Piece, Henderson’s rifle performance, and McCready’s stocking work – if at the
expense of women. The chauvinistic setting that may have stifled the voices and limited the

307
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
308
Richardson, interview.
156
options for some women was simultaneously generative for many of the male artists
involved with MOCA.
Continuing the legacy of Fluxus also meant that Marioni and the other MOCA artists
also embraced a spirit of experimentation, a fascination with the quotidian, an openness to
the possibilities of what art could be as well as a sexist posture. A Fluxus-like attitude could
flourish at MOCA because it was so ad hoc, unrestrained and because the activities were
conducted among friends. The importance of MOCA’s distinctive relaxed and open
atmosphere was also apparent in later shows at MOCA, including Body Works, to be
discussed next.

Body Works, 1970
Like Sound Sculpture As, another early group exhibition titled Body Works (October 18,
1970) not only attested to MOCA’s role as a center of creative exploration of new media on
the West Coast, but it also continued Marioni’s project of producing situations in which
artists could assemble and interact. Six months after Sound Sculpture As, Body Works
showcased the newly emerging medium of video, probably the first public show centering
on video art in the Bay Area and the first traveling video exhibition in the United States.
309

Curated by Willoughby Sharp, who we saw earlier participating in the first MOCA event, the

309
The exhibition was supposed to premier at the Center for Art and Communication in Buenos Aires, Argentina before
being shown at MOCA, but when Sharp arrived at the Center, he discovered that the video system was incompatible with
the tapes. Following the initial presentation at MOCA, Sharp distributed the exhibition free of charge to institutions that he
later visited, and the videos had screenings at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles, the Atlanta School of Art, and
the University of Iowa. Willoughby Sharp, “Videoperformance,” in Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl
Korot, vol. 1st (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 258, 266 n.24. It is widely acknowledged that the earliest
(non-traveling) video exhibition in the country was TV as a Creative Medium, which took place in May 1969 at the Howard
Wise Gallery in New York. The first time an established museum showed video was probably when the Whitney Museum
of Art held A Special Videotape Show in 1971. Marita Sturken, “The Whitney Museum and the Shaping of Video Art: An
Interview with John Hanhardt,” Afterimage 10, no. 10 (May 1983): 4, 8.
157
show included videos by artists Vito Acconci (b. 1940), Terry Fox, Bruce Nauman (b. 1941),
Dennis Oppenheim (b. 1938), Keith Sonnier (b. 1941), and William Wegman (b. 1943) and
was shown for the first time in San Francisco. Although Marioni typically organized all of
the shows at MOCA, in 1970 he was in frequent correspondence with Sharp, who had
become a mouthpiece in the national and international avant-garde art circuit through his
newly-launched art magazine Avalanche. Marioni welcomed Sharp’s show at MOCA because
he knew that it would publicize MOCA’s name beyond the confines of the Bay Area
artworld. Indeed, Body Works also differed from other MOCA shows in that it featured
mostly artists outside of the Bay Area. The only Bay Area artist was Fox; Acconci,
Oppenheim and Sonnier lived in New York, and Nauman and Wegman resided in the Los
Angeles area, although both Oppenheim and Nauman had roots in the San Francisco area.
310

Fox’s video (Tonguing, 1970) focused on his lower face while he made a range of
movements with his tongue, Acconci’s video (Corrections, 1970) showed the artist setting fire
to the hair on his back with matches and beating out the fires with his hand, and
Oppenheim’s video (Selected Works, 1970) depicted a loop of the artist parting the hair on his
head with his bare hands. Works like these, in which the artist employed his own body as the
medium, began to be known as “body works,” a term popularized by Sharp in Avalanche, and
later “body art.”
311
Not only was Body Works notable for being the first showing of video art
in the Bay Area, but it also introduced the new genre of body art to the art public. Given

310
Nauman attended art school at the University of California, Davis from 1964-66 and lived in San Francisco until 1969
before moving to Southern California, and Oppenheim grew up in Richmond, California and received his B.F.A. from the
School of Arts and Crafts, Oakland in 1965 and his M.F.A. from Stanford University, also in 1965, before moving to New
York City.
311
See, for example, the article on body art in the first issue of Avalanche Willoughby Sharp, “Body Works,” Avalanche 1 (Fall
1970): 14–17.
158
Marioni’s devotion to innovative sculpture, his interest in showing body art at MOCA comes
as no surprise. For Marioni, sculpture was an art form that involved the manipulation of
materials, and each of the artists in Body Works activated parts of his own body in a
“sculptural” way, whether wiggling one’s tongue or parting one’s hair, merging the subject of
the artist and the object of the artwork into one event.
And yet, these sculptural events were not simply performances. From the very
beginning, body art was closely tied to the new technology of video. Each video in Body
Works was actually a recording of a performance created expressly for the camera with no
live audience present. Although video did not allow the artist direct interaction with the
audience as did live performance, it was repeatable – it allowed the work to be shown a
potentially endless number of times to a potentially unlimited number of audiences. Unlike
the older technology of film, which needed to be developed, video offered the benefit of
seemingly instant access to the image, even as, in these examples at least, the moment of the
recording of the performance and the playing of the recording itself existed in different time
frames. At this time, however, video was hard to edit, and thus was mostly done as a
continuous take. Marioni himself explored and embraced the advantages of the new medium
of video in his own practice, although he did not create body art like the works in the show.
Influenced by Andy Warhol’s films that were shot in real-time without editing like Sleep,
1963, or Empire, 1964, Marioni’s first video, 21:15, 1971, depicted the artist eating and
smoking a cigar while listening to a record of jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.
312
The length of the

312
Marioni, interview, June 27, 2008.
159
video was dictated by the length of one side of the record, which was twenty-one minutes
and fifteen seconds.
Although MOCA’s sponsorship of a video art show in 1970 attested to Marioni’s
progressive curatorial outlook, Body Works reflected Marioni’s lax and cavalier approach to
running an exhibition venue. Marioni’s curatorial style was such that he would simply choose
the artists and let them do what they wanted; in this show, Sharp did all of the work of
organizing the show and brought it to Marioni fully-assembled. But Marioni knew little
about the content of the works, according to the Artforum critic Tarshis, and he certainly did
not bother to screen the videos beforehand before presenting it to the invited audience. This
was perhaps in part because he did not own a video recorder-player (he borrowed the
machine for the exhibition from San Francisco State University.)
313
Indeed, another problem
arose related to the lack of equipment; Wegman’s tape, even though it was promoted as part
of the exhibition, was found to be incompatible with the equipment on hand at the last
minute, and was not shown at all.
314
The unavailability of proper equipment may not have
been only due to Marioni’s lack of attention to practicalities, but was a prevalent problem of
this early moment in video when “portable video systems were scarce and relatively
unobtainable in the Bay Area [a]rt community,” yet a more conscientious impresario may
have made greater efforts at securing the proper equipment beforehand or learning more
about the works before screening them.
315

313
Jerome Tarshis, “San Francisco,” Artforum 9, no. 6 (February 1971): 85. Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010
314
Ibid.
315
It was not until 1974 that video equipment became more widely available. George Bolling, “De Saisset Art Gallery and
Museum,” in Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1976), 169.
160
Marioni also built a degree of casualness into the event by opting not to hold the
event at the MOCA premises, but at a local bar named Breen’s just across the street. Marioni
was a regular customer at Breen’s Bar and considered it the unofficial MOCA canteen. By
using it as the venue, he achieved his goal of “combin[ing] both exhibition and reception”
316

Each video was screened one after another on a single television mounted on a raised shelf
behind the bar. The small television monitor can be seen in the upper left corner of a
documentary photograph of the event (Figure 2.8). Another photograph of the event depicts
audience members sitting in booths in the bar, engaged in conversation (Figure 2.9). That
everyone was not intently watching the videos would not have bothered Marioni, who chose
the bar environment precisely in order to make the event more social. As I argue throughout
this chapter, Marioni believed that a lively, friendly milieu provided the context for
productive artmaking.
Marioni’s decision to hold the exhibition at the bar also reflected an insight about the
no-edit process by which body art videos were made and the inability of video art to engage
the audience for a sustained period. Indeed, critic Tarshis emphasized in his review how the
Body Works videos bored the audience. Nauman’s tape (Floor/Wall Positions, 1968), which was
a continuous loop of the artist walking down a corridor and then back, was stopped early to
avoid driving away the audience, which had begun to leave as the repetitive performance
dragged on. In addition, at the end of the screening, Tarshis reported that Oppenheim’s wife
“got out of her seat as if shot from a cannon and said, ‘Thank God it’s over! I couldn’t stand
any more of this!’”
317
Although one would expect that the spouse of an artist in the show

316
“Body Works at MOCA,” Artweek 1, no. 34 (October 10, 1970): 2.
317
Tarshis, “San Francisco,” 85.
161
would not openly express boredom at the screening, Tarshis mentions this anecdote to
underscore just how utterly bored the audience felt. Indeed, the repetitiveness and
boringness of early video art has been pronounced by many critics and art historians. This
quality, as mentioned, was in large part due to a lack of editing capabilities in the early
technology; artist could not easily cut out the “boring” passages. In addition, artists saw
video as an experimental medium, one that could be used to create meandering, exploratory
works that were expressly non-linear and not action-packed. For some artists, the non-
narrative, and often boring or abstruse, quality of their tapes was also meant to stand in
direct opposition to and to counter the effects of commercial television. Other artists
embraced the slowness and monotony of the work to conjure states of Zen meditation or a
drug-induced consciousness.
318

Moreover, the idea that the video was meant to usurp the entire attention space of
the audience is in some sense a mistake. As experimental pieces, perhaps these videos were
not designed to be viewed in complete silence with focused concentration, but were meant
to be shared with an audience of like-minded peers who would drift in and out of paying
attention to them and who would use them for open discussion and debate. Marioni was one
of the first artists in the Bay area to acquire an intimate knowledge of how videos were being
made, and his presentation of the videos at Breen’s Bar evinced his understanding of them
as open-ended experiments meant to be seen casually rather than as polished, complete
works that required an audience’s full attention. As he explained in his memoir, watching the

318
For more on boringness in video, see Peggy Gale, Videotexts (Toronto, Ont., Canada: Published for the Power Plant,
Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995), 27–30; David Antin, “Video:
The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” in Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot, 1st ed. (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 178–80.
162
videos at Breen’s Bar “was the best way to see real-time tapes. You could come and go, have
a drink, talk, and be comfortable. The tapes were thirty minutes each, black and white, soft
focus, and with no story line.”
319
Noting that the videos had “no story line,” Marioni
acknowledged the tedium of real-time, non-narrative tapes and decided that the communal
and interactive viewing environment was most appropriate for early video pieces.
It is also important to note that the event was held at a time when Breen’s was
normally closed, and that only invited guests and those who had heard by word of mouth
would have attended. Indeed, the Body Works audience reportedly consisted of “a capacity
crowd of conceptual artists, assorted hairy freaks, and expensively dressed art-lovers.”
320
In
other words, although some artists (including those in MOCA’s circle, notably, Henderson
and Sherk) situated their works in the public space in order to engage an unsuspecting
passerby and to reach out to the layperson, Marioni’s decision to show at a publicly-
accessible, non-art space was not what it appeared to be, as he limited the audience to that
thin slice of the public that consisted of avant-garde artists and their supporters.
Marioni continued the tradition of casual presentations of video in an ongoing
weekly drop-in, open house at MOCA, which will be addressed later in this chapter. The
third exhibit we will look at further addresses the issue of art, sociability and the public: The
San Francisco Performance: New Art from the Bay Area.

319
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 97.
320
Tarshis, “San Francisco,” 85.
163
The San Francisco Performance: New Art from the Bay Area, 1972
1972 began as a hard year for Marioni. The financial effects of having lost his
Richmond curatorial job and only source of income began to weigh on him, as he fell behind
on the rent for the MOCA building. Finally he got ejected from his space in San Francisco,
and MOCA was homeless for a year. Yet throughout the time that MOCA had no physical
space, Marioni continued to organize exhibitions, referring to himself as “Tom Marioni of
MOCA;” hence, all of Marioni’s curatorial projects at this time could be seen as MOCA
projects. The most important of these shows, The San Francisco Performance (March 12-April
16, 1972), featured many of the artists from the MOCA inner circle of artists – Fox, Fried,
Henderson, Kos and Sherk – as well as other artists who were not part of the tight group,
namely the artists from the collective Sam’s Café (Marc Keyser, Terri Keyser and Dave
Shire), Larry Fox and George Bolling. Organized for the Newport Harbor Art Museum in
Newport Beach, California, the show came about when the director of the museum, Thomas
Garver, invited Marioni to organize a show of San Francisco art in 1971.
321
Like almost all of
the work featured in MOCA exhibitions, each of the works in The San Francisco Performance
shared a performative component. But Marioni usually referred to the temporal,
performative works as “actions” rather than “performance,” so Marioni’s choice of the word
“performance” in the title of this exhibition probably signals a capitulation – and an attempt
to capitalize on – the newly fashionable term “performance art.”
322
As the idea of
performance art became widespread, much of what occurred at MOCA was retrospectively

321
Garver and Marioni met through meetings of the Western Association of Art Museums, mentioned in Chapter One,
when Marioni was curator at the Richmond Art Center (1968-1971). Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
322
The first time that “Performance Art” appeared as a separate heading in Art Index was in volume 21 from 1972-73.
Bruce Barber, “Indexing: Conditionalism and Its Heretical Equivalents,” in Performance by Artists, ed. A.A. Bronson and
Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979), 187.
164
included in histories of performance art, and Marioni and MOCA were considered pioneers
in the field.
323

Unlike Sound Sculpture As and Body Works, which were strictly one-event affairs, The
San Francisco Performance consisted of an opening day with performances by a few of the
artists as well as a component that was installed in the Newport museum for the month-long
duration of the show. As with all MOCA exhibitions, Marioni did not select the artworks
that were included but he chose the artists – Bolling, Larry Fox, Terry Fox, Fried,
Henderson, Kos, Sherk, and Sam’s Café – and gave them loose parameters to guide them in
their selection of artworks to contribute to the exhibition. The parameters in this case were
extremely broad: he simply requested that the artists travel to Newport Harbor to create the
performances and install their own works.
324
This hazy planning stage lacked a true sense of
the museum’s space, as Marioni did not think to ask for a floor plan of the building
beforehand. Marioni described this exhibition as “an experiment” for the Newport Harbor
museum because the museum did not know what was to be presented until the artists
arrived at their doorstep to install the work.
325
Luckily, Marioni’s permissive, and perhaps
lazy, curating style was in synch with the museum’s liberal and trusting attitude toward
Marioni.
Kos showed an ordinary pool table surrounded by open steel traps used to catch
small animals hanging menacingly on the walls (Pool Hustle) (Figure 2.10). Players were
invited to use the table, but had to be careful lest they knock their cues into the traps and

323
Chronicler of performance art Carl Loeffler, for example, credits Marioni for being one of the early supporters of
performance art. Loeffler and Tong, Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, vii.
324
Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, June 19, 2011.
325
Ibid.
165
hurt themselves or their sticks.
326
For her work titled Traditional Performances: a piece within a
piece, within a piece, etc. (Figure 2.11), Sherk created an elaborate sculptural habitat for live rats,
one of which was pregnant and gave birth in Newport, and one of which was dead. The
installation consisted of soil and grass and concentric columns of gauze suspended from the
ceiling creating different areas, each of which was “symbolic of a different phase of life.”
327

Like other pieces by Sherk involving animals, Traditional Performances was meant to display the
life cycle of living beings. Sherk was also interested in the interconnectedness of humans and
animals, and her “activity in making her art was paralleled by the mother rat…building a nest
for her offspring.”
328
A different type of installation was shown by Fried, who covered a
sixty-foot long section of a wall from ceiling to floor in an offset printed paper (Figure 2.12).
The source of the wallpaper design was an enlarged reproduction and its inverse of one of
Fried’s dense ballpoint pen drawings. Fried described the extended process involved in
making the drawings:
I’d take a pen and I’d hold it and I’d put my eyes as close to the paper with the point
where the pen touched the paper still in focus, and I’d just stay there and wait and
eventually the paper would get filled, so the first one took about forty hours, and last
one took about a year and a half, and I’d only do it when I was stoned.
329

Indeed, writing in the exhibition newspaper that served as the catalogue, Marioni observed
how much of the new art was influenced by drug use:
Since the advent of the hippies and rock music there are strong feelings to
communicate in a personal way in the Area and it is definitely influencing many

326
Kos also presented a videotape called Warlock(ing), December 1971, San Jose, California in which he set up game traps in the
rain.
327
Sherk, interview.
328
Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 81–82.
329
Fried, interview.
166
artists to the point that the taking of drugs is important to the execution and even
the understanding of the work.
330

What was important for radical youth – particularly hippie Bay Area collectives like the
Diggers and the Merry Pranksters – was the opening of their minds, the stripping away of
limiting artificial cultural constructs, or essentially, a return to a pre-repressed, unalienated
state. These countercultural rebels, borrowing ideas from existential philosophy and
psychoanalysis, believed that modest individual acts of opposition to the dominant order
could effect social change. This conviction in personal liberation was also translated into the
use of drugs in order to expand one’s consciousness, a belief that rationalized the use of
drugs in the production of artworks such as Fried’s drawings.
The exhibition also included one of Fried’s videos, Fuck You, Purdue, 1971 (Figure
2.13) which opened with a shot of a bearded Fried alone in his crowded living quarters
screaming, “Hey Ward, fuck you!” followed by a cut of him in another position, mumbling
“Fuck you, Purdue.” Although this was not explained to the viewer, the work was based on
his brother’s experience in the Vietnam War, where two rival drill sergeants named Purdue
and Ward ordered their subordinates to walk over to the other sergeant’s barracks and yell,
“Fuck you, Purdue” or “Fuck you, Ward.” The video can be read as a portrait of a returning
veteran who is haunted by memories of his time in the military, although it was not intended
to be a work specifically about the Vietnam War or one of protest.
By contrast, Henderson’s Attica, 1972, was intended to comment on a real event that
took place several months earlier in Attica, New York, where, after the inmates at an
overcrowded maximum security prison took guards hostage to demand better living

330
Tom Marioni, The San Francisco Performance, exh. cat. (Newport Beach, Calif., Newport Harbor Art Museum): 1972): front
cover.
167
conditions, the prison was stormed by the state troopers, and ultimately cost the lives of
thirty-nine people. In the museum galleries, a model made up of colored lights (Figure 2.14)
stood for the live performance-cum-site-specific installation that occurred on the night that
the artists arrived in Newport Harbor prior to the opening of the exhibition. Henderson,
with the help of Kos, scrambled up a hillside nearby the museum and used strings of
Christmas lights to spell out the word “Attica” on a dark field. As Kos remembered:
I helped [Henderson] carry equipment up the hill. It was a generator with Christmas
lights. We each had an extension cord and I had the A T T of Attica and he had the I
CA. So I’d go ATT and he’d go ICA. Cutting the power and putting it back.
331

Soon after they began the light show, “the police, helicopter and dogs descended” and
Henderson and Kos were arrested by police for trespassing and Kos ended up having to
spend the night in jail.
332
Plainly invoking a recent event of social unrest – and suggesting the
artist’s sympathy and solidarity with the protesting prisoners – Attica related to Henderson’s
earlier politically-motivated public performances. With the inclusion of Attica as well as
Fried’s Fuck You Purdue and Sherk’s Traditional Performances, the exhibition reflected the
liberal, oppositional outlook of San Francisco conceptual artists. Although Marioni himself
tended not to draw his inspiration from current political events, this exhibition reveals how
many of the artists with whom he was involved did.
Aside from the works by the other artists, the exhibition also included contributions
from Marioni. As he did at the Richmond Art Center and in other shows at MOCA, Marioni
found a way to make a creative, “artistic” imprint on the show in an unorthodox manner
that went beyond the scope of the traditional curator. Marioni decided that the San

331
Kos, interview.
332
Henderson got out on bail given to him by Thomas Garver. Kos, interview.
168
Francisco-based artists should travel together as a group across the state to the Newport
Harbor museum for the opening of The San Francisco Performance – which they did via a rented
chauffeured fifteen passenger airport limousine – and declared the trip itself an artwork.
333

As a lived experience of the artists, the road trip inflected Marioni’s interest in the idea of life
as art, a principle that, in fact, inspired the conception of the exhibition overall. The gallery
handout accompanying the show described the blurring of the boundaries of the aesthetic
sphere and everyday life:
by taking acts, words and objects from everyday existence, and shift[ing] the
concepts that surround them…the boundaries of ‘art’ are blurred and extended into
life, and one is hard pressed at times to find out where, (or even if) the transition
between one and the other occurs….These artists make the point that one cannot
exclude life from an art experience because the two should not be separable….
334

As mentioned in Chapter One, many conceptual and performance artists in the 1960s and
1970s challenged the arbitrary designation of one sphere of life activity as art and another as
work or utility, that is, they resisted the Modernist ideal of artistic autonomy. Marioni, too,
rejected the traditional separation of art and life in his curatorial initiatives and individual
works of art. While Sound Sculpture As presented sounds made by prosaic, household objects
as art, the road trip of The San Francisco Performance was supposed to present the same kind of
usurpation of life by art by transforming the mundane actions that constituted the life of an
artist – specifically the transportation from the artist’s home city to the exhibition venue –
into art.

333
Tom Marioni, “The San Francisco Performance,” exhibition handout, 1972, 2, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive,
Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
334
Thomas Garver, “The San Francisco Performance,” exhibition handout, 1972, 1.
169
Marioni, however, did not advocate that everything an artist did should be designated
art.
335
As shown in A Participation Piece, which involved a live photographing of the painting
event as it unfolded, Marioni believed that an artist transformed an action or process into art
by framing it in the appropriate manner, which first and foremost entailed recording and
translating the action or process into a documentary form, either through photography, or
increasingly, video. Documentation was useful not only as a way to obviate the problem of
the ephemerality of durational, performative art by capturing it on film or tape, but more
importantly, it had the power to constitute and distinguish an action, especially one that
closely resembled an event in everyday life and could easily be mistaken for the mere
quotidian, as art. Although one might argue that it took the next step of displaying the
documents in an art setting that would endow the recorded action or process with the status
of art, to Marioni, it was the first step of documentation that was most crucial, for it could
not be assumed that his works would ever be shown. Given his interest in framing the road
trip as art, Marioni invited Larry Fox, a photographer (and brother of Terry Fox), and
Bolling, a videographer, to accompany him and artists Henderson, Kos, and Sherk on the
group trip down South (Figure 2.15).
336
Thus Marioni highlighted and aestheticized a
normally hidden, functional aspect of the exhibition-making process, while at the same time
he demystified the other artworks in the exhibition, in as much as the material conditions of
its production were shown.

335
Marioni, interview by Karen Tsujimoto.
336
Howard Fried flew down to Southern California to join the artists at the opening event. Fried, interview. Terry Fox
could not travel to Newport Harbor at all during the exhibition because he had to be hospitalized. The group Sam’s Café
also did not participate in the road trip or the opening; they had disbanded as a collective by that point. Marioni, interview,
August 10, 2009.
170
While it does not seem to have been made clear to Fox and Bolling at the time,
Marioni viewed the two men differently than he did the other artists in the exhibition. As
Marioni said in a recent interview, “I did present the two documenters as part of the show,
but not the same as the artists you know, because they were documenting what the other
artists did.”
337
Thus it could be said that Marioni saw what Fox and Bolling were doing not
as the work of independently creative artists, but as assistants equipped with recording
equipment carrying out Marioni’s directive, which was to document the road trip, or what
Marioni saw as his personal work of art. In fact, all of the artists who participated in the road
trip were, in Marioni’s scheme of things, actors in Marioni’s artwork. In representing himself
as the artist whose labor is primarily to conceive of an idea that is enacted or embodied by
others, Marioni was picking up on a notion popular in conceptual and post-studio art circles
of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The road trip represented Marioni’s “invisible”
contribution in the show just as the blank pages in the catalogue to Invisible Painting and
Sculpture, his process print cover for the catalogue to The Return of Abstract Expressionism or
Allan Fish’s Piss Piece in Sound Sculpture As, and revealed Marioni’s desire to practice as an
artist, rather than remain confined to his role as curator.
338

In the course of the drive from San Francisco to Newport Harbor, Marioni planned
for the group to make two stops: the first at Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens in
Fresno (inland Northern California), a subterranean complex of grottoes, vegetation, and
arches created single-handedly by Sicilian immigrant Forestiere on his personal property in

337
Marioni, interview, June 27, 2008. In 1972, few artists owned video cameras, but according to Marioni, George Bolling
“had a video camera because he would document accidents for insurance companies.” Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
338
Marioni later referred to these gestures as “invisible” works of art. Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 102, 115.
For his use of the idea of invisible art, see also Tom Marioni, “Invisible Text, Paris, 2008 Followed by Invisible Painting and
Sculpture,” in Voids: A Retrospective, ed. Mathieu Copeland (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2009), 380–381.
171
the first half of the century, and the second at artist Chris Burden’s performance at the
Market Street Program gallery in Venice, California (Bed Piece, 1972) (Figure 2.16), in which
the recent art school graduate remained in a cot pushed up against the wall of the gallery for
twenty-two days.
339
Although these two entities, a homestead and a gallery exhibition,
drastically differed in form, they interested Marioni because he saw them as stagings of
everyday life activities as art. By inhabiting the exhibition space, Burden’s piece made prosaic
actions – mostly lying in bed and often sleeping – into the stuff of art. Forestiere was not a
self-identified artist, nor were the gardens considered by him a work of art per se, but
Marioni considered Forestiere an artist and the gardens as the summation of a life’s work,
primarily of construction and maintenance.
340
By making the gardens a stop on the road trip
along with Bed Piece, Marioni saw that one’s laborious actions of gardening and building
could represent a work of art. In addition, the work was not dissimilar to other conceptual
works being made at the time, namely earth art, or large-scale site-specific installations built
directly into the landscape. Blurring the lines between making art and going through the
motions of everyday life, the Underground Gardens and Bed Piece thus were compatible with
a road trip that was itself conceived as a work of art made out of the actual lived travel
experience of the artists.

339
Burden got to know Marioni when the former was an art student at the University of California, Irvine. Burden’s teacher
Robert Irwin encouraged Burden to travel to San Francisco to meet Marioni because of Burden and Marioni’s mutual
interest in body-based performance. Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007. Burden maintained a correspondence with
Marioni throughout the years and performed twice at MOCA (Secret Hippie Piece, October 30, 1971 and Fire Roll, February
28, 1973). In April 1972, a month after visiting Burden’s Venice show, Marioni had a show at the Reese Palley Gallery in
San Francisco that also involved inhabiting the gallery space. Titled The Creation, 1972, Marioni lived in the space for seven
days and created a different drawing, print or performance each day.
340
Tom Marioni, interview by author, August 27, 2010, San Francisco, Calif. When he was a curator at Richmond Art
Center, Marioni showed photographs of the Underground Gardens by Edmund Shea in an exhibition called Four
Photographers (January 14-February 7, 1971). He also featured an article on and images of the Underground Gardens in the
first issue of his art publication Vision by his wife Brown. Kathan Brown, “The Underground Gardens of Baldasare
Forestiere (1879-1946),” Vision 1, no. 1 (September 1975): 62-67.
172
Marioni’s decision to make the exhibition into an opportunity for a road trip also
underscored Marioni’s continued attraction to Bay Area bohemia. Immortalized in Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the road trip was associated with the Beat search for
independence and escape from the strictures of straight, white American society. In 1960s
San Francisco, the road trip continued to attract cultural rebels. According to Martin Lee and
Bruce Shlain, for Ken Kesey’s hippie collective the Merry Pranksters, “travel,” just as it was
for the Beats before them, “was still attached to the bohemian lifestyle as a metaphor for
spiritual discovery”
341
The Pranksters traveled across country in 1964 in an outlandishly
painted bus that they dubbed “Furthur,” engaging in bizarre acts of street theater along the
way.
342
By taking the opportunity of the exhibition to invent a conceptual artist road trip,
Marioni used the fundamentally communal situation of artists in close quarters to build
camaraderie for a group that was outside of cultural norms.
Indeed, one of the primary reasons Marioni started MOCA was to create a
conceptual art “scene” into which he would fit. Part of this program was to make the various
artists with whom he worked seem like members of a larger movement. Thus he deliberately
showcased the artists involved in The San Francisco Performance as a clique; the emphasis was
on the group of artists rather than any individual. In Figure 2.17, the image used for the
invitation to the exhibition, Fried, Sherk, Kos, Marioni, Larry Fox and Henderson are
pictured together, standing or squatting against a wall. The artists who could not be present

341
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (Grove
Press, 1992), 121. For more on the romance of the road in American culture, and for an interesting comparison of the road
trip in the hands of the Beats and the Merry Pranksters, see Katie Mills, The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film,
Fiction, and Television (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
342
For more on the Merry Pranksters, see Michael Schwartz and Neil Ortenberg, eds., On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the
Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture, 1st ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1990).
173
were included by proxy: Terry Fox was represented by his video playing in the monitor
above Larry Fox’s head, and the collective Sam’s Cafe was represented by a photograph of
the three artists tacked to the wall next to Fried. The image used to represent the exhibition
thus highlights the charisma and allure of the artists rather than their artworks, and positions
them as a group, rather than describing their art as a stylistic movement. The use of the
artist’s bodies also underscores their physical presence in their works, or the performative
thread that runs through the exhibition. Marioni, following his usual curatorial practice, also
included himself in the image. Although he served as the curator and ringleader of the group,
the composition of the photograph confirms his desire to be seen as one of the artists (albeit
one who was central to the group) and his interest in erasing the difference between curating
and artmaking.
The image is also suggestive of a representation of a rock band that might be found
on an album cover. And in fact, Marioni restricted his art movement to certain artists that he
liked, which inevitably made MOCA gravitate to an exclusive “star system” organization.
The rock band image is also fostered by Marioni’s decision to rent a chauffeured limousine
for the trip, which conveyed an exaggeratedly luxurious appearance to which he certainly was
not accustomed. In other words, he seeks to present himself and his entourage as important,
famous artists through the recording of the trip in Fox’s and Bolling’s documentation.
Marioni’s other contribution to the exhibition was the design of the catalogue, which
was not a typical bound volume, but a tabloid-sized disposable and inexpensively-printed
newspaper. As we saw in Chapter One, Marioni, like other conceptual-minded curators, re-
designed the exhibition catalogue to make it less a scholarly or utilitarian guide to the art and
more a manifestation of the underlying theoretical approach of the exhibition. The use of a
174
newspaper – with its connotation of ephemeral use and disposability – reproduced the logic
of the fleetingness of performance. Yet in the end, Marioni’s essay failed to communicate the
goals of the exhibition and neglected to provide a theoretical basis for his show. His
rambling catalogue essay, printed in tiny print on the front page of the newspaper, suggests
the absence of a cogent thesis for the exhibition. He begins with one long summary
paragraph that is supposed to be an introduction to the themes addressed in the show, but
contains only broad generalizations and haphazardly jumps from one topic to another. A
short excerpt will suffice to give a sense for Marioni’s inarticulate and ungrammatical text:
The life span or performance of the piece is shorter and the methods for recording
the artists’ hand today are in keeping with the materials (technology) that are
available to the artist. We approached in the late 60’s a love of natural processes, raw
materials and moved to the country so to speak. Museums were dealing with dealers
and collectors and not the artist himself.
343

Marioni follows this vague introduction with an account of the backgrounds and practices of
the various artists one by one, but he never describes the works of art that were actually
included in the exhibition. To be fair, when Marioni wrote the text, he did not know what
was to be included in the show, such was its improvisational nature. Indeed, the
disadvantage of imposing no sort of instructions on the artists was that it compromised the
coherence of the exhibition as a whole. The incoherence of the catalogue, too, is created by
the reproduction of photographs of the road trip and of the process of the exhibition
installation on multiple pages in the form of a contact sheet turned vertically on the page
(Figure 2.18). The pictures are too small to decipher, lack no explanatory captions, and get
lost in the sheer number of images.

343
Marioni, The San Francisco Performance, exh. cat., front cover.
175
These same images taken by Larry Fox were blown up into four inch by six inch
prints for exhibition in the galleries of the museum (Figure 2.19). Fox was given access to a
darkroom just before the opening in order to develop the photos for this purpose. The
prints were posted in a single continuous line in the center of the walls of the entry foyer,
while Bolling’s video footage of the trip played on a monitor nearby. Though I do not have
any evidence of how Fox’s images were received, Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson
complained about the illegibility of the video. Wilson described footage taken during the
arrest that took place after Henderson installed his Attica piece as follows: “it looks mostly
like vague puddles of light accompanied by voices of Henderson and the police sounding
like Ph.Ds. discussing an academic issue.”
344
Indecipherable and dull, the real-time video of
the trip’s events also prompted Wilson to comment wryly: “the artists have deemed
everything that has happened around them since they left San Francisco in a bus is art. Being
a concept artist is marvelous, like being a magic fairy. You point at anything and zap, it’s
art.”
345

Wilson mocked the circularity of Marioni’s idea that art was absolutely defined by the
artist. Interested in bridging the gap between art and life, and fascinated by the ways in
which an artwork becomes framed as art, Marioni intended to use the entire exhibition as the
end point for the collection of artists under his leadership – thus giving the exhibit of the art
an aspect of art itself. Hence, the display of documentation from the trip and the installation
of the exhibition followed logically. But by throwing out the standard of what interested the
spectator, and indeed, leaving no place for the art to be observed, he may have erred in

344
William Wilson, “This Is Art---These People Are Artists,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1972, sec. View R Part IV, 1.
345
Ibid., 14.
176
presuming on the allure of the artist – as though second-hand documentation of their lives
would supply the interest in the exhibition. Although the road trip and installation of the
exhibition was a pleasurable, social activity for the artists, it likely was not particularly
interesting for the average museum visitor. In a sense, we could say that the exhibition was
intended to create a rich experience for the artists – by allowing them to enjoy each other’s
company during the road trip and by allowing them the privilege of installing their own
works in the museum as they pleased – but it also shut down one of the core aims of an art
exhibition at a public institution, which was to foster understanding of art by a lay audience.
This privileging of the artists’ experience and the artists’ needs corresponds to the
operating ethos of MOCA, which was, as we have seen, concerned with an audience of other
conceptual artists rather than with the general public. Museum staff member Phyllis
Lutjeans, who worked closely with Garver on the exhibition, recalls that it was not
particularly popular, and adds, “I think people were confounded.”
346
Curator Suzanne Foley
writes that “[The San Francisco Performance] was not easy for the public to understand or to
accept, and it is to Thomas Garver’s credit that he brought it about.”
347
Alarmed when a rat
from Sherk’s installation bit a visitor and by the profanity in Fried’s Fuck You, Purdue video,
the museum board also threatened to shut down the show.
348
Just days after the opening,
Lutjeans wrote in a letter to Sherk: “Everyone seems to be up tight [sic] about the exhibition,
but there has [sic] been no drastic moves made. We are open and people are coming.”
349
The

346
Phyllis Lutjeans, personal communication with author, October 9, 2011, Newport Beach, Calif.
347
Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 27.
348
Lutjeans, personal communication.
349
Lutjeans, Gallery Administrator to Sherk, March 15, 1972. Letter located in San Francisco Performance Folder, Orange
County Museum of Art Archives, Newport Beach, Calif.
177
show remained open but The San Francisco Performance revealed the problems with producing a
conceptually driven, artist-oriented show at a public museum. As historians of the
movement have argued, a high level of competence was often needed to decipher conceptual
art.
Although The San Francisco Performance happened at a time when MOCA had no fixed
venue, by January 1973, Marioni received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) and was able to reopen MOCA in a new space on the second floor of 75 Third
Street, just across the road from the original building that housed MOCA. It was there that
he mounted one of MOCA’s most significant exhibitions, All Night Sculptures, in April 1973.

All Night Sculptures, 1973
A one-night event that ran from sunset to sunrise on April 20-21, 1973, All Night
Sculptures was a group exhibition of nine artists including Terry Fox, Joel Glassman,
Henderson, Kos, Stephen Laub, Sherk, Barbara Smith, John Woodall and Frank Youmans
(who performed a piece conceived by Marioni). As usual, Marioni selected a group of artists
and gave them loose instructions under which to develop a new piece expressly for the
exhibition. In the case of All Night Sculptures, Marioni’s single instruction was: “Do
something that lasts all night,” with the work addressing, somehow, the theme of
nighttime.
350
The late night duration of the exhibition set the tone for a casual and fun
evening, an all night party, in fact, rather than a traditional formal art exhibition. In addition,
because All Night Sculptures was a one-time live event, it conflated the separate structures of

350
Roth, “Towards a History of California Performance: Part One,” 99.
178
an opening reception and an exhibition. As with Body Works, the party was the exhibition.
Through convivial occasions like these, MOCA made itself into a social center that
happened to be an art space, or a place for conceptual artists and their supporters to interact.
Although the title All Night Sculptures suggests Marioni’s continued preoccupation
with sculpture as the master art form, the works in this exhibition again were nothing like the
traditional notions of static, object-based sculpture. Some of the artists opted to do
performances, while others created site-specific installations, and in both cases, they were
often designed to create an interactive experience that would involve the spectator in the
piece, in effect transforming him or her into the performer. Kos, for example, covered the
floor of one room with two-by-four foot wood planks and placed a typewriter on a table
farthest away from the door for his piece rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march,
1973. Meanwhile the recorded sound of the typing of the letters “M a r M a r M a r c h”
played loudly through speakers in a rhythmic cadence. The pulsing sound combined with
spacing of the wood planks compelled anyone entering into the room to step to the beat.
Fox’s Memento Mori, 1973 (Figure 2.20) created “a kind of Surrealist environment tableau
sculpture” in the shaft of a skylight out of a bed and pillow covered with white canvas that
draped to the floor, a bowl in the corner holding a coral-like sponge saturated with vinegar,
and a slit in the wall so that anyone in the room could see outside using the light of the
moon.
351
Reached by a ladder and enclosed by a glass pyramid-like top, Fox created a space
of contemplation that because of its small size, encouraged the spectator to see it alone, and
that engaged the sense of touch, smell, and vision. A more intimately interactive work was

351
Tom Marioni, All Night Sculptures, 1973, video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 33 min., copy located in
Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif. This work is titled Cell in a definitive
catalogue of Fox’s early work. Brenda Richardson, Terry Fox (Berkeley, Calif.: University Art Museum, 1973), n.p.
179
Feed Me, 1973 by Smith, who created a boudoir-like environment in the former ladies
bathroom. While a recorded loop of her voice imploring “feed me” played continuously,
Smith lay naked on a makeshift bed on the floor, and invited visitors, mostly men, in one at a
time to have a private session with her using objects she had set out in the space including
fruit, wine, burning candles, and incense oils (Figure 2.21). The experiences ranged from
talking to eating and drinking to sexual intimacy.
A common strategy of performance and installation artists in the 1960s and 1970s
was to temporarily take control of a confined area during an exhibition. Art historian Julie
Reiss reports that art dealer Martha Jackson organized a show of Environments in 1961 (a
name coined by artist Allan Kaprow for his immersive installations) in which the gallery was
divided into six sections, each of which was given over to an artist. Jackson asserted that “’it
led to many museum shows afterwards where they did the same thing; they divided the
museum up and gave each artist a section.”
352
Yet MOCA was different from galleries and
museums in that it was not designed as a clean gallery space, but was instead a found,
dilapidated, multi-room space that bore the marks of its previous status as the home to a
printing company (Figure 2.22). It thus lent its architectural atmosphere to a more flexible
and creative use of the space as compared to the standard rectilinear gallery room. All Night
Sculptures thus exploited unusual areas like the bathroom, the skylight nook, and the roof,
which were all taken over by individual artists. One factor that allowed this new format of
presentation was MOCA’s move to the 75 Third Street building upon its reopening. At five
thousand square feet, the new space was much larger than the first, and even though Marioni

352
Jackson quoted in May 23, 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, transcript, Archives of American Art, New York as
cited in Reiss, From Margin to Center, 37.
180
officially did not have rights to the generally unoccupied floor above, which was connected
to his floor by an open staircase, he nevertheless used the upstairs space for events like All
Night Sculptures.
353
By renting a large multi-room venue, Marioni was able to comfortably
space out group shows like All Night Sculptures, giving each artist his or her own area for the
duration of the event. The sequential nature of the former MOCA shows – having all of the
artists perform in succession in a single loft space or at Breen’s Bar – was in part a matter of
physical space requirements rather than aesthetics. In the new space, the seriality of Sound
Sculpture As was given up for the more traditional, simultaneous showing of pieces and
performances.
A related precursor to this practice was the Los Angeles feminist art project known
as Womanhouse (open to the public on January 30 to February 28, 1972). An old, decaying
mansion rehabilitated by a group of feminist artists, Womanhouse, like MOCA, was not
purpose-built as a museum or gallery, but was repurposed into an exhibition venue for a
variety of site-specific installations and performances. At Womanhouse, artists created pieces
that related to the specific function of the area of the house in which they were located,
whether the bathroom, bedroom, stairwell or kitchen. The traditional confinement of
women to the domestic sphere was, as we saw with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “Manifesto
on Maintenance Art,” 1969, of course, especially contested by second wave feminists. Judy
Chicago, for instance, used the bathroom to create an installation of tampons and maxi-pads
(Menstruation Bathroom, 1972) that rendered hyper-visible the normally taboo subject of
menstruation, while Kathy Huberland used the staircase in her piece Bridal Staircase, 1972,

353
Recall from the introduction that the top floor was largely vacant with the exception of 1974 when the San Francisco
Redevelopment Agency rented it out to the nonprofit organization, the Chinese Youth Alternative.
181
which satirized the presentation of women – like objects – to men on their wedding days. In
these cases, the signifiers of the space flowed into the meaning of the pieces.
The same thing was not true of MOCA. Unlike Womanhouse, the individual works
in All Night Sculptures did not convey a coordinated, collaborative message about the space,
and the exhibition as a whole was not motivated by a shared political, feminist, outlook. In
fact, Marioni’s own artistic contribution to the exhibition could have been seen as the
opposite of feminist, in that it reified typical gender stereotypes. For the piece entitled The
Artist’s Studio, 1973, Marioni hired a moldmaker, Frank Youmans, to create a work of
Marioni’s design, which was to make a plaster cast of a torso using a live, nude female model
(Sally Pine), a lengthy “all night” activity that involved first making a mold of the model and
then casting it in plaster (Figure 2.23).
354
Thus Marioni’s work literalized the objectification
of women and the traditionally subordinate role accorded to women in the art world as muse
and model rather than artist. Blind to the sexist overtones of his work, Marioni failed to
question the meaning of having a topless woman lie down to be cast for the sake of a male
artist’s work, and simply saw his piece as providing a new interpretation of sculpture. Indeed,
by putting on real-time display the processes of casting and molding, he transformed a very
traditional method of sculpture-making into a live performance and process piece. Yet this
radical reframing of the medium of sculpture did not include a reassessment of the role of
women in this history.
Even Marioni’s observation of Smith’s Feed Me demonstrates his chauvinist view of
women. Putting the female artist in the position as an erotic plaything rather than an artist in

354
Marioni, All Night Sculpture.
182
control of the situation, he commented: “The scene on the outside of the room that night
looked very much like a street corner. The guys were sitting around smoking cigarettes
fantasizing about going into the room.”
355
His characterization of the work paints it as a
situation where men waited their turn with a streetwalker contrasts with Smith’s view, which
was that she had intentionally disturbed the normal representation of the relationships
between men and women by shifting the onus of desire to herself, the woman. The visitor
entering the room soon learned that it was up to him or her to determine how to please and
“feed” Smith, rather than the other way around.
356
This is not to say that Marioni’s reading
was entirely wrong, but that he tended to view the work from the position of the
heterosexual male and was often unconcerned with or unaware of competing female
perspectives.
In addition to what it reveals about Marioni’s views of the opposite sex, The Artist’s
Studio also reveals much about his view of himself and about the division of labor in
conceptual art. As I touched on earlier, Marioni was constantly concerned with advancing
himself as an artist in the shows he curated, rather than simply disappearing behind the
scenes as a curator. Even so, Marioni’s experience in the museum system made him aware
that including himself in his shows was a conflict of interest. As a compromise, Marioni hid
his identity whenever he made an artistic contribution to a show he was also curating.
Although Marioni listed Youmans as an artist in the promotional material for the exhibition,
in recent accounts Marioni makes clear that he was the artist behind the work, not Youmans;

355
Ibid.
356
Jennie Klein, “Feeding the Body: The Work of Barbara Smith,” Performing Arts Journal 21, no. 1 (January 1999): 30–31.
183
Youmans was “just a craftsman making a mold.”
357
Marioni thus puts Youmans in the same
position that he put Fox and Bolling into when they recorded The San Francisco Performance –
that is, they were the accessories, the instruments, in the making of Marioni’s artwork. Again,
Marioni’s desire to remain anonymous drove him to create a work that reflected the
conceptual logic by which the authorial integrity of the artist was not threatened by the fact
that he did not actually fabricate the work himself. In other words, conceptual art
conveniently made it legitimate for Marioni to hire another person to execute his work, while
still allowing him to remain the author of the work, just as an architect can claim to be the
author of a building even if she does not do a single piece of physical labor in the
construction of the building. Marioni could thus satisfy two personal necessities: one, his
aspiration to show his artwork, and two, his sense of the kind of intellectual work that
conceptual art should embrace. Although many conceptual artists challenged notions of
authorship and originality in the wake of the death of the author theory, Marioni’s work
suggests that dispensing with authorship is nearly impossible in our market-based, art star
driven art world. Ultimately, the notion of authorship remained intact while what changed
was the definition of artistic labor.
As my description should make clear, All Night Sculptures was a highly unusual
exhibition format, in its occurrence overnight and its assigning of artists to their own
domains within the building. In his role as curator-impresario, Marioni creatively responded
to the challenges of displaying new art forms that physically and temporally exceeded the
boundaries of traditional art objects. Although avant-garde happenings had been engaging

357
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
184
the spectator for decades, Marioni’s show went beyond most earlier interactive work by not
only putting the spectator through a spectrum of participatory activities associated with the
individual works of art; but also bringing together, in one composition, the art event and
social gathering by virtue of the fact that the event was designed to go into all hours of the
night. Reflecting on his experience with MOCA many years later, Marioni liked to say that he
“started MOCA as an excuse for a party.”
358
While this comment was made tongue in cheek,
the spirit of irreverence – not to speak of the inverted world of carnival – certainly marked
All Night Sculptures, as well as many of Marioni’s MOCA-related activities of the time. We
turn next to another event that embodied Marioni’s sense of party, MOCA’s Wednesday
afternoon open house events.

Wednesday Afternoon Open House, 1973-74
By 1973, a weekly drop-in, social gathering centered on drinking beer became the
mainstay of MOCA activities. The mailing that introduced the new MOCA space (Figure 5)
proclaimed: “As part of the Museum exhibition program, MOCA will be open to the public
every Wednesday afternoon. Unscheduled events will take place, including the serving of
FREE BEER.” Each Wednesday afternoon, Marioni opened the space to the public from
one to five in the afternoon, and on any given day, about five to fifteen people would
gather.
359
The participants consisted mostly of local artists, but an artist or curator visiting
from out of town might drop by if he was there on a Wednesday.
360

358
Tom Marioni, “California Body Art and Its International Roots, 1996,” in Writings on Art: Tom Marioni 1969-1999 (San
Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2000), 75; Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 93.
359
Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
360
Ibid., Sherk, interview.
185
To host the Wednesday event, Marioni filled his refrigerator at MOCA (Figure 2.24)
with “the cheapest beer [he] could” find, which was “supermarket beer at eighty nine cents
for a six pack of short bottles of Fisher beer.”
361
All of the empty beer bottles were collected
and placed side by side on shelves built into the walls, which were left over from the printing
company that had inhabited the space before MOCA (Figure 2.25), creating a tangible,
visible documentation of the ongoing event, or what Marioni described as a “record of [the]
social activity.”
362
The array of beer bottles evoked Pop forerunners, but where Jasper Johns
made a bronze cast of Ballantine Ale cans (Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1960) (Figure 2.26),
Marioni showed real, mass-produced bottles that had served the useful function of
containing beer. While the sculptural installation of bottles was a clear homage to Andy
Warhol, unlike Warhol’s painted rows of Campbell’s soup cans (200 Campbells Soup Cans,
1962 (Figure 2.27), Marioni’s use of alcoholic beverages replaced the decidedly domestic and
feminine-coded subject matter with an adult, masculine-coded one.
Through the aestheticization of social beer drinking, the artist reenacted the ritual of
bonding among men, thereby unwittingly reifying and ritualizing beer drinking as an
authentic, masculine behavior that was carried out in order for one to enter the ranks of
full-fledged, heterosexual manhood.
363
As Marioni said himself, “men drank beer and
women drank wine,” indicating his awareness of the masculine and potentially sexist tone
that beer brought to the occasions.
364
In a sense then, the unending rows of accumulated

361
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 104.
362
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 7.
363
For more on drinking among men in college fraternities in the postwar era, see Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps:
A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 241–248.
364
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
186
bottles signaled not only the bonding that occurred, but also the maleness of MOCA, the
boys’ club atmosphere of events at MOCA in general and of the Wednesday afternoon
events in particular. Marioni also chose to use beer in his work because he thought of
alcohol as a ritualistic stimulant that heightened one’s experience of the world, as it was
in the Catholic Church in which he was raised.

used
.”
366

365
In addition, he explained that beer was his
drink of choice because he was from Cincinnati, what he called a “German beer town
Although in part inspired by his biography, Marioni’s choice of cheap beer also constituted a
kind of bohemian disaffiliation from the bourgeoisie in favor of aligning with the working
class, especially in light of the fact that the museum was housed in a former printing factory,
or a place of blue-collar labor.
The Wednesday affairs were inspired by Marioni’s experiences as an art student,
which consisted primarily of drinking and playing the bongo or conga drums.
367
As he
remarked in his memoir, “A lot of the things I did in art school were things that I later
ended up making the subject of my art.”
368
What he learned most from art school was not a
traditional skill in drawing or welding or printmaking, but rather that the social activities in
which artists engaged formed the connective tissue of artistic life. Though seemingly
unrelated to art, and ostensibly superfluous and unserious, these activities were not separate
from and peripheral to artmaking, but they constituted the very stuff of art. The lesson that

365
For more on Marioni’s views on beer as a stimulant, Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986,” n.p.;
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 11; Tom Marioni, “Tom Marioni: Interview by Robin White at Crown Point
Press, Oakland, California, 1978,” View 1, no. 5 (1978): 11.
366
Marioni discusses Cincinnati as a beer town in Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986.”
367
Ibid., n.p.; Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 63; Marioni, “Tom Marioni: Interview by Robin White at Crown
Point Press, Oakland, California, 1978,” 11.
368
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 63.
187
Marioni took away from art school, then, was that art did not have to be autonomous from
the material and social world. Just as Marioni designated the road trip across California in
The San Francisco Performance art, he also redefined drinking cheap beer and socializing with
friends as art.
Yet despite the fact that the drinking and socializing alone counted as art by
Marioni’s standards, he nevertheless attempted to make the Wednesday afternoons more
acceptable as authentic art events by showing art-related videos. The tapes were mostly
videos made by artists as works of art, but Marioni also showed documentation of previous
events at MOCA as well as recorded art-related talks.
369
The process was relatively informal:
a local artist who wanted to show a new video could simply ask Marioni if he could get on
the schedule the next week. No record was kept of the videos shown, but Marioni
remembered a few videos that were shown at the time. On one occasion, Peter D’Agostino,
who became a prominent San Francisco video artist in the mid- to late 1970s, showed one of
his art tapes.
370
On another occasion, Marioni screened four thirty-minute tapes of Joseph
Beuys giving lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland as part of a performance festival in 1973. Burt
Arnowitz, whom Marioni had engaged briefly as MOCA’s video curator, had recorded Beuys
when he and Marioni traveled to Edinburgh for the festival as part of the MOCA Ensemble,
a band specializing in the musical genre free jazz, put together by Marioni.
371
On a third

369
Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
370
Tom Marioni, email message to author, March 3, 2010.
371
The MOCA Ensemble rehearsed at MOCA, but the only member who was an artist was Marioni (percussion). The other
members included Arnowitz (synthesizer), Buddy Toscano (saxaphone) and Gabrial Stern (saxophone). Marioni, interview,
February 24, 2010; Marioni, email message, March 3, 2010.
188
occasion, Rosamund Morley, who had been a student of Robert Irwin, brought one of
Irwin’s lectures for screening.
The regular Wednesday gathering was Marioni’s attempt to create an artist’s salon,
but it did not have the stiffness of a typical salon. Rather, “it was,” in Marioni’s words, “as if
you had people over to watch television in your living room,” although admittedly the stated
populism of the event was undercut by the high art content of the videos.
372
Like the Body
Works exhibition at Breen’s Bar, the Wednesday open houses made observing videos a live,
communal experience, thereby inviting discussion of the works or lectures being shown and
establishing bonds between those present. Although all of the events at MOCA
demonstrated Marioni’s interest in getting people together, the weekly beer events were a
more formalized way for Marioni to create a sense of community and cohesiveness among
the members while centering the discussion on art. Conscious of his artistic forbears,
Marioni sought to reproduce the watering hole gatherings that occurred between postwar
artist groups like the New York School painters who convened at the Cedar Tavern in the
1950s, and his contemporaries in New York, who assembled in their factions at Max’s
Kansas City in the 1960s and 1970s. Marioni, who also considered himself a Beatnik in the
1950s, may also have been thinking of other countercultural, bohemian groups like the San
Francisco Beat poets who gathered at Vesuvio’s bar in San Francisco in the 1950s. Marioni
knew that for radical artists excluded from the mainstream, a sense of community and shared
purpose was valuable for providing a psychic space for experimentation and validation of
their work.
373
By putting MOCA in the service of the social mediation of the group of San

372
Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
373
For more on artists’ social networks, see Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde, 19–42.
189
Francisco conceptualists, Marioni was again extending the mission of the museum into the
grey area between displaying and canon-making, on the one side, and participation, on the
other. This was the kind of “social and public artwork” that he referred to in the quotation
cited in the introduction to this chapter, although – unlike other public projects – it was
reserved for a small circle of likeminded artists.
One significant perk that artist meetings at MOCA offered to its participants was
complimentary alcohol, a fact underlined by a sticker that read “Free Beer” placed on the
door of MOCA’s refrigerator. As mentioned above, by this time, MOCA’s expenses were
being covered by the grant it received from the NEA, and thus the beer, like everything else
at MOCA, was being paid using a portion of this grant. As Marioni recounts in a 1976
interview, “That’s one of the things I did with the grant money I got from NEA, was to give
away beer.”
374
Although the way in which Marioni narrates the events suggests a puerile
attitude of rebelliousness, and although the distribution of free beer was seen by at least one
critic as a waste of taxpayer money, I think it is also fair to look at Marioni’s actions in the
context of historical events that took place in San Francisco in the late 1960s and early
1970s.
375

Recalling the cultish embrace of all things free by San Francisco hippies, Marioni’s
free beverage distribution reveals a countercultural pedigree. In particular, the action can be
linked to the acts of the Diggers, who from 1966 to 1968, enacted a utopian social program
that included free transportation (members were obligated to pick up hitchhikers), free

374
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 7.
375
Alfred Franknstein attacked the giving away of free beer as a waste of taxpayer money. Alfred Frankenstein, “Art to
Make One Foam at the Mouth,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, May 22, 1979), 40.
190
communal housing, and free food given out every day at Golden Gate Park with the intent
of subverting the money-based capitalist system.
376
In 1967, Abbie Hoffman, a former
Digger who became well-known for founding a breakaway group called the Yippies,
ecstatically championed “the free thing…[as] the most revolutionary thing in America today.
Free dance, free food, free theatre (constantly), free stores, free bus rides, free dope, free
housing, and most important, free money.”
377
Marioni in his memoir, too, acknowledges the
influence of the counterculture, explaining that San Francisco body art “developed in the
time of free speech, free love, the hippie era of drugs and rock and roll.”
378
Thus, when
Marioni provided free beer in the spirit of mocking the institutional protocols of the art
grant complex, it is also related to this larger countercultural, anti-capitalist movement that is
specific to the San Francisco context.
379
Marioni, in contradiction to the countercultural
embrace of the people, limited his arena of action to the art sphere and never sought to
effect social-political change like the Diggers. Yet he imported into the art world tactics of
collective rebellion against commercial, bourgeois society, and he embraced the
countercultural interest in sharing one’s bounty with one’s peers. While others may have

376
Founded in 1966 by about twenty members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, including former Beat poet Peter Berg,
the Diggers remained active through 1968. Naming themselves after the seventeenth century utopian English
revolutionaries who sought to cultivate public lands for common use, they staged free interactive street theater and issued
broadsides to promote the disruption of capitalist bourgeois society. Michael William Doyle, “Staging the Revolution:
Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-68,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s,
ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 78–83. Also see Martin, The Theater Is in the
Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America, 86–124. The Beats, too, embraced a cult of poverty in a rejection of modern
life, and in an attempt to avoid the corrupting influence of commercial world, mass media, and monotonous work. Van
Elteren, “The Culture of the Subterraneans: A Sociological View of the Beats,” 71.
377
Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996),
101.
378
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 83.
379
Another related but later incident involving free goods and services occurred when the left-wing radical group the
Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974. The SLA conditioned
Hearst’s release on the distribution of free food in San Francisco, although the demands were not filled to their satisfaction,
and she was never released.
191
criticized hippies for freeloading on society, and indeed, correctly rebuked them for their
sense of entitlement, the hippies justified giving away surplus or even stolen goods because
they were being made available to needy individuals. For Marioni, using a grant from the
NEA to purchase beer for an indigent group of artists was justifiable because on the one
hand, he believed that it was the role of the avant-garde artist to provoke institutional
powers, and on the other hand, the distribution of free beer and the bonds it created was
instrumental to fostering the experimental art that he so valued.
The five events discussed in this chapter underscore MOCA’s role as San Francisco’s
leading incubator of avant-garde art in the early 1970s. Because it provided the opportunities
for artists to gather in casual, social situations and to try out their performances and
installations in a supportive environment, MOCA became, for a brief time, central to the Bay
Area (and indeed the West Coast) experimental art scene. MOCA introduced time-based art
forms including performance, installation and video to the admittedly narrow circle of avant-
garde artists. These artists, in their teaching and in their other work, disseminated this ethos
of art making. Of all the artists in the MOCA circle, Terry Fox garnered the most attention
at the time, exhibiting early on in New York and in Europe, including at Documenta 5 (1972),
the prestigious international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and continues to be the most
well-known of the group for his action-sculpture work. He moved to New York in 1978 and
later to Europe, where he passed away in 2009. Fried also showed in Documenta 5 as well as
other international shows in the early 1970s, gaining prominence for his video work in
particular, but also for his performances and installations. He became a professor at the San
Francisco Art Institute (where he studied as an undergraduate) in the Sculpture Department,
and later helped establish the New Genres Department, a move that reflected the school’s
192
recognition of the shift in artmaking away from specific mediums. Kos, too, found
employment as a professor of art at SFAI, his alma mater, beginning in 1978. He also
achieved success with his video and video installation pieces, showing them in New York
and in Europe throughout the 1970s.
The founding of MOCA itself set a precedent for the proliferation of what would be
become known as alternative art spaces in the Bay Area and beyond, particularly those that
specialized in the temporal, situation genres embraced by MOCA. In 1974, Sherk went on to
found The Farm, a “life-scale environmental performance sculpture” composed of reclaimed
buildings and land under a freeway intersection that sponsored artist and community events
alike. In 1977, Melchert became the head of the Visual Art department of the NEA, which
as will be discussed in Chapter Four, was instrumental in giving life to artist spaces like
MOCA throughout the 1970s and 80s. Bringing his MOCA experience to the Washington
job, Melchert continued to channel federal monies to the support of alternative spaces and
new genres of art throughout his tenure (1977-81), a direction that was begun by Melchert’s
predecessor, Brian O’Doherty.
Even though Marioni acted as an administrator and curator of the events at MOCA,
he always considered himself one of the artists in the community that he forged. As his
various contributions to and interventions into the five exhibitions examined in this chapter
demonstrate, Marioni constantly sought out new ways to participate in his exhibitions as an
artist. If Marioni began to consider exhibitions as artworks, then it was an easy jump for him
to begin thinking of MOCA as a whole as a work of art. Although he did not start MOCA
with the idea that the organization itself was art, over time Marioni could not resist folding
MOCA into his artistic practice. In Marioni’s mind, MOCA was too important of an
193
achievement and too significant a part of his time to be considered merely a curatorial
project.
My focus on the exhibits is not meant to eclipse Marioni’s career as an artist in his
own right. While he was running MOCA, he never stopped seeking out opportunities to
show his personal artworks in other institutions. When granted the chance to show at
another art venue, he used the resources of the organization to benefit himself in such a way
that seemed exploitative. The next chapter explores how his works made for museums
highlight the heteronomy of the artistic sphere, specifically how material and social concerns
govern the asymmetric relationship between artists and art institutions.
194
Chapter Three: Marioni’s Works in Museums: Making Museums Pay

On Monday, October 26, 1970, a day when the museum would typically be closed to
the general public, Tom Marioni, using his pseudonym Allan Fish, invited thirty artist friends
to attend a private party at the Oakland Museum, just outside of San Francisco. The
museum had cleared out an annex to a gallery for Marioni to host the event, which formed
the basis of an artwork called The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art
(Figure 3.1). From one in the afternoon to five in the evening, Marioni and his friends drank
beer, smoked cigarettes, socialized and “clowned around.”
380
Most of the participants
remained in the gallery designated for the work, but some of the attendees wandered off into
other parts of the museum. A few of these tipsy wanderers removed a shade from a lamp
and playfully placed it on a sculpture by Bruce Beasley. At one point Paul Kos, one of the
invited artists, took one of the ropes used to cordon off a room and, using his rock climbing
skills, lowered himself down to another museum gallery exhibiting a historical diorama of
life-size American Indians.
381
At the conclusion of the event, the group left empty beer cans,
cigarette butts, soiled napkins, an apple core, and a partially eaten sandwich in the gallery
space, creating a visual state of disarray. Marioni intended that this detritus be displayed – for
subsequent visitors to the museum during the month-long run of the exhibition – as the
“residue” documenting that the event that had taken place.
382

380
Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, July 24, 2011.
381
Kos, interview.
382
Hilla Futterman, “Activity as Sculpture: Tom Marioni Discusses His Work with Hilla Futterman,” Art and Artists 8, no. 5
(1973): 18.
195
The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, which was recreated in various manifestations
throughout the 1970s, as we saw in our discussion in Chapter Two of the Wednesday beer
gatherings at Marioni’s MOCA in 1973-74, exemplified the artist’s tendency to erase the
boundary between ordinary life activities and the creation of an artwork. This work drew on
the fact that Marioni was a self-described “social being” who enjoyed getting drunk with his
artist friends (with its resonance in the art world in such artist get-togethers as the abstract
expressionist meetings at New York’s Cedar Tavern). Marioni claimed not to subscribe to
the romantic notion that art was supposed to be better, higher and more valuable than “real”
life, so if carousing was something that happened in his daily life, then he saw no reason not
to frame this activity as art. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends was not entirely understood
by its audience within that frame, however, and in fact museum officials believed it to be a
duplicitous scam intended to exploit the generosity of the host institution. In other words,
they suspected that Marioni tricked the museum into throwing him a party under the guise
of making art.
While earlier chapters have addressed Marioni’s relationship to museums by
examining his exhibitions – as well as works that he made for them – at the Richmond Art
Center and MOCA, this chapter will focus on works like The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends
that were produced for institutions with which he had no affiliation. This chapter will
examine the aesthetic and ethical aspects involved in importing pleasurable, mundane
activities into the space of the museum, which shamelessly put into the forefront of the
experience the exploitation of the sponsoring institution for the artist’s personal benefit. In
addition to The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, this chapter addresses two other works that
constitute an unorthodox use of exhibition opportunities to benefit the artist: 6 x 6 x 6,
196
1971, which entailed Marioni eating a fancy catered meal with three friends in a gallery space,
and My First Car, 1972, where the artist used the exhibition budget to purchase an old car for
his personal use. Because the activities highlighted in the works served the artist’s practical
everyday interests as an ordinary person (rather than as an artist per se), audiences often saw
them as spurious art works.
The works addressed in this chapter underline Marioni’s continual struggle to
support himself financially in the early 1970s. Of course Marioni was unable to make a living
by selling art – not only because his durational, ephemeral work did not lend itself to being
sold, but also because he had no gallery representation and no interested patrons. As we saw
in Chapter One, his one steady job, the few years he spent as curator at the Richmond Art
Center, was sacrificed to his sense of where the art community should be moving. So in early
1971, unable to find permanent employment as a curator or teacher, the extra-artistic jobs
that he might be suited to do, he found himself with no steady source of income.
Exhibitions and their accompanying budget allotments to artists for materials thus became
one of the few ways for him to generate income as an artist. Capitalizing on exhibition
opportunities he was able to secure – often through taking the initiative to propose projects
to curators and museum directors – Marioni redirected the exhibition budget into a kind of
fringe benefit for the impoverished artist, while at the same time throwing a party, eating a
good meal and owning a car. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, 6 x 6 x 6, and My First Car
then were, on the one hand, expedient, improvisatory solutions for a struggling and relatively
powerless artist to survive within the existing art world system, and, on the other, stages in
Marioni’s conceptual art practice of enlarging the aesthetic sphere to encompass the
ordinary.
197
Marioni was convinced, at this point in time, that an artist was entitled to support,
financial and otherwise, by the museum (as well as by the state). This sense of entitlement
perhaps stemmed from his coming of age in the post-war era in a cultured, white, Italian
immigrant household. In prosperous 1960s America, post-scarcity thinking, which
maintained that advanced technology could eliminate the need to work and allow people to
live off societal excess, had became widespread.
383
This countercultural belief in the capacity
of society to support its citizens while they engaged in creative endeavors that the capitalist
system could not support, coupled with Marioni’s affluent upbringing may have also partly
inspired Marioni’s sense of entitlement.
384
As will be described later in the section on My
First Car, Marioni projected the possibility that American art institutions could be pushed
into adopting the Italian model of artistic culture, where widespread support of the arts,
liberty for the artist, and respect for artists was the rule.
The strand of Marioni’s practice addressed in this chapter highlighted the
dependence of artists – particularly lesser known artists like Marioni – on the museum
system for both career advancement and financial gain. Marioni was cognizant of the fact
that museums had become pathways to a successful career and a necessary adjunct to
achieving a secure place in art history in the postwar era, and although art world denizens all
understood the asymmetric power of the institution over the artist, this unequal power

383
Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s,” in
Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 11–12.
384
As historians of the 1960s have noted, the vast majority of hippies, too, came from middle-class, white households, and
they had an expectation of a life of prosperity that only privileged members of society could have. See, for example, Ibid.,
12.
198
dynamic was not openly acknowledged in the space of the museum.
385
Marioni, however,
predisposed as he was to making carnivalesque breaches of decorum, was intent on exposing
his compromised relationship to the museum and hence made it the very subject of his art.
Marioni’s work thus suggested a model of an artist not as a romantic, gifted genius,
but as a capitalist producer. Against an idealized conception of the artist, Marioni’s work
revealed that the life of the artist was embedded in a way of making a living rather than an
exalted pursuit of self-expression or handicraft, and that artists far from being uninterested
in commerce or career advancement, were wont to view the museum opportunistically. Yet
at the same time, we can see an opposing tendency in Marioni’s practice. For while the
ordinary subject matter of his works suggest this materially-bound artist person, Marioni
reserved a special place for the artist as the figure uniquely endowed with the power to
sanction one life activity as art, and others as merely leisure or utility. Despite his
understanding of the artist as embedded within a capitalist logic of exchange, he nevertheless
retained an idealist notion of the artist that upheld the artist as a godlike figure.
Ultimately, this chapter argues that Marioni’s exploitative and seemingly unserious
works had the effect of exposing the economic realities and power dynamics that structured
the relationship of the artist and art institution. By bringing into the light normally repressed
relations, he critiqued the museum’s pretense to social neutrality and objective standards as
well as the Modernist ideals of the art object’s internal coherence and autonomy. In his
work’s emphasis on the utilitarian and ephemeral pleasures of the senses – drinking beer or
consuming a meal – Marioni further discards Modernist principles of transcendence and self-

385
For an analysis of the important role that museums play for artists, see Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums
in New York Since 1969,” 79–81, 97.
199
sufficiency, and thwarts the museum’s attempt to make aesthetic judgments as they had in
the past.
At the close of this chapter, I touch on one more of Marioni’s pieces from the early
1970s, Christmas Poem, 1972, when Marioni mailed notices to members of the art world in the
Bay Area and beyond announcing that he had been appointed the Director of the San
Francisco Museum of Art (which would change its name to the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art in 1975) – which of course most insiders in the art world would have known
was absurd. While this piece of prank art is unlike the first three works addressed in this
chapter, since it was not produced with funds provided by an art institution, the piece
demonstrates the artist’s continued engagement with and critique of the organizational
structure of museums. Here, Marioni did not open up the museum’s role in the exchange
circuit of the art world by using exhibition monies to fund his personal life, but he exploited
the museum’s existing system of public relations and communication to interrupt the
smooth execution of the museum’s administrative policies. Furthermore, because Christmas
Poem made Marioni’s real life job search its subject, like the other works discussed in this
chapter, it laid bare the financial insecurity of the life of an independent artist and exposed
the material realities that structured the art world.
To invite his friends to the party at the Oakland Museum in October 1970 for the
occasion of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, Marioni sent a typed letter on a standard
sheet of paper that stated:
The Oakland Museum, Art Division, cordially invites you to participate Monday,
October 26, 1970 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in an event by Allan Fish entitled ‘The
Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.’ Please R.S.V.P. in
writing to Mr. George Neubert, Curator, The Oakland Museum, 1000 Oak Street,
200
Oakland, California. Please bring this invitation which admits only yourself to the
door. (Figure 3.2)

This text was followed by an alphabetical listing of the names of thirty artists to whom the
letter was sent. The invitees primarily consisted of local artists that Marioni had included in
exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center and MOCA including Mel Henderson, Paul Kos,
Warner Jepson, Peter Macan, James Melchert, Jim McCready, Bill Mott Smith, Frank
Youmans, and Carlos Villa, as well as Marioni’s brother Paul Marioni, who was a local glass
artist. He also included Los Angeles artists Larry Bell and Lloyd Hamrol, and New York
artists Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim and Willoughby Sharp, and finally, Marioni’s jazz
hero Miles Davis, but none of the artists outside of the Bay Area attended the event. Marioni
also listed “Tom Marioni” as one of the invitees, because ostensibly the work was by Allan
Fish, which, as we have seen, was a pseudonym developed by Marioni to allow him to
exhibit art during the period that he was employed as a curator at the Richmond Art Center.
Although Marioni used this false name in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of
interest between his role of curator and of artist, most of his artists friends knew that
Marioni was behind Allan Fish.
Marioni designed The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends to be an event exclusively for
artists. While Neubert, the curator at the Oakland Museum, was also included, he was also a
sculptor whom Marioni had shown at Richmond and was a friend of Marioni’s.
386
Other
than Neubert, no museum staff members were invited, nor were any museum donors or the
general public. As signaled by the title, Marioni’s primary intention was for “the act of
drinking beer” or the activity of imbibing itself to be the “art,” not the inanimate post-party

386
Marioni included Neubert in Invisible Painting and Sculpture at the Richmond Art Center when the latter was still in
graduate school. Neubert, interview.
201
tableau. Although Marioni intentionally left the detritus from the party in the space so that it
could be seen by subsequent museum visitors, he described the trash as “just a record of the
real activity,” meaning that the primary and most essential aspect of the piece was the party
and that the installation was merely incidental.
387
Moreover, the only consumers of libations,
that is, the only beneficiaries of the participatory, enjoyable experience, were artists. Yet the
museum displayed the remains of the party in the gallery space as an installation, and as such,
framed the trash as art for later museum visitors.
Marioni’s invitation list was intentionally structured to counter the typical museum-
sponsored social event, in which museums went out of their way to create fashionable
parties to mark the opening of exhibitions, as well as letting trustees and wealthy individuals
rent gallery space as an exclusive location for private gatherings. In doing so, museums were
essential sites in another dimension of the art market, as they lent cultural capital and
standing to the wealthy, who in turn supported the museum system and, supposedly, the art
community. It is important to keep in mind that artists had to be invited to show in a
museum or to participate in an event at a museum, and that the invitation marked a territory:
the artist might be in the museum, but she was not of it. Artists were denied the sense of
being on their home turf – like guests, they had to be “on their best behavior.” Artists
certainly were not supposed to be alone, unsupervised, drinking beer and cavorting in the
museum space as they were in The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends. Marioni’s artist party,
then, was a kind of carnival, which literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin described as
“celebrat[ing] temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order;

387
Marioni quoted in Futterman, “Activity as Sculpture: Tom Marioni Discusses His Work with Hilla Futterman,” 18.
202
it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.”
388
The
inappropriateness of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends – the way the artists were not at all
on their best behavior – highlighted the role of museums as playgrounds for donors rather
than centers for artists or the public, as well as revealed the existence of a hierarchy of
museum constituents in which trustees occupied the top rung. By having the museum
unknowingly host a private party on his behalf, Marioni revealed how art world insiders had
the privilege of attending special events, while the general public was excluded. But unlike
conventional museum special events, he ensured that the insiders were all artists (the
producers of art) rather than monied donors (the exchangers of art).
The work could also be seen as a kind of farcical collapsing of the institutional
process of exhibition-making that is akin to Marioni’s short-circuiting of the situation by
which an artist benefited from being featured in a museum show. If the process of
organizing an exhibition culminated in the party thrown by the museum to celebrate the
exhibition’s opening, then by an admittedly absurdist logic, one could reason that one could
simply exclude the tedious middle term, the exhibition of the art work, and go right to the
party, a step where the partygoers acquired cultural capital by mere contiguity with the
museum system. Marioni recognized the importance of social interaction to the art world,
commenting on how so much of the art world activity revolved around friendly socializing
as well as professional networking among artists, curators, dealers, critics and collectors.
Although people often attended openings for the purpose of fraternizing and to “be seen”
(rather than to appreciate and experience art), this activity was officially deemed frivolous or

388
Bakhtin, “Rabelais and His World,” 199.
203
subsidiary to the work of artmaking that the museum system was supposed to be celebrating.
Marioni’s work within the museum showed him how much of what the museum system was
supposed to be about – in the words of one art historian, “protecting cultural memory and
spreading public enlightenment” – disguised what the museum also did, namely, conferring
cultural capital by its connection to “patrons” of the arts.
389
Rather than seeking to
distinguish and separate himself from the supposedly superficial and unserious aspects of the
art world or to critique this activity as inherently corrupt, Marioni instead embraced these
very qualities as the thematic of his work. As shown in Chapter Two, the collapse of the
distinction between party and art demonstrated by The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends was
prefigured and amplified in many of the exhibitions that Marioni organized at MOCA.
This ostentatious embrace of the frivolous, however, did not win Marioni
institutional or critical support – which, given Marioni’s experience in this world, did not,
probably, surprise him. Before Marioni realized The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends at the
Oakland Museum, the work had already been rejected by two other institutions. Marioni first
approached San Francisco’s most prestigious museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art,
and offered to perform the work there, but Director Gerald Nordland declined. Although
Nordland explained that the museum did not show work that was less than five years old,
Marioni believes that “[Nordland] just made that up. He didn’t want to do it because he
didn’t take it seriously or [didn’t] think it was art.”
390
Thus, Marioni shows very well that his
work was the kind of outrageous thing that would question the status of art – and by
inference, the workings of the museum system. Marioni also approached the Museum of

389
Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boulle ́e to Bilbao (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2008), 13.
390
Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, July 11, 2011.
204
Contemporary Art in Chicago because it had a reputation for being supportive of conceptual
art under Director Jan van der Marck. David H. Katzive, who served as Acting Director of
the museum when van der Marck stepped down in 1970, agreed to present Marioni’s piece,
and the exhibition even appeared on the museum’s printed calendar, but in the intervening
period between planning and execution, a board member learned about the piece and forced
the museum to cancel the show altogether.
391

Thus even before the work was produced, it had been censored by one institution
and refused by another, and it seems that Marioni’s success at finding a venue in the
Oakland Museum was the result of its relative newness and the support of the curator,
Neubert, who had been given the freedom to organize exhibitions without any intervention
from his superiors. After The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends went up in the galleries,
however, the trustees of the Oakland Museum learned of the work’s premise and were
angered that a work they deemed to be inappropriate for a museum setting was being
displayed. In a conflict reminiscent of that which pitted Marioni against the board at
Richmond, Neubert was held accountable for organizing the offending exhibition and the
original decision to hire him as a curator was questioned.
392

While I do not know precisely to which aspects of Marioni’s work the officials at the
various institutions objected, a disparaging review by San Francisco Chronicle by art critic
Alfred Frankenstein provides clues. Frankenstein’s review addressed Marioni’s exhibition
together with a concurrent show at the Oakland Museum of abstract, minimal sculpture

391
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
392
Neubert, interview. The museum, however, did not actually pay for the beer. Marioni believes that Neubert paid for the
beer out of his own pocket because he was too “shy” to ask the museum for the funds. Marioni, interview, July 24, 2011.
205
made out of plastic, characterizing Marioni’s work as “in violent opposition to the skill and
taste displayed by the plastic sculptors,” and took issue with the fact that Marioni presented
“a pile of empty beer cans, a rotten apple, some dirty paper napkins, and other rubbish” as
art.
393
Thus what was objectionable about The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends to Frankenstein
was that it reflected contempt for skill and aesthetics on the part of the artist. The critic was
so incensed with Marioni’s audacity to present trash as art that he questioned whether
Marioni had the right to be called an artist.
394
Because Marioni did not demonstrate the
specialized talent and artistic skill that an artist was supposed to possess, the very legitimacy
of his identity of an artist was threatened. In his analysis of art worlds in the early 1980s,
sociologist Howard Becker highlights what may be at play in Frankenstein’s disapproval:
“because artists have special gifts, because they produce work thought to be of great
importance to a society, and because they therefore get special privileges, people want to
make sure that only those who really have the gift, the talent, and the skill get the
position.”
395
In Frankenstein’s eyes, Marioni had not passed that test: he had neither the gift,
the talent nor the skill to call himself an artist.
Although Frankenstein did not explicitly mention this in his review, surely he and
other critics were upset by the fact that The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends was produced in
marked opposition to the values supposedly embodied in the museum system, which
surrounded the sphere of art with solemnity and exclusivity. As art historian Carol Duncan
has persuasively argued, museums, in an officially secular civic culture, took on properties

393
Alfred Frankenstein, “Plastic as Fine as Marble,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 22, 1970, 49.
394
Ibid.
395
Becker, Art Worlds, 16.
206
associated with the sacred, and made viewing art into a kind of ritual through which the
spectator was ideally supposed to be enlightened and, to some extent, transformed.
396

Modernist art theory, too, reinforced the boundary between the “real” world and the gallery
space, by conceiving of its object as self-contained, as a manifestation of internal relations
and properties, and as something to be looked at, or to use Fried’s term, beheld.
397
These
traditional and Modernist views of art and museums produced a hermetic museum space
that was sealed off from the “real” world – a place where the real world’s utilitarian or
hedonistic values were also excluded. The very distance that had to be taken with the objects
in this setting manifested the notion that these were not objects for use or sensual
consumption. As autonomous aesthetic spheres, museums excluded the quotidian business
of life. Instead of affirming the separateness of art and the exclusivity of the gallery space,
Marioni imported de-sacralizing, mundane activities from everyday life including drinking,
socializing, and “clowning around” into the museum. These activities were not only
markedly ordinary social relations, but they were also pleasurable and typically forbidden in
the gallery space.
Furthermore, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends replaced what should have been the
hermetic labor of making art into an enjoyable pastime shared among friends, that is, a
presumed solitary process was turned into something social and hard to theorize. As Marioni
explained in a 1986 interview:
It wasn’t enough for me to be a solitary artist, to stay in my studio and make art. I
was a social being, and I had to be involved with social activities, involved with other

396
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 12; Janet Marstine,
“Introduction,” in New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. Janet Marstine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 8–9.
397
Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 32–34.
207
artists. That’s also part of being Italian, too, I think. Coming from an Italian-
American background, being involved with people, with social groups. That’s kind of
my romantic idea about being an artist.
398

Marioni’s claiming of his Italian cultural roots fronted the conflict between the traditional
model of the artist and his particular disposition: Marioni rejected the reigning studio model
in which the artist acted as an individualist, sealed off in the private domain of his
workspace, and instead embraced the social interaction made possible by the post-studio
model of working. Here, we can fruitfully return to our discussion of post-studio art in
Chapter One, using Caroline Jones’ Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American
Artist as our touchstone. Jones argues that the image of the solitary artist in the studio is a
powerful emblem of the traditional practice of artmaking, contributing to the myth of the
artist cultivated in the early post-war American art scene. She persuasively contends that a
major shift occurred in the 1960s “with artist as manager and worker in a social space, or
engineer of a decentered and dispersed ‘post-studio’ production.”
399
While Jones is more
interested in highlighting how the artist’s role was becoming increasingly managerial and
how artists increasingly outsourced their labor, what she is describing is a shift that makes
possible the equation between artmaking and social interaction. Making art outside the
studio not only meant an engagement with worldly things, but also with other people, thus
violating the solo auteur principle. Indeed, at least in Marioni’s piece, the involvement and
input of various people was seemingly under no one’s control – without a script, and
without any explicit choreography provided by the artist. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends,

398
Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986.”
399
Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, 9.
208
in which the social aspect of the work is explicit, underscores how post-studio practice in
general was also a social practice.
The lack of control in Marioni’s work echoed a lack of something else that
Frankenstein and the museum trustees at the Oakland Museum and the Chicago Museum
may have seen as even worse – a lack of labor or toil. The studio artist was, above all, a self-
driven laborer, supposedly working for the sake of the object alone. Marioni, by contrast,
engaged in no such obvious effort to create The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends beyond what
anyone would do when planning a party. The artwork itself was simply an afternoon out
drinking “with the boys,” which meant that it not only exhibited a lack of exertion, but also a
healthy dose of fun and licentiousness. As a convivial, group activity, it seemed incompatible
with the traditional notion of a serious art proposition. Yet this libertine quality is certainly
what connected it to late 1960s countercultural activity and leftist social theory popular in
the Bay Area.
Involving the engagement in amusing, idle and haphazard activities, The Act of
Drinking Beer with Friends represented a refusal of tedious, useful labor. The conceit of the
piece rejected the societal demand – based in a Protestant and capitalist work ethic – that all
citizens, including artists, be productive and industrious, and as such, aligned itself with the
anti-productive ethos of Beat poet and the hippie who “dropped out” of middle-class society
and refused the pursuit of a “respectable” career and the postwar ideal of domesticity
(buying a suburban house and raising a traditional family).
400
Particularly in the 1960s post-

400
For more on the history of the work ethic in the United States see Herbert A Applebaum, The American Work Ethic and
the Changing Work Force: An Historical Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998). The section of the annotated
bibliographic essay concerning the history of the work ethic in the twentieth century on pages 144-145 is particularly
helpful. Also see Sharon Beder, Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR (Australia: Scribe Publications,
2000).
209
scarcity economic environment in which the hippies lived, young people could live off the
excess wealth of society rather than adding to it. As chronicler of the counterculture Richard
Neville observed:
The Underground [his term for “hippies, beats, mystics, madmen, freaks, etc”] has
abolished work. There are no Positions Vacant columns in the Underground press.
Hippie hands do not say housework. No one takes vacations – do children holiday
from play? Instead, Underground people:
(i) Transform Work (i.e. Work=Play)
(ii) Sow their one wild oats.
(iii) Fuck the System.
401

The anti-work attitude expressed here borrowed ideas from postwar leftist intellectuals like
Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown who denounced contemporary industrialized
society as engineering widespread repression through an excessive fixation on efficiency and
production.
402
One solution to countering this repression – which led to a distinct sense of
alienation from one’s work – was an embrace of leisure and play. For example, philosopher
Norman O. Brown, claimed in 1951 that “[u]nderneath the habits of work in every man lies
the immortal instinct for play. The foundation on which the man of the future will be built is
already there, in the repressed unconscious.”
403
Marioni’s open-ended work of art and
embrace of an indulgent, social activity reflected a countercultural ethos that prized play and
recreation as a means to resist the managed lifestyle of the “organization man,” with its
repressions and sobriety.
My contention that Marioni’s work constitutes a kind of critique of productivity
echoes art historian Robert Haywood’s interpretation of Allan Kaprow’s Happening Fluids,

401
Richard Neville, Play Power: Exploring the International Underground (Random House, 1970), 262–263.
402
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959); Marcuse,
One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.
403
Norman Oliver Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 34.
210
1967, a work that involved participants in the strenuous labor of assembling a massive block
of ice that was then allowed to melt in the sun. Because the labor required to construct the
ice block did not result in an object of exchange or use value, it de-commodified the art
object. Haywood argues that the performance was meant to strip the labor of its
“instrumental, profit-driven rational[e].”
404
If piling up blocks of ice and leaving them to
melt in the sun was meant to be a blow against the artwork as the symbol of productivity,
then we can see that logic further developed in Marioni’s work, where a supposedly fun or
least leisure activity creates nothing but the trash that it left behind in the gallery space. It
was not merely wasted work, but the rejection of work altogether, or a kind of “dropping
out” of society and its attendant expectations of being prod
at
uctive.

A year after he performed The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, Marioni, under the
Fish pseudonym, devised a related work, titled 6 x 6 x 6, in which the sociable activity was
not drinking, but eating (Figure 3.3). Marioni made the work for a sculpture exhibition of the
same name, 6 x 6 x 6, held at the Walnut Creek Civic Arts Center, a regional art gallery
twenty-five miles outside of San Francisco. The show’s curator invited artists to create works
that were six feet by six feet by six feet.
405
Because the premise of the show specified a
particular dimension for the works included in the exhibition, it implied that the works were
expected to be physical three-dimensional objects, but Marioni created a different kind of
work by eating a six course meal catered in the gallery area with his wife Marilyn, artist Terry

404
Robert E. Haywood, “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer Schapiro’s and Allan Kaprow’s Theory of Avant-Garde
Art,” in Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, Events, Objects, Documents, ed. Judith F Rodenbeck and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (New York: Columbia University, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, 1999), 43.
405
Marioni, interview, July 11, 2011. Other artists included in the show included Richard Breger, John Britton, Wayne
Buckley, Tio Giambruni, Robert Hudson, Leonard Hunter, James McManus, George Neubert, James Perrizo, James
Pomeroy, Ruth Tamura, Brian Wall, William Wiley, Rita Yokoi and Gordon Yamamoto. 6 x 6 x 6 invitation, Walnut Creek
Civic Arts Center archive, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, Calif., image of invitation emailed to author by Erik Mortensen,
Bedford Gallery Senior Programs Assistant, July 19, 2011.
211
Fox, and Fox’s wife Marsha, using the budget of twenty-five dollars allocated to the
exhibition. A canvas with the dimensions of six feet by six feet was laid out on the gallery
floor, and a fancy table for four was set up with a tablecloth, dishes, silverware and wine
glasses. On the appointed day, Saturday, June 5, at 7pm, the curator of the exhibition Kerry
Marshall served the meal to the foursome, who behaved just as they would at a restaurant,
eating, drinking and interacting with one another. After the two couples finished eating their
meal, they left the gallery and “[t]he table and the dirty dishes were left on exhibition as the
record of the act.”
406

After a few days, a colony of ants discovered the remaining bits of food and formed
a trail through the door straight to the canvas and up the table. Despite the presence of the
ants, which tainted the clean, pristine environment of the gallery space, the art center staff
did not complain about the work or threaten to take it down. As Marioni later explained,
“[The museum staff] went along with it. I was the artist and that was what my piece was and
they accepted it as they should have.”
407
The artist’s commentary expressed his sense of
entitlement to present whatever he wanted in the museum without regard to how it might
affect the normal operations of the institution. Of course, the ants were not so inconvenient
for the staff and besides, the curator may have welcomed this kind of radical gesture. From
the point of view of the sponsoring institution, 6 x 6 x 6, while radical in its interpretation of
the overarching theme of the exhibition, was certainly more palatable than The Act of
Drinking Beer with Friends. In the former, Marioni tamed the blue collar element that existed in
the latter, stripping it of beer and “the boys” and replacing them with a more “respectable”

406
Futterman, “Activity as Sculpture: Tom Marioni Discusses His Work with Hilla Futterman,” 18.
407
Marioni, interview, July 11, 2011.
212
drink, wine, and more “respectable” companions, the artists’ wives. An upscale, white collar
affair, 6 x 6 x 6 presented itself as aligned with the class interests of the institution.
It is hard to consider 6 x 6 x 6 without recalling Nouveau Réaliste Daniel Spoerri’s
transformations of a gallery into a restaurant and the associated “snare pictures” from the
1960s (Figure 3.4).
408
In Restaurant de la Galerie J in 1963 Spoerri hosted a series of dinners in
a Paris gallery where he employed art critics as waiters. In the midst of the meal, Spoerri
interrupted his patrons and removed the tabletops for preservation. He lacquered the
leftover food and glued them along with the plates, silverware and glasses to the tabletop.
Spoerri turned the assemblage tabletops on their sides and hung them from the walls like
paintings. Marioni’s arrangement of eating utensils and leftover food in 6 x 6 x 6 – and in
The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends – resembled Spoerri’s snare pictures in subject matter and
in their use of chance to form the composition. But while Spoerri’s work was designed to
converge a theatricalized event and the congealment of that event in his preservation of its
accoutrements, Marioni’s work was represented solely by the untouched residue of an
activity that had occurred over time. The crux of Marioni’s work was the act of eating the
meal or drinking the beer, and the tableau left behind was only a by-product of the situation
– its waste. As such, the remains of Marioni’s actions, rather than being transformed into a
collectible, saleable object like Spoerri’s tabletops, were simply dismantled and discarded.
Like Spoerri, Marioni also employed important local art world figures in his work: in
6 x 6 x 6, Marioni pressed the curator into service as the waiter, and in The Act of Drinking

408
While Marioni never cited any connection to Spoerri, Marioni idolized Spoerri’s fellow Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein.
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 150–151.
213
Beer with Friends, he demanded that the curator obtain the beer.
409
By assigning the curator
the job of waiter or beer-procurer, Marioni found a way to symbolize his triumph over t
museum system: he had himself treated as an art “star.” It was as if he had such difficulty
obtaining access to museums, that once he had the chance to show in one, he was sure to
use all of its resources to his best advantage. This work again points to the element of star
envy present in the Marioni’s oeuvre. Just as he produced his road trip piece for The San
Francisco Performance in imitation of a rock band, he created these two pieces in imitation of
the way that rock bands were catered to on the concert circuit.
he

As a presentation of the banal, quotidian activity of eating a meal, 6 x 6 x 6
underscored Marioni’s interest in using mundane, everyday actions as material for his art. As
mentioned in Chapter Two, Marioni’s idea that he could frame real life activities in real time
as art allowed him to distinguish his work from theater and illusion, while demystifying the
aura of the art object. As Marioni observed about the piece, “there was absolutely no art in
it, it was as [T]erry [Fox] said beyond art, it was pure pleasure.”
410
Describing the work as
free of art, he emphasized how the actions that he and his friends carried out it in were
intended to be just like real life. The confining of the two couples within the boundaries of
the six feet square area, however, made them appear to be on a kind of stage, and cast a
theatrical tinge on the performance. Whatever one’s reading, for Marioni, acting out
everyday, embodied activities in the gallery space – precisely because the actions were so
inappropriate there – had the effect of drawing attention to the frame of the museum. It

409
In Marioni’s words, “Neubert went out and got the beer. I told him that was he had to do. That was the job of the
curator. It was materials needed.” Marioni, interview, July 24, 2011.
410
Tom Marioni, “A Letter to Willoughby,” Artweek 2, no. 24 (June 26, 1971): 2.
214
exposed the rarefied and regulated nature of the museum experience – at least for the
average visitor, who was banned from eating, drinking or making a racket in the galleries.
Just like The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, what was also important about 6 x 6 x 6
was that it was performed in collaboration with others, and that the privilege of eating in the
museum was reserved only for the artists and their companions. By sharing the experience of
the meal with his wife and another artist couple, Marioni made the meal an entertaining,
interactive, social event, or “pure pleasure” for himself and his friends. This description also
suggests a connection to theorist Brown, who believed that art had a liberatory potential and
could help to stimulate the recovery of childhood pleasures.
411

But it was a different experience altogether for the spectators. Even though the
audience members at the opening could see the meal being consumed, they were excluded
from partaking of the food. The two couples acted as if they were at an ordinary restaurant,
talking amongst themselves, but ignoring any activity around them and refusing to interact
with the spectators. A clear distinction between the artists and the audience was drawn, and
the audience was made to understand that they were looking on from the outside of a
private pleasurable experience that involved the artists only. The encounter of 6 x 6 x 6 after
the performance was concluded was similarly alienating: because the spectator could only
gaze upon evidence of a meal that had been eaten, she would also have been reminded of
her exclusion from the dining experience. With this work, Marioni again made the space of
the museum the province of artists, who were allowed to dine in the galleries, a special
privilege usually reserved only for the museum’s wealthier patrons.

411
Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 65–66.
215
This piece points to a tension in Marioni’s practice. On the one hand, he insists that
the actions that make up art are no different from what happens in ordinary life. On the
other hand, he also maintains that the artist is the one who can identify what is art and what
is simply everyday life. That is, while desacralizing and demystifying the artwork by
conflating it with the mundane, Marioni simultaneously mystifies and elevates the artist as
the person with the special power to transform the banal into art. While other artists who
appropriated the everyday into their art – including the Fluxus collective, Allan Kaprow, and
the Situationists – did so with the idea that anyone could be an artist and that artists were in
fact superfluous, Marioni clung to a more romantic and traditional idea of the artist as a
person endowed with special powers. In a sense, this notion of the specially empowered
artist relates to a larger phenomenon that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s as artists
stopped making precious art objects and shifted toward performance. As critic Brigit Pelzer
observed, “There was a shift from so-called auratic work of art toward the auratic artist. In
an iconic shift, the artist himself ended up iconicized.”
412
In the absence of a stable art
object, the aura that formerly accrued to the object was now transferred to the artist herself.
Marioni’s stance became problematic, however, as will be seen in the discussion of the next
work. In his effort to demystify the artwork, he framed ordinary activities as art, but when
his audience failed to accept the presented activities as art, he unwittingly weakened his
credibility as an artist who could perceive what is art in the first place.
If Marioni asserted his right as an artist to use the exhibition opportunity in an
unorthodox manner in The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends and 6 x 6 x 6, then he further

412
Pelzer, “‘Cache-toi, Object!’ The Unattainable Revolution,” 76.
216
extended his artistic license when he used exhibition money to acquire personal property in
his piece My First Car, 1972, which came about when Lydia Modi-Vitale, curator of the de
Saisset Art Museum at the University of Santa Clara, a Jesuit college one hour’s drive south
of San Francisco, invited Marioni to do a solo show. Given a budget of five hundred dollars,
Marioni used three hundred fifty dollars to buy a used Fiat model 750 car and the remaining
funds to print elegant, double enveloped invitations to the opening (Figure 3.5).
413
During
the opening on March 3, 1972, Marioni drove the car into the gallery and parked it on an
Oriental rug (which was part of the museum’s permanent collection), and he spent the bulk
of the opening seated in the car, playing the radio and drinking champagne, while a tape
recorder captured the conversations of the people who stopped by to chat with him and a
stationary camera trained on the car recorded the evening’s events on video (Figure 3.6).
Although the car was supposed to be on display for a month until March 30, when the
president of the university, Father Terry, found out about the project a day later, he ordered
the show closed.
414

Marioni recalled that Father Terry shut down the exhibition because he “was
embarrassed, aggravated that the gallery had spent the money on such activity that didn’t
have anything to do with art.”
415
As with The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends and 6 x 6 x 6,
the issue of artistic labor was again at play. Marioni did not fabricate the work by hand, but
in a Duchampian gesture, Marioni simply designated a “readymade,” or a mass-produced,
functional car as art; or more precisely, he designated the activity of buying the automobile

413
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
414
The opening was on a Friday evening and Marioni removed the car the following Monday. Futterman, “Activity as
Sculpture: Tom Marioni Discusses His Work with Hilla Futterman,” 20.
415
Ibid., 20.
217
as art, with the non-art aspect being the driving of the Fiat 750 to the gallery and its display,
which fell under the category of documentation, as it testified that the act of purchasing had
occurred.
416
Marioni also claimed elsewhere that the subject of the work was the “process”
by which the museum gave Marioni the car and by which the car came to be exhibited as
art.
417
By emphasizing the behind-the-scenes social exchanges and economic transactions
that led to the show, Marioni was again mocking art’s supposed transcendence from the
everyday world, equating artmaking to the mundane act of exchanging money for a
commodity in which he became the owner of a useful object. Here, he violates the
Modernist principle that art was always autonomous. When Duchamp hung his readymade
urinal in a museum, he, in effect, transferred it from the world of utility to that of aesthetics.
Marioni’s piece goes Duchamp one further, in that no transfer is made. Father Terry, who
evidently saw art in traditional terms, saw Marioni’s action for what it was – a radical attack
on those terms.
Despite Marioni’s emphasis on the car as documentary evidence of a process, he also
recognized that the car itself could serve as a kind of collectible art object – or at least a
collectible piece of documentation – suggesting that after he finished using it, it could enter
the de Saisset Museum’s permanent collection.
418
To this end, he used transfer type to stencil
the title of the piece, the name of the museum, and the dates of the show onto the door of
the car, mimicking a wall label that would appear by a work of art in a traditional gallery

416
Marioni quoted in ibid., 20.
417
“Unusual Exhibits at Santa Clara,” Alameda, Calif. Times-Star, March 4, 1972, no page number available, clipping from de
Saisset Museum Archives at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara.
418
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 5.
218
installation.
419
In his characteristically taunting manner, Marioni at once acknowledged the
museological impulse to collect and preserve, yet thwarted that impulse by presenting the
institution with something it would never actually want to keep.
Ultimately, what bothered the university president about the work was that he felt
that it was an exploitation of the museum’s resources for the artist’s own benefit.
420
Susan
Middleton, who was a student at University of Santa Clara and an assistant as the gallery at
the time, may have summed up the feeling of the administration when she wondered to
herself, “Is this a scam?”
421
Marioni’s gesture in My First Car was so radical and antithetical
to the traditional understanding of art that it resembled a fraud by which the artist obtained
free car on the university’s budget. In other words, art was simply the term being used as an
excuse or cover for a prank or self-aggrandizing or irresponsible behavior. In fact, these
reactions point to the conflict between Marioni’s belief that the artist’s perception
determines the artwork, and his critique of the aura that removes the artwork from ordinary
life. Indeed, if the artwork is no longer endowed with an aura that distinguishes it from one’s
lived experience, then there is nothing to signal to the audience that it is art, except for what
the artist tells them. In the case of My First Car, apparently the university president did
believe that Marioni was a credible enough source.
a

Through its reinvention of accepted principles of artistic practice and modes of
aesthetic evaluation, avant-garde art, as art historian Michael Leja has observed, often has the

419
Ibid.; Dorothea Weinstock, “Ritual Destruction,” Artweek 3, no. 12 (March 18, 1972): 2.
420
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
421
Susan Middleton, interview by author, June 27, 2008, San Francisco, Calif.
219
potential to be understood as fraudulent.
422
Marioni, it might be said, risked the accusation
of fraud in order to overturn accepted artistic conventions, raising the questions: How was
the public supposed to evaluate a work like My First Car? What was the proper criterion f
judgment? Given its unorthodox form, like Duchamp’s Fountain, it was no wonder that it
elicited suspicions of being a hoax.
or

423
As discussed in Chapter One, conceptual art in
particular posed the additional problem requiring no expenditure of labor or skill on the part
of the artist. Ironically, Marioni’s strong desire to propose a serious work of radical avant-
garde art was precisely what made it seem so fraudulent.
What also made claims of deceit more credible was the fact that Marioni genuinely
wanted ownership of the car and believed that the museum should be responsible for buying
it for him – just as he felt the museum should purchase the catered meal for his dinner and
beer for his party. Citing the practice of patronage by the Catholic Church in fifteenth
century Italy, Marioni rationalized his choice to purchase the vehicle for My First Car in the
following way: “I needed a car, and I thought this was a way for the church to support an
artist as it did during the Italian Renaissance.”
424
Because the University of Santa Clara was a
Catholic institution, Marioni likened it to “the church,” and because he was the son of an
Italian immigrant, Marioni characterized himself as a deserving Italian artist. According to
Marioni, the Italian theme of the work also dictated his decision to select a car made by Fiat,
the Italian automobile manufacturer.
425
Although this analogy to the Renaissance was so

422
Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp, 246.
423
For more on Duchamp and modern art in early twentieth century France was shot through with the potential for hoax,
see Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-gardism, C. 1909-17, 163.
424
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 133.
425
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 6.
220
absurdly facile that Marioni had to have meant it partly as tongue-in-cheek, the statement
nevertheless reflects Marioni’s belief in the artist’s right to be financially underwritten by art
institutions.
Perhaps the more relevant contextual reference is, as mentioned earlier, the world of
entertainment, where the star artist is accorded all kinds of perks. Marioni further explained
his rationale for his unorthodox use of the exhibition funds: “I figured if I bought a car with
the money that they would normally use for shipping or installation expense or anything like
that,” Marioni reasoned, “that I could function better as an artist in society.”
426
In this sense,
the car could count as one of the behind the scenes expenses of the museum, with the
difference that the cost of handling the work would flow directly into buying the work. At a
time when Marioni could not rely on the art market and its attendant dealers and collectors
to support him, he turned to the pre-market patronage model. Of course, he made this turn
with some irony, knowing fully well that it would provoke a scandal.
But the response by the university to close the show demonstrates that if the
institution was being asked to step into the role of patron, then it might want to have a say in
what it was paying for.
427
Apparently, the university deemed compensating an artist for raw
materials used to construct a sculpture and giving an artist money to buy a pre-fabricated,
operative consumer product two separate affairs. Not only was Marioni’s first car
readymade, but it was also not chosen for reasons of aesthetics. As Marioni flatly stated,
“The design of the car is not the subject of the show.”
428
In fact, the design of the car was

426
Ibid., 5.
427
For more on the dynamics of patronage, see Becker, Art Worlds, 99–107.
428
“Unusual Exhibits at Santa Clara.”
221
significant, but not for its beauty, but for its lack thereof. Marioni chose a decrepit jalopy to
caricature the handcrafted work of the same title – My First Car – by local artist Don Potts,
which had been receiving much accolade in the art community.
429
Potts spent six years
laboriously hand-crafting a gleaming, futuristic vehicle, which, although drivable via remote
control, was exhibited and admired as a sculptural object (Figure 3.7). Thus My First Car
represented a deliberate rejection of conventional standards of beauty and skill, at the
expense of Potts: “I was going to go out and buy a car and exhibit it as a joke, like beat
[Potts] to the gun.”
430
Indeed, Marioni’s notion of connectedness and sociability among
artists did not extend to all artists, but was limited to those with a decidedly conceptual and
avant-garde sensibility.
Marioni short-circuited the process by which artists indirectly benefited from
museums by taking the behind the scenes support and displaying it in an unseemly fashion
on the museum floor. That support led, ideally, to mutual benefit for the favored artist and
the museum system. A museum show raised the profile of an artist, generally led to more
shows, sales and grants, and theoretically gave him the economic ability to afford a car, while
it affirmed the museum’s place in the system, bolstered it within the art world context, and
advanced its curators and directors. My First Car removed the intermediate steps in this
process (one that never proclaims itself as such) by pushing on the logic of the museum’s
support in an artist’s career: why not simply have the museum pay for a car that the artist

429
Having worked on the project since 1966, Potts showed the car at the Hansen-Fuller Gallery in 1970 and had a traveling
museum show opening at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Southern California the following month, an exhibition that
would travel to seven other locations including the Whitney Museum in New York.
430
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3. Marioni, however, claimed that he respected Potts.
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007. His respect was also demonstrated by the fact that he included a film of Potts’ car in
action in a show at MOCA called Films by Sculptors, March 22, 1970, just after the space opened. Cecile N. McCann,
“Museum of Conceptual Art Opens,” Artweek 1, no. 13 (March 28, 1970): 2.
222
would now be able to purchase as a successful, museum-worthy artist? Marioni also reasoned
that the car could help him better succeed as an artist presumably by providing him a means
of transportation that would allow him to more easily complete the tasks required of an
artist. Yet Marioni neglected to provide the museum something in exchange for their
support. It seems that the museum expected that he produce something from the fruit of his
labors, but he merely purchased something factory-made.
Here, it is instructive to compare Marioni’s strategy of exploiting the museum system
in the service of artists to those pursued by artists associated with institutional critique, a
subset of conceptual art that emerged in the 1970s that laid bare the ideological and
economic motivations behind the production and presentation of art through a
deconstruction of art institutions.
431
One archetypal work of institutional critique is New
York-based Hans Haacke’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, which
detailed the relationship between museums and donors in text panels listing the names of
trustees and their corporate affiliations (Figure 3.8). The piece suggested that museums were
dependent on larger corporate entities for their funding, unduly subject to their influence,
and, in return, endowed upon the corporations a certain charitable or cultural status.
As our account of Marioni’s pieces in this chapter shows, like many artists associated
with institutional critique, he made the museum his arena of interrogation and through his
projects and the reactions that they elicited from the sponsoring institutions, he pointed to
their hidden expectations and assumptions. In My First Car, however, Marioni’s critique of
the institution took a different tack than Haacke’s. Instead of attempting to reprimand the

431
See the Introduction for a longer discussion of Institutional Critique.
223
museum or its supporters as Haacke did in Solomon Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees,
Marioni made himself into the profiteering villain that took advantage of the museum, thereby
exposing how the artist benefited materially from participating in museum exhibitions. If
Haacke exposed how institutions were overseen by donors who used museums for their self-
interest, Marioni likewise demonstrated how artists, too, could manipulate the museum for
their personal benefit. He revealed how artists used art institutions opportunistically to
advance their own careers and how they, too, stood to benefit from being associated with
these organizations. While the target of censure by institutional critique was the institution,
Marioni implicated himself as the beneficiary of the exhibition and refused to take a moral
high ground vis-à-vis the museum. The artist was not outside of the capitalist art system, but
embedded within it.
Yet if we take into account the petty amounts and objects of these self-interested
gestures – a used car, a meal, a bunch of beers – we see that Marioni did not gain much
financially from his exhibitions. His works were not so much about what he would acquire
through the appropriation of the exhibition funds as they were about exposing the system
and provoking a scandal that itself might generate positive interest in the artist (since
originality and iconoclasm were already established as qualifications for a successful avant-
garde artist). In a sense, Marioni’s status as a little known artist was what gave his work
meaning; even though he was not an art star, he nevertheless treated himself like one –
collecting on the perks that a star would receive as well as acting with a bravado that only a
star could get away with – and thus served as a kind of parasite on the system that existed for
art stars rather than unknown artists like him.
224
Marioni’s work also pointed to the fact that artists made art not purely for art’s sake
but also to earn money and to be famous. And what the work underscored was the difficulty
of making a living and “making it” as an artist, even for one who was willing to do other art-
related administrative jobs. Indeed, My First Car was in part motivated by a state of financial
destitution by the artist. After Marioni left his curatorial position at the Richmond Art
Center in March 1971, he lacked a regular income and began to aggressively search for
curatorial or teaching jobs to support his family and to operate MOCA. Unable to secure a
permanent position, by early 1972, Marioni was forced to vacate the space occupied by
MOCA, whose rent he could no longer afford, and to turn to welfare to help cover his
family’s living expenses.
Thus possession of a car was a significant lifestyle improvement for the
impoverished artist, allowing him “to function better in society.” In fact, Marioni claimed
that it made no difference to him that his show was closed soon after it opened, because not
only was the act of buying the car the crux of the piece, but more importantly, it did not
preclude him from having use of the car. The museum did not demand that the car or the
money be returned and Marioni drove the car until it broke down, which was only a few
months later.
432
In the case of 6 x 6 x 6, Marioni’s decision to use the exhibition budget to
pay for a meal also stemmed in part from the artist’s penurious situation. “It so happened
that [the Walnut Creek Civic Arts Center] had $25 budgeted for me to do my piece there in
that show,” Marioni explained in a 1972 interview.
433
The telling comment is the observation

432
The car was never admitted into the museum’s permanent collection. Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E.
Loeffler,” 5.
433
Futterman, “Activity as Sculpture: Tom Marioni Discusses His Work with Hilla Futterman,” 18.
225
that followed – “You could get a good meal for four people for $25” – which revealed how
Marioni’s distressed financial state was very much in the forefront of his mind.
434
Since he
was struggling to make ends meet, why not take the money earmarked for exhibition
materials and use it to obtain a decent restaurant meal, a luxury for the struggling artist? If
his work sought to present real life activities as art, then the reality of his struggle for
existence was the need for assistance to pay for transportation and meals. The upscale meal
also represented a kind of aspirational fantasy for Marioni, a vision of the kind of lifestyle
that he always hoped to inhabit as a famous artist.
Indeed, by the time of the opening of My First Car, Marioni had been out of a job for
over a year and he had little money on which to sustain himself and his family. In a personal
letter to Fox from the same period, Marioni observed, “looking for a job has dominated my
life for so long that [I] can’t think about anything else. [I]t has become my art.”
435
Perhaps
Marioni was referring to a work that he exhibited in the Game Show, a group exhibition that
occurred that summer at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he displayed a resume along
with a letter asking for a job.
436
A postscript to the letter, playing on the theme of the
exhibition, observes, “art is not a game, it’s a business.”
437
This note suggests that making art
was not simply a romantic or high-minded act of creative expression but also about the
mundane need to earn a living. It was as if Marioni was acknowledging that an artist was

434
Ibid.
435
Tom Marioni to Terry Fox, n.d. [location in archive suggests date of August 1972], Museum of Conceptual Art Archive,
Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
436
Prudence Juris, “Fun and Games at the Institute,” Artweek 2, no. 27 (August 12, 1972): 12.
437
Ibid. Interestingly, another review of the same exhibition reports a slightly different name for the exhibition (Games
Show) and a slightly altered version of Marioni’s postscript (“Art is not a game, it’s a business.”) Thomas Albright, “‘Games’
Comes After ‘Fun’,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 1972, clipping from Tom Marioni, personal archive, San Francisco,
Calif.
226
supposed to make art that was recognized as distinct from life, but unfortunately his real life
– specifically his lack of a source of income and penurious state – got in the way. As he
stated in his letter to Fox, he was so preoccupied with getting a job that making art about
another subject was impossible. And yet in a way, this piece, which made one’s extra-artistic
work, or lack of it, art, was also one that was completely acceptable within the rules of a
conceptualism that rejected Modernist art’s claim to autonomy.
Whether acceptable as art or not, it was not exactly successful in getting him
employment: on the one hand, it exposed a private document in a public venue, so
theoretically more employers would see it. But at the same time, that exposure was
embarrassing, a sort of misplaced appeal – in that underscoring that the art world is a
business was exactly the wrong way to do business in the art world. Marioni’s piece, then,
transgresses on the ludic allowance given the artist: instead of playing within the limits of the
aesthetic sphere, he is serious within the limits of the ludic situation (that is, the exhibition
Game Show, which presumably invited free play). He again broke down the border that
arbitrarily separated art from life, but in a new manner.
Interestingly enough, the subject of this work is the opposite of The Act of Drinking
Beer with Friends presented two years earlier when Marioni was still securely employed at the
Richmond Art Center. While The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends rejected the capitalist goal of
maximizing productivity, here Marioni expresses his almost pathetic desire to secure wage-
earning work. The difference can be attributed to the change in Marioni’s life situation and
financial security. While in 1970, he had the luxury of spending a leisurely afternoon
socializing with friends, by 1972 his desperation for a job precluded him from “dropping
out” of the professional job search.
227
The last work to be discussed in this chapter, Christmas Poem, was also conceived
from the perspective of an artist struggling to survive financially. During a long interval
when the San Francisco Museum of Art was searching for a new director, Marioni printed
announcement cards declaring that he had been appointed to the director position at the
museum. In a formal, italicized typeface, the card proclaimed: “The Board of Trustees of
The San Francisco Museum of Art are [sic] pleased to announce the appointment of Thomas
Marioni as Director, January 3, 1973.” (Figure 3.9) He mailed a few hundred cards to
everyone he knew in the art world including artists, curators, critics and collectors as well as
other candidates who were being considered for the position.
438
Marioni explained that he
knew how announcements of appointments of important people were made because of his
prior experience working at a museum and that he modeled his card after formal business or
wedding announcements.
439
Although the text included an unintentional grammatical error
that may have hinted to some recipients that it was not official, the spare, elegant choice of
font and overall design of the card gave it an air of authority. The title of the work referred
to the fact that he mailed the cards in December, the month of sending Christmas greetings
to friends and relatives.
Although the Christmas Poem was a hoax, it reflected Marioni’s sincere desire for the
job. Prior to sending the fake announcement, Marioni had officially expressed his interest in
the position by submitting a letter to the museum in the summer of 1972, and in a 1978
interview, he professed “I really wanted to have the job as director of the museum, you

438
Tom Marioni, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” interview by Jess
Rigelhaupt, Transcript, June 4, 2008, 4–5.
439
Brunson, “Interview with Tom Marioni, January 28, 1986.”.
228
know.”
440
Proposing to give Marioni ultimate administrative control over the most powerful
museum in the city, Christmas Poem constituted a mock grab for power by Marioni, and thus
seemed to protest the control of the museum over the artist’s professional fate. If as an artist
he could not get an exhibition at the museum, then why not imagine taking over as
administrative head of the museum? As Director, he would wield a gatekeeping power that
was unavailable to him as an artist and possess the authority to decide who was in and who
was out; and he would finally have the ability to transform what he considered a stodgy and
outmoded museum into an institution that was relevant to contemporary artists. Although
Marioni knew that he would never be appointed to the job, the outrageous nature of the
piece still suggests some ambiguity on Marioni’s part in actually wanting a kind of buttoned-
up museum job. Plotting a hoax against the museum is just about the last thing Marioni
would do to further his chances as a serious candidate either at this museum, or any other
institutions where he might be applying.
For a brief moment, Marioni could have the satisfaction of knowing that he had
succeeded in convincing many people in the art world that he was named director of the
museum. One art publication, Museum News, printed the news of his appointment as fact.
441

In addition, many of Marioni’s artist friends who knew about the spuriousness of the
announcement found his mutinous act hilarious. Los Angeles artist Larry Bell related the
details to then-Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Maurice Tuchman, who
apparently was driving at the time and laughed so hard about the incident that he almost

440
William M. Roth, Museum President, to Tom Marioni, August 28, 1972, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley
Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif. Marioni, “Tom Marioni: Interview by Robin White at Crown Point Press, Oakland,
California, 1978,” 14.
441
Marioni, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” 4.
229
drove off the road.
442
On the other hand, Marioni also heard that one trustee angrily called
another individual on the hiring committee in outrage because he had not been told of the
decision.
443
When Henry Hopkins was finally hired in 1972 as the new director of the San
Francisco Museum of Art, Marioni reports that Hopkins “didn’t think [the incident] was
funny” and added that, “he never forgave me.”
444
Whether it was because this incident or
not, Hopkins did not appear to be a strong proponent of conceptual art.
445

Although Marioni knew his holiday greeting had the potential to alienate any
supporters he might have had at the museum, he hoped that the work would have some
effect on the hiring decision. As Marioni commented in a 1978 interview, “at least, I
thought, maybe at best [creating Christmas Poem] would make [the San Francisco Museum of
Art] think, and hire somebody a little more liberal than they normally do [sic], because
relative to me everybody in the museum business would be conservative.”
446
The mailing
was then Marioni’s indirect and impudent way of urging the hiring committee to conside
candidate more open to performative, conceptual art. By proposing himself as the director,
Marioni revealed unspoken restrictions that governed the process of selecting the chief
administrator – that only a small pool of candidates with specific characteristics could even
be considered. As he complained in his memoir, “The trustees usually hire a director raised
r a

442
Marioni, interviews, June 4, 2008 and February 24, 2010.
443
Ibid.
444
Marioni, interview, February 24, 2010.
445
Marioni, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” 6, 12.
446
Marioni, “Tom Marioni: Interview by Robin White at Crown Point Press, Oakland, California, 1978,” 14.
230
in private schools with an Ivy League background.”
447
Here, “Ivy League” is code for elitist
and conservative.
Christmas Poem did not attempt a reasoned examination of the museum’s hiring
policies, but subjected it to the shock treatment of a hoax. In this way, it was a kind of
provocation that only an artist would make; a serious professional museum administrator
would never have produced a fake announcement that was almost guaranteed to destroy her
candidacy. But an artist could be “forgiven” eccentric and flamboyant gestures, and as we
will see, Marioni was indeed forgiven for his duplicitous scheme.
Even though the mailing ostensibly sought to obtain recognition of Marioni as a
worthy museum administrator, what Marioni really sought from the San Francisco Museum,
and from the art world, was recognition of Christmas Poem as a valid and valuable work of art,
and of himself as a notable artist. In 1976, the same museum hosted the first major survey
exhibition of twentieth century art in California mounted by any institution. Titled Painting
and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era, the exhibition was jointly curated by Hopkins and
Walter Hopps, a curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian
Institution (now known as the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, D.C.
The curators did not originally select Marioni for the show, and at the opening of the
exhibition at the San Francisco Museum, Hopkins apparently apologized to Marioni for not
including the latter, although given Hopkins’ disapproval of Marioni’s earlier prank, perhaps
the former only apologized out of courtesy. After this incident and after Newsweek published
a review of the show that erroneously identified Marioni as one of the artists in the

447
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 132.
231
exhibition, Marioni sent Hopkins one of the original 1972 Christmas Poem announcements
with a note stating that it was not too late to append the work to the exhibition (Figure
3.10).
448
Amazingly, Hopkins added the card to the show, which later traveled to the
Smithsonian Institution, and it was also documented in the exhibition catalogue (which was
not produced until after the installation in San Francisco). Because of Marioni’s brazen,
persistent and enterprising move, he finally secured space in an important, landmark
exhibition of California art.
Marioni also sent a copy of the letter that he wrote to Hopkins to Artweek, which
republished it in its entirety in the section of the publication allotted to letters to the editor.
Marioni later explained his decision to mail the letter to Artweek as follows, “I was angry at
[Hopkins] for excluding me from the show, which I should have been in.”
449
Assuming that
Artweek’s readers would have been incensed by his exclusion from the exhibition, Marioni
thought that by publicizing his letter that he would embarrass Hopkins for his oversight.
One might argue, however, that it was more embarrassing for Marioni than Hopkins, for it
revealed that the reason Marioni ended up in the show was because he aggressively lobbied
for it, not because Hopkins initially selected him. In other words, it was not the quality of his
work as judged by the museum’s curators that led to his inclusion, but his dogged tactics of
self-promotion.
Marioni’s own theory of the power of the authentic artist led him to embody it in
various mocking works that were presented to the museum as a sort of test: if they accepted

448
Marioni, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” 5. The letter is located in
Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
449
Marioni, interview, July 11, 2011.
232
it, they were accepting the mockery of the entire museum system, while if they rejected it,
they were showing the retrograde nature of the museum system before true avant-garde art.
Ultimately, his persistence paid off: the San Francisco Museum embraced Christmas Poem, not
only by including it in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture in California, but also by
accessioning it into the museum’s permanent collection.
The latter event occurred some years after the Painting and Sculpture in California
exhibition when San Francisco art collector John Bransten purchased one of the original
announcement cards from Marioni and then donated it to the museum.
450
By accepting the
card into its collection, the museum could be said to have openly acknowledged its internal
limitations without actually having to change the hiring policy (and the ideology it reflected)
that the work criticized. In other words, the move demonstrated the remarkable ability of
museums to absorb the critique that was directed at them. Yet a more charitable reading
might maintain that the incident revealed the museum’s acknowledgement of its faults, and
that it testified to a growing interest in self-reflexivity that has characterized museological
practice since the later 1970s.
451
Whatever the verdict on the motivations of the museum, the
final outcome was not unwelcome to Marioni. If Marioni realistically could not get hired by
the museum or change its hiring policy, he nevertheless wanted his artistic act to be
recognized by the museum as a serious, credible work of art. As a lesser-known artist, he
especially needed the museum to testify to the validity and importance of his work.

450
Marioni incorrectly identifies the collector as Bob Bransten in this interview Marioni, “SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral
History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” 5. Marioni, interview, July 11, 2011. The San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art website lists the correct person, John Bransten, who was Bob’s brother.
http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/9828
451
For an interesting theory on how museum curators themselves have become practitioners of institutional critique, see
Simon Sheikh, “Notes on Institutional Critique,” Transversal (January 2006), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/sheikh/en.
233
Marioni’s struggle for recognition and for financial stability in the early 1970s led to a
body of work that highlighted the economic underpinnings of the art system and brought
into focus the material realities of the art world at the expense of exposing Marioni himself
to scandal and embarrassment. His museum-based interventions revealed the hierarchy of
constituents – donor, staff, artist, public – that characterized museums, and acknowledged
how those controlling purse strings had access to special privileges. They also highlighted the
power differential between artist and museum, underscoring the artist’s dependence on the
museum for his career advancement and livelihood, and the difficulty that artists had in
earning enough money to survive in the modern capitalist system. Yet Marioni did not
exempt artists from critique. He did not paint them as heroic figures but opportunistic
careerists, who self-servingly used museums as platforms to advance their personal agendas,
and he pronounced the pursuit of artmaking as simply a way of making a living. Despite this
materialist portrayal of the artist, Marioni nevertheless clung to the romantic notion of the
artist as a special person, a “star,” who had the power to make everyday actions into art.
Through his work, we see how much he aspired to be a star himself.
All the while that Marioni was taking what he could from established museums, he
was also operating this own private museum, which he was able to run with grants from the
federal government. The next chapter explores the effect of state patronage on MOCA and
other artist-run exhibition spaces in the 1970s.
234
Chapter Four: MOCA: Portrait of a Museum as an Alternative Art Space
and Conceptual Artwork

As an artist-run, non-commercial art space dedicated to situational conceptual art (a
baggy concept under which Marioni, as we have seen, included video, installations,
performance, and various event-based pieces), MOCA stood out as a unique fixture in the
Bay Area art scene when it opened in 1970. Yet the idea of the artist-founded exhibition
venue was not Marioni’s invention.
452
In the postwar era, the San Francisco Bay Area
witnessed the establishment of several notable similar spaces, which included: Metart
Galleries, a cooperative gallery formed in 1949 by abstract expressionist painter Clyfford Still
and twelve of his students at the California School of Fine Arts; the Six Gallery, an
exhibition venue founded in 1954 in a former garage by Wally Hedrick, Jack Spicer,
Hayward King, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan and David Simpson, all Beat artists
and poets; and Semina Gallery, artist Wallace Berman’s roofless shack at the edge of a canal
where he held exhibitions of different artists on Sundays for two hours at a time during the
1960-61 seasons.
453
However, MOCA certainly kickstarted the next phase of the do-it-

452
Modernism is dotted with episodes in which artists took the control of the exhibition space into their own hands,
starting with Gustave Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism in Paris in 1855.
453
Metart was inspired by Still’s philosophy that a solo exhibition of an artist was the only format that would properly
convey the oeuvre’s meaning, and that the artist-run gallery was the solution for an artist to exhibit free from the constraints
and demands of the critics and the marketplace. For more about Still and Metart, see Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay
Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, 30–32. A few years later in 1952, a group of San Francisco artists founded the short-
lived King Ubu Gallery in a former garage space with earthen floors and no electricity. After it closed, the Six Gallery
opened in the same space in 1954. The Six Gallery was the site of the famed reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl in 1957.
Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, 85–86; John Natsoulas, The Beat Generation
Galleries and Beyond (Davis, Calif.: John Natsoulas Press, 1996), 16, 35.
New York in the 1950s was also a hotbed of artist-initiated galleries. Some better known spaces included the
Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery opened by former students of Hans Hoffman (1952-1959) and the City Gallery (1958-
59), founded by artist Red Grooms in his own studio with another painter named Jay Milder. Barbara Haskell, Blam! The
Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984), 19, 20, 53. In
the late 1960s, a number of artist run spaces also opened in New York including Apple, an exhibition space that operated
out of artist Billy Apple’s studio (opened October 1969); and 98 Greene Street, an experimental theater and performance
space founded by collectors Holly and Horace Solomon in New York (opened December 1969). Jacki Apple, Alternatives in
Retrospect: An Historical Overview 1969-1975 (New York: The New Museum, 1981).
235
yourself art space in the area. Across the nation, artist-run venues popped up all over the
place, influenced by the collectives and communes that had formed during the era of the
counterculture. Well-known exhibition spaces included: 112 Greene Street/112 Workshop in
New York City (1970); F Space in Santa Ana, California (1971); the Portland Center for the
Visual Arts (1972); N.A.M.E. Gallery in Chicago (1973), and/or in Seattle (1974); Hallwalls
in Buffalo (1974); the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) (1974); and 80
Langton Street, San Francisco (1975). By the mid-1970s, the number of these spaces
proliferated to such a degree – in large part because of the newly established flow of funds
through the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which grew steadily throughout the
decade – that critics took these “alternative art spaces” to be symbolic of a larger artistic
movement. Those familiar with the West Coast art scene acclaimed Marioni’s work as a
pioneer in this movement for his role in founding MOCA, which was sometimes credited
with being the first alternative art space in the country.
454

The phrase that came into use – “alternative art space,” occasionally reworked as
“alternative arts space” or simply “alternative space” – was given to informal, low-budget,
non-commercial exhibition venues founded by artists. The sense of opposition to the gallery
and museum system is implied with the word “alternative,” much as counterculture was not
against culture as against a particular mainstream culture. The stimulus to creating alternative
art spaces was generated in a period when there was great interest in generating all kinds of

454
Terri Cohn, “Circa 1970: The Evolution of the Alternative Arts Scene,” Artweek 30, no. 12 (December 1999): 15;
Constance Lewallen, “Paul Kos: An Annotated Chronology,” in Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2003), 30; Thomas McEvilley, “Introduction,” in
Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2003), 16. Loeffler stops short of calling MOCA the
first space, but calls it “a first” in the alternative space movement Carl E. Loeffler, “From the Body into Space: Post-Notes
on Performance Art in Northern California,” in Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, ed. Carl E.
Loeffler and Darlene Tong, vol. Updated (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press: Contemporary Arts Press, 1989), 377.
236
alternative lifestyle and economic spaces specializing in everything from experimental
educational methods to new community property relations to the growing and marketing of
organic products. San Francisco, an epicenter of countercultural activity, provided a
supportive niche for such ventures. Most alternative spaces, particularly those in San
Francisco in the 1970s, focused on showing such experimental work as performances or
installations, although some also featured more conventional media, particularly spaces that
were founded to promote artists of a particular (underrepresented) identity, such as Chicanos
or women. While artists continue to found new alternative spaces today, the movement
peaked in the late 1970s and ended by the mid-1980s, when federal funding declined.
In this chapter, I approach MOCA with the hindsight that it is now considered one
of the first alternative spaces in the country, and seek to understand its role as a model in the
larger history of alternative spaces in the Bay Area and across the United States. MOCA’s
importance, as I will seek to show in this chapter, must be put in the context of the larger
cultural phenomenon of which it was a part. Using the Bay Area as a case study, I trace the
social and economic conditions that made the alternative art space movement possible,
arguing that the confluence of a number of factors – the high concentration of
professionalized artists, a lack of exhibition venues, an ideology of do-it-yourself rooted in
the oppositional politics of the 1960s, the existence of inexpensive building space due to a
deteriorating economy, and the availability of federal government funding – led to MOCA’s
birth in 1970 as well as the subsequent profusion of alternative spaces in San Francisco
throughout the 1970s.
In 1970, Marioni did not set out to create an alternative art space, that is, something
secondary, surrogate or oppositional to mainstream institutions, which is why he pointedly
237
named his space a museum. As he insisted in a 1976 interview, “I wouldn’t have called it a
museum if I wanted to make an alternative art space. I wanted it to be part of the
establishment right from the beginning.”
455
As we saw in Chapter Three, Marioni’s
relationship to the museum system is fraught with ambiguities; although Marioni viewed the
museum as an institution that had the power to promote the advance of art, he often
attacked it, exposing its normally disguised material and social functions, including
conferring status onto donors or upholding the autonomy of art objects. If he desired for
MOCA to partake of the authority that accrued to “the Establishment,” he certainly ran the
space in the most anti-establishment way possible. He never organized MOCA on the lines
that would make it equal to a museum. Instead, MOCA had an informal structure, a private
orientation, no protocol limiting the action of the curator, and a total dedication to
experimental art that hardly resembled a conventional museum in the sense of an institution
concerned with archiving, preserving and displaying art – permanent objects – to the
public.
456

Interestingly, other alternative spaces, such as LAICA and 80 Langton Street,
spurred by the availability of grants to those who could demonstrate their merit and viability
in their applications, tended to become more bureaucratized, developing boards and staffs,
and began to resemble established museums. Oftentimes, they were founded by trained arts
administrators rather than artists, who were skilled at and willing to set up supervisory

455
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
456
Marioni did sometimes claim that he was doing the preservation, conservation and collecting work of the museum, that
is, he was well aware of the traditional functions of the museum, although he reinterpreted them in unorthodox ways. For
example, his permanent collection consisted of documentation and ephemera from events rather than original artworks.
For more on MOCA’s permanent collection, see Ibid., 28; Masahi Matsumoto, “Alternative Spaces for Art Exhibitions”,
November 3, 1976, 6.
238
advisory boards that set policies and monitored the organization’s practices, and ran their
operations based on prescribed selection and exhibition procedures. In contrast, then, to the
tendency towards organization by other alternative arts venues, MOCA, with its supposed
ambition to become an established art space, remained a one-man, largely improvised
operation throughout its existence into the early 1980s.
457
What comes into play here is
Marioni’s longtime primary identification with the role of artist rather than curator or arts
administrator, to the extent that, as we have seen, his curatorial function was absorbed by his
larger idea of the artist persona. Marioni, even after he was removed from his position at
Richmond, only had so much time and energy to devote to the managerial duties required to
run an exhibition venue, and ultimately he lacked the wherewithal, interest and
administrative skills to successfully expand or organize the venue into a full-fledged
institution. Because MOCA had an intimate scale and oversight dependent solely on
Marioni, it resembled more a personal artist project than a professionally managed,
bureaucratic operation.
Just as Marioni did not set out to create an alternative art space, he also did not set
out to make MOCA an artwork – yet unsurprisingly, given Marioni’s expanded sense of the
artist’s function, Marioni ultimately appropriated MOCA into his art practice. I am
suggesting, then, that MOCA served not only as a functioning exhibition venue, but, in
contrast to most other alternative art spaces, became a conceptual artwork or art “object.”
Marioni himself began calling it a “social artwork” by mid-decade (the fact that it was

457
Marioni did not officially close MOCA until the building in which it was housed was condemned in 1984, but it hosted
its last exhibition in the MOCA space in 1980 with installations and performances by Tony Labat and Jose Maria Bustos
and its final show anywhere with a modest display of matchbook covers at Jerry and Johnny’s Bar in 1981. Tom Marioni,
personal communication with author, September 12, 2011.
239
conceptual was implied), and this interpretation of MOCA as artwork is also reflected in
later exhibitions in which Marioni objectified the physical space and social activity of
MOCA. In addition to making the opening of the second location of MOCA itself an event
in January 1973, three years later Marioni billed the restoration of the walls in the building to
the state that they had been when he moved in as an art piece (The Restoration of a Portion of the
Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Museum of Conceptual Art by David Ireland, 1976). In the second
half of the 1970s, he put the space itself on view for an open house (Open for Inspection,
September 1977) and showed the furniture as well as photographic documentation of the
space in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MOCA at SFMOMA,
1979). In treating the totality of MOCA as a work of art, Marioni was consistent with his
sense of his art practice as comprising social interactions (e.g., The Act of Drinking Beer with
Friends, 1970) and his management of other artists (e.g., The San Francisco Performance, 1972); in
fact, there seemed to be no fixed definitional limit between art and personal activity for
Marioni, which means that eventually it was inevitable that his curatorial endeavors (e.g., the
founding of MOCA) would fall under the art category.

A Short History of the Alternative Art Space Movement in the Bay Area and Beyond
On October 2, 1975, over two hundred participants attended a public artists’ meeting
in San Francisco at Bonnie Sherk’s “The Farm” on the subject of alternative art spaces.
Leaders from fifteen different Bay Area alternative organizations gave short presentations on
their establishments, after which all attendees were invited to join in an open discussion.
458

458
Marioni was not in town, so artist Terry Fox read a statement about MOCA written by Marioni and answered questions
on his behalf. Paul Kagawa, ed., A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting Held
October 2, 1975 at The Farm, San Francisco (San Francisco: The Seminar, 1975).
240
The majority of the presentations centered on exhibition venues – namely, 1218-32 Folsom
Street, 63 Bluxome Street, 80 Langton Street, American Can(‘t) Collective, Galeria de la
Raza, La Mamelle, MOCA, Samore Gallery, South of Market Open Studios, the Farm, the
Floating Museum, the Goodman Building and the Women’s Art Center – but two
publications, Left Curve and Vision (Marioni’s newly founded art journal, published by his
wife Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press), were also represented.
459
The large attendance
number as well as the long duration of the event (after three and a half hours, the discussion
was curtailed “due to lack of time”) attested to the overwhelming interest in alternative art
spaces in San Francisco.
460
Artist Paul Kagawa organized the meeting under the rubric of
“Floating Seminar,” a recurring artists’ forum that he started earlier that year. The Floating
Seminar was itself a sort of alternative artist-run initiative “designed to provide a structure
for personal communication with each other [artists] about issues which they felt were
important.”
461

This eclectic group of organizations illustrates the burst of art activities and alternate
art structures and organizations that developed in the 1970s in the Bay Area. In addition to
the publications and the seminar series itself, the Farm, where the meeting was held, is of

459
As mentioned in a footnote in the introduction, Marioni had also long aspired to publish his own art publication. After
he met his second wife Kathan Brown in 1974, who was owner of the successful Crown Point Press, his dream became a
reality. Brown backed and published Vision, which comprised a total of five issues between 1975 and 1980, with Marioni as
the editor. At the artists’ meeting, Brown ended up speaking about Vision to the assembled audience; she was not on the
original roster to speak but was added at the last minute.
460
Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting Held October 2, 1975 at
The Farm, San Francisco, 6.
461
It is interesting to compare Kagawa’s sense of art practice with Marioni. Kagawa initially conceived of the Floating
Seminar as a process art piece in which he as an artist assumed the role of social organizer, in much the way Marioni as an
artist assumed the role of curator. In the course of Kagawa’s project, however, he realized that “the organization-as-art-
activity was irrelevant, and that the real value of the meeting was in the interaction between artists at a personal level,” and
thereafter, discontinued thinking of himself as an artist playing a role. Paul Kagawa, “The Floating Seminar October 1975,”
La Mamelle Magazine: Art Contemporary 1, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 40.
241
interest. As mentioned in Chapter Two, Sherk, an artist who was part of the MOCA inner
circle in its early years, conceived of The Farm as “a life-scale environmental performance
sculpture” in 1974 that took over unused land and vacant warehouses by a freeway
interchange in Potrero Hill and converted the area into a working farm and community
gathering spaces.
462
Operating in San Francisco at this time was also a group that organized
“open studio” weekends, that is, predetermined times when artist studios were open to the
public; as well as 63 Bluxome Street, a rentable space founded by a small group of artists
(opened 1974); and 1218-32 Folsom St, an exhibition space for art both in new media as well
as traditional, run by curators and artists associated with the San Francisco Art Institute
gallery (opened 1975). But the most well-known of these spaces were those which, like
MOCA, focused on time-based, post-studio art. 80 Langton Street (founded in 1975)
specialized in “time and non-object-oriented art forms, such as performance, video, music,
dance, and film as well as other experimental and multidisciplinary situations.”
463
La Mamelle
began as a publishing house in 1975, but by the end of the year, it opened an exhibition
venue that hosted performance art, video art, experimental dance and theater, and
conceptually driven object-based shows (including a show of works all made using a copying
machine). The Floating Museum (founded 1975), did not have a physical space at all.
Launched by artist Lynn Hershman, the Floating Museum was a program of one-time
temporary, site-specific exhibitions throughout the city, with “the function of the
museum…to get clearance for the spaces, and to facilitate communication of the

462
Sherk quoted in Nancy Buchanan, ed., Social Works (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, 1979), 40.
463
Quote from 80 Langton Street Documentation, The First Year – 1975-76, thirty-four postcards documenting events at the
space quoted in Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 40.
242
program.”
464
Other alternative spaces were constituted to create opportunities for groups
marginal to the dominant white male core of the artworld, including community-based
centers like the Galeria de la Raza, which addressed the city’s Chicano and greater Latino
population, and the Women’s Interart Center, which served women.
Kagawa’s primary intention in organizing the Floating Seminar that brought the
representatives of these disparate organizations together was to promote networking among
artists and other related parties: “It is the purpose of the Floating Seminar to help solidify
the awareness of local community among artists through the stimulation of personal
interaction and communication.”
465
Kagawa suspected that the strong attendance at the
meeting attested to “a feeling that the existing art institutions in San Francisco are not
providing sufficient support for artists in the area.”
466
Indeed, the meeting revealed that the
idea of creating alternative organizations was widely embraced in San Francisco. This was
due partly to the activism of the era that traversed numerous spheres of public and private
life, and partly to the economics of supply and demand.
The latter comes down to two factors that emerged in San Francisco as well as in the
United States as a whole: a large number of artists and a dearth of venues for artists to
exhibit. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, colleges and universities began to open up a
number of graduate art school programs. This created an unprecedented scenario in the
American art world: instead of a few artists who received training in specialized schools or in

464
Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting Held October 2, 1975 at
The Farm, San Francisco, 30.
465
Kagawa, “The Floating Seminar October 1975,” 41.
466
Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting Held October 2, 1975 at
The Farm, San Francisco, 7.
243
Europe, there was suddenly a flood of new artists with graduate degrees as well as positions
for artists as teachers (thus offering artists a source of steady employment and stable
income). In essence, art rapidly became a degreed professional choice.
467
As art historian
Howard Singerman has convincingly argued, it was the sheer number of graduates from art
schools, particularly graduate-level programs, that inadvertently triggered the need for
alternative art spaces, since the museum and gallery system had been set up for a much
smaller number of artists.
468
Indeed, thirty-one new Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programs
opened in the United States in the 1960s, and forty-four commenced in the 1970s.
469
In the
Bay Area, there were MFA programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State
University, California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, University of California at
Berkeley and University of California at Davis. Phil Linhares, who oversaw the San
Francisco Art Institute gallery throughout the 1970s, estimated that between five hundred to
one thousand new MFAs were granted each year in the Bay Area in 1975.
470
This growth in
art schools undoubtedly contributed to the dramatic rise in artists in the 1970s: while six
hundred thousand people identified themselves as artists in the 1970 United States census,
one million people did by 1980.
471
As the higher educational system churned out more and
more artists in the 1970s, there was a glut of trained artists with nowhere to exhibit, much
less to sell. Sociologist Diana Crane reported in her study of the New York art world in the

467
The trend of increased professionalization of artists began in the late 1940s and 1950s when the GI bill encouraged art
schools and other university art departments to become accredited so that they in turn could credentialize their students.
Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, 128; Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry,
and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 79–82.
468
Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, 157.
469
Ibid., 6.
470
Thomas Albright, “The Expanding Alternatives,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 1, 1975, 44.
471
Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde, 4.
244
1970s that although galleries and museums also grew, the growth did not keep pace with the
increased number of artists: “In spite of the continual expansion in the numbers of galleries
and exhibition spaces, the intensity of competition meant that only a small fraction of the
artistic community was likely to receive either symbolic or material rewards.”
472

In a city like San Francisco, where the commercial market and museum scene were
much smaller than in New York, the problem of too many artists and too few exhibition
venues was especially acute. When Henry Hopkins moved to San Francisco in 1974 to take
on the position as Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, he was surprised by the
great number of artists:
what was a shock to me, even though I knew it, was simply the density of the artist
population, in San Francisco was incredible [sic]. Every third person was an artist at
one time or another, not really, but it [seemed] like that sometimes. And no single
museum [was] ever going to be able to serve that mob of people who choose to
work [in San Francisco].
473

Indeed, the Bay Area was a mecca for young artists not only because of its reputation as a
socially liberal metropolis, but also because of the number of the high quality art programs.
Although Marioni did not pursue a graduate degree in art, the vast majority of his colleagues
came to the Bay Area either to enroll in a school or teach in one.
To fulfill the exhibition needs of the artists being graduated from the art schools and
the artists who moved to the area would have required dozens of additional exhibition
venues in San Francisco and the surrounding cities. But only a handful of museums and

472
Ibid., 136. Of course, even prior to the explosion in the number of artists, the vast majority of artists toiled away in
obscurity because the modern art world has always been oriented toward a star system of artists where only a few
individuals achieve fame and material rewards. For more on the star system in the arts, see Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?,
107–110; Benhamou, “Artists’ Labour Markets”; Schulze, “Superstars.”
473
Henry Hopkins, oral history interview with Henry Tyler Hopkins, October 24, December 3, & December 17, 1980,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
245
galleries of any stature showed contemporary art at all, and even fewer accepted the newer
temporal or site-specific variety. The San Francisco Museum of Art was the only institution
with any national reputation that showed contemporary art, and this it did grudgingly and
infrequently, especially in the early part of the decade. While the Berkeley Art Museum and
the art department at the Oakland Museum organized some contemporary exhibitions, they
were still new institutions at this time with only regional and local reputations. Only a few
galleries that showed contemporary art existed, and they typically focused on collectible,
object-bound work. Given the lack of mainstream venues for contemporary art, it is not
surprising that San Francisco spawned an unusually high concentration of alternative art
spaces.
Although the mismatch between the high number of artists and the low supply of
exhibition venues was the foundational premise that spawned the alternative space
movement, still, it is unlikely artists would have turned to the do-it-yourself solution without
the conceptual framework developed in the 1960s by the New Left and the counterculture.
The social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a two-fold process of
consciousness-raising, in which the citizen learned to question authority and to look at
established institutions with skepticism while learning, at the same time, to feel self-
empowered to make changes and create new forums, organizations and communities. Renny
Pritikin, the former head of New Langton Arts (a later incarnation of 80 Langton Street), for
instance, observed how the alternative space movement took its cues from the 1962 The Port
Huron Statement, a blueprint for the New Left, issued by the Students for a Democratic
Society:
246
The founding of artists’ organizations took place in an era of populist, grass roots
parallel institutions in American life, as many (mostly younger) people found
themselves unable to accept the prospects for life and career that the culture offered
them. This phenomenon accelerated as people became aware that previous
perceptions of social structures as monolithic and intimidating could be successfully
challenged.
474

Indeed, the cultural atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a very American mix of
individualism and communalism, self-dependence and collectivities and communes. The do-
it-yourself potential of alternative institutions in the arts appealed to both of these
conceptual poles. Artists were not the only ones creating institutions “parallel” to the
mainstream, dominant ones; there were alternative schools, alternative housing arrangements
and even alternative forms of commerce. Feeling excluded from and victimized by the elite
tastemaking process, numerous artists decided to take matters into their own hands by
founding their own spaces.
475
Again, Pritikin explains:
The objective was self-determination. Artists took this rhetoric, originally intended to
address disenfranchisement from political decision-making processes, and applied it
to the microcosm of an art world that had effectively placed artists in a passive and
victimized role, identifying that condition as a political one. As an alternative to such
a condition, artists proposed to create their own ground for displaying their works
both for their peers and any interested audience.
476

One critic writing in 1977 also confirmed that “[a]rtists invented alternative spaces in an act
of self-determination; it was refusal to allow the commercial art world to define who gets

474
Renny Pritikin, “The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists’ Organizations,” in New Writing in Arts Criticism:
1986 Journal, ed. Anne Marie MacDonald et al. (San Francisco: San Francisco Artspace, 1988), 38.
475
This notion of self-determination also manifested itself in the New York based activist art group, the Art Workers
Coalition (1969-71), as mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation. Articulating their rights as “art workers,” these
artists, among other things, created an artist’s bill of rights in 1969. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New
York Since 1969.”) For more on the Art Workers Coalition, see Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers. A San Francisco Art Workers
Coalition was also active in agitating for artists rights in the mid-1970s.
476
Pritikin, “The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists’ Organizations,” 37. For a biting critique of the artists’
adoption of the language of empowerment that had been originally applied to the disenfranchised poor, see Grant H.
Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality:
Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 116–117.
247
access to the system and who doesn’t.”
477
Sociologist Batia Sharon likewise reports in her
late 1970s study of San Francisco artist-run galleries that artists gained autonomy from t
traditional power brokers in the art industry by creating their own venues to enlarge their
sense of freedom and control over their art career.
he

478

In Marioni’s case, although he definitely experienced his moment as a power broker
as the curator at the Richmond Art Center, he nevertheless had enormous trouble with
getting the cooperation of the higher ups at the museum in doing what he wanted in that
role, which was why he started MOCA in the first place. His idea was to have absolute
control of the agenda of an art space, which would free him from the art institution
hierarchy and the tastes of the general public. As he explained in an interview in the 1970s,
“Even though I did some things that were adventurous, experimental [at Richmond], I still
didn’t do the things as far out as I wanted to, so I started my own space.”
479
Marioni
obviously thought that he could make good on his commitment to promoting conceptual art
and promoting his own art only by founding his own place and stamping it with his own
ideas. MOCA became all the more important after his contract with the Richmond ran out
and he had few other job options.
However, it is important to remember that the artists who showed in alternative art
spaces or helped organize them generally were not morally opposed to participating in the
established art exhibition system; rather, they simply could not obtain access to it. Just as the
oppositional politics of the 1960s and 1970s was often motivated by the demand for access

477
Steinbach, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Space,” 7.
478
Batia Sharon, “Artist-Run Galleries – A Contemporary Institutional Change in the Visual Arts,” Qualitative Sociology 2, no.
1 (May 12, 1979): 24. Sharon appears to have completed her research by 1977, but the paper was not published until 1979.
479
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
248
to the political establishment rather than its overturning, alternative art spaces emerged as
part of an effort to create opportunities within the art system rather than a rejection of the
system altogether. Brian McPartlon, one of the founders of 63 Bluxome Street, proclaimed
that “[w]e do not view our enterprise as directed against established commercial galleries,
museums and organizations....Our ambition is to augment the established support system,
and not rival it.”
480
In founding MOCA, Marioni believed that he could do a better job of
programming than existing institutions, but, as we have seen, he craved, to a perhaps
inordinate extent, recognition from the established institutions. In Sharon’s view, most
artists in the Bay Area became involved with alternative spaces after failing to advance their
careers using the commercial route.
481
Indeed, what Marioni and other Bay Area artists most
wanted was recognition from established art organizations for the new kinds of temporal,
performative and site-specific art through their inclusion in institutional exhibitions and
collections. Like racial and ethnic minorities and feminists in the sixties, these artists were
protesting to participate in the broader structure of the existing system. In the history of
alternative art culture, it should also be noted that the situation in San Francisco differed
somewhat from that of New York in that in the former, traditional art institutions such as
galleries and museums were few and weak and did not constitute a powerful force that
intensified the energy with which artists protested their dominance and rejected their
influence. In the Bay Area, there were so few places to show that founding an alternative
space was more often than not about making opportunities where there were none.

480
McPartlon quoted in Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting
Held October 2, 1975 at The Farm, San Francisco, 55.
481
Sharon, “Artist-Run Galleries – A Contemporary Institutional Change in the Visual Arts,” 13, 20.
249
Yet it is also true that alternative spaces – unlike galleries and even the archetypal
cooperative gallery – were non-commercial. In a sense, this condition was forced upon them
by two factors: the lack of buyers for their work (which was, as event based work, often hard
to commodify anyway); and the presence of a new funding source – grants from the NEA –
that allowed alternative spaces to operate without need to sell anything and that propelled
the alternative space initiative into a national movement throughout the mid- to late 1970s
and 1980s. The NEA, a federal agency founded in 1965 under President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s administration, aimed to promote high standards for the performing arts and the
visual arts and to make “great” art accessible to the public.
482
The United States government
traditionally showed much less interest in supporting the arts than its European counterparts
and, until 1965, had never implemented a formal national policy on the arts, so the
establishment of the NEA marked a dramatic shift in the arts history of the country.
483

Historian Donna Binkiewicz argues that the establishment of the NEA was politically
possible in the mid-1960s as a result of the continuing fallout from the competition between
the U.S. and the Soviets. Supporters of a national arts agency argued that the arts expressed

482
President John F. Kennedy had established the President's Advisory Council on the Arts by executive order in 1963, but
no one had been appointed when Kennedy died in November 1963. It was left to Johnson to take up the cause, which he
did in 1964, when he pushed through the Congress the passage of the bill that approved the creation of the National
Council on the Arts, which would become the administrative body of the NEA. Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse:
United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), 94–95, 224.
483
The closest that the United States came to forming a national policy on the arts was under President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal programs including the Works Project Administration (or later called Works Progress
Administration)’s Federal Art Project. Although the WPA programs funneled large amounts of money to artists, they were
structured as temporary work programs intended to provide relief to the unemployed by paying artists a set wage for their
labor. The Department of Painting and Sculpture (later the Department of Fine Arts) of the Treasury Department oversaw
a similar work program that commissioned artists to create works for federal buildings. The fact that the administration
directed the funding to artists, rather than farmers or doctors, constitutes a type of policy decision and support of the arts
on the part of Roosevelt. But nevertheless, these programs were designed as welfare-type programs and none of them
constituted a permanent, independent agency that awarded grants to artists and art organizations as part of a federal arts
policy as was the NEA. Ibid., 15–18; Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, “New Deal for Public Art,” in Critical Issues in
Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, ed. Harriet Senie and Sally Webster, 1st ed. (New York: IconEditions, 1992), 128–
141.
250
the ideals of a free democracy and that exposure to these great works of art would
concomitantly “uplift” American citizens and enhance the image of the United States
internationally.
484

The NEA’s Visual Arts Program, through which art organizations like MOCA as
well as individual artists received funding, was established in 1967. The NEA began giving
grants to artists and art organizations as early as 1966, but the sixties and early seventies were
mostly spent by the NEA in getting its footing, developing the types of grants it would
administer, and formalizing the application and vetting procedures.
485
One of the categories
that the NEA began in 1971 was the intermediate program, a “flexible pilot program of
small grants” where “[f]unds were used primarily for workshop activities aimed at facilitating
the production of art, training young artists, and exhibition and finding new markets for
artists’ works.”
486
As stated in the 1971 fiscal year program report issued by the National
Council on the Arts and the NEA, “[g]rants under these programs are made for projects
which are frequently small in scale and short in duration. They included support for
organizations less formal in structure than universities and museums.”
487
Thus the
Intermediate Program in its first two years (1971-1972) made grants to artist-initiated
projects like Detroit’s Common Ground, a shared studio space for various artists that began
in 1964; New York’s 112 Greene Street; and Los Angeles-based Market Street Program, an

484
Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse, 52, 56, 63–67.
485
Ibid., 113, 123.
486
National Council on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts, Programs of the National Council on the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, D.C., 1971), 2.
487
Ibid.
251
exhibition venue founded by recent art school graduate Joshua Young.
488
In addition to
alternative spaces, the Intermediate Program also funded other activities that did not fit into
traditional categories including residency programs and slide registries.
489

A grantee through the Intermediate Program in the NEA fiscal year 1973, MOCA
was among the first alternative spaces to receive funding from the government agency.
Marioni had known from his Richmond experience that the NEA gave grants to museums,
so he decided to apply for funding in 1970, just a few months after he opened MOCA at its
first location.
490
Correspondence between Marioni and Brian O’Doherty, the head of the
Visual Arts Department at the NEA, shows that O’Doherty was intrigued by MOCA and
wanted to support it, but struggled to categorize it into one of the 1970 funding rubrics.
491

O’Doherty also informed Marioni that MOCA had to obtain non-profit status in order to
receive federal funds.
492
The protracted process of qualifying for non-profit status took until
1972, and so it was two years after Marioni started it that MOCA collected on its first NEA
grant in the fall of 1972 (NEA fiscal year 1973), which was for five thousand dollars (twenty-

488
Common Ground received $2,300 in NEA fiscal year 1971 under the Intermediate Program. National Endowment for
the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report Fiscal Year 1971, 1971, 124. 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street and the
Market Street Program each received $8,500 under the Workshops rubric in the NEA fiscal year 1972, the earliest year in
which what would later be called alternatives spaces would be funded. National Endowment for the Arts, National
Endowment for the Arts Annual Report Fiscal Year 1972, 1972, 114. The Market Street Program was founded by Young, who
used a statistical method of surveying hundreds of his artist colleagues to determine who should be shown and with whom.
In addition to presenting object-based works, the space also showed many avant-garde performance-based and site-specific
installation works.
489
Elaine A King, Pluralism in the Visual Arts in the United States, 1965-1978: The National Endowment for the Arts, an Influential
Force, 1986, 151.
490
Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
491
Brian O’Doherty to Tom Marioni, August 26, 1970, Tom Marioni, personal archive, San Francisco, Calif.
492
Ibid.
252
eight thousand in today’s dollars).
493
The grant was allocated under the rubric of “Short-term
Activities,” a subset of the Intermediate Program.
494
Virtually the entire MOCA budget was
made up of the grant in 1973. In addition, MOCA charged a small membership fee for two
dozen or so members, which came to perhaps one hundred fifty dollars or so in any given
year. The members were mostly artists, but they also included some collectors and critics.
495

After Marioni established MOCA in 1970 with his own money, he took a financial hit by
losing his position with the Richmond Art Center and was forced to close the MOCA space.
Thus, the 1973 NEA grant gave MOCA a second life, allowing Marioni to reopen MOCA in
a physical space all over again. In subsequent years (fiscal years 1974 through 1977), MOCA
continued to receive funding under the Workshop category, which was initially another
subdivision of the Intermediate Program, in the increased amount of ten thousand dollars.
496

Indeed, without federal funding, it is doubtful Marioni would have continued with MOCA in
1973. The NEA grants had a similar role in sustaining many artist-run organizations
throughout the 1970s and 1980s. And despite the fact that some of the smaller spaces in San
Francisco never received government funding, the momentum generated by the government

493
In a 1976 interview, Marioni incorrectly states that MOCA received a grant in 1971. In this same interview, he states that
the process of applying for non-profit status took only nine months to a year, which would mean that MOCA would have
had non-profit status by 1971 and could have collected a grant that year (NEA fiscal year 1972). Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in
Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
494
According to Marioni’s memoir, O’Doherty and Marioni had decided that MOCA did not fit under the workshop
category because it was not a teaching institution per se, which is why he received a “museum grant” in 1973. Actually,
MOCA received a grant under the Intermediate program and not under the museum rubric, which was a different category
altogether. Marioni’s desire to make MOCA an establishment art space may have distorted his interpretation of events.
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 104–105.
495
Marioni, interview, January 30, 2007.
496
In 1975, the Workshop Program was designed “[t]o assist workshops where practicing professional artists who share
common aesthetic and technical interests may work together.” National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the
Arts Annual Report Fiscal Year 1975, 1975, 107.
253
grants created the sense of a national artist space movement that filtered down to all venues,
large and small.
In his position as head of the Visual Arts Department from 1969 to 1976,
O’Doherty played an integral role in funneling federal money toward alternative art
organizations.
497
As editor-in-chief of the New York-based national art magazine Art in
America from 1971 to 1974 – a position he maintained concurrently with his job at the NEA
– and as a conceptual artist practicing under the pseudonym Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty was
personally involved with experimental new art genres and championed artist-initiated
ventures like MOCA even before they became a widespread phenomenon. In fact,
O’Doherty is even credited with coining the term “alternative spaces.”
498
Throughout the
1970s he pushed the NEA to increase funding for performance, environmental, video and
conceptual art. These new forms of art practice were initially sponsored not through direct
grants to artists (as were more traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, and
photography) but through awards to organizations that supported these artists, that is, by
channeling money to alternative spaces via the Intermediate Program. It was only later in the
decade, around 1976, that the NEA began to recognize conceptual art, performance art and

497
O’Doherty replaced the first Director of the Visual Arts Program, Henry Geldzahler, a former curator of American art
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and specialist in contemporary art, who helped to shape the program’s
initial focus on modernist art. O’Doherty reported to Nancy Hanks, the head of the NEA (who was appointed by President
Richard Nixon to her post in 1969), who also had a hand in directing the funding to alternative art spaces. Binkiewicz,
Federalizing the Muse, 153.
498
Critic Kay Larson writes that O’Doherty “wrote a story which used the phrase ‘alternative space’ to describe the
phenomenon (the phrase also appeared in the headline) and thus inadvertently named it” (Kay Larson, “Rooms with a
Point of View,” Art News 76, no. 8 (October 1977): 35.), but I have not been able to locate the original article to which she
refers. Phil Patton also credits O’Doherty with coining the term (Phil Patton, “Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the
Alternative Space,” Art in America 65, no. 4 (July 1977): 81.
254
video art as discrete genres and thus organized panels to review the artist grant applications
in each specific category.
499

In a 1977 interview, O’Doherty stressed the fortuitousness of the timing of the NEA
funding in terms of fostering alternative spaces:
the nice thing is that [the NEA] got involved…just when the spaces were starting to
exist, and so government support came in at just the right moment. It was a happy
historical accident that the endowment was there when all this started.
500

O’Doherty does not accept the idea that the federal funding caused the alternative space
movement, but only enabled it to gain momentum. An advantage of federal grant money, at
first, was that it had few strings, unlike funding from dealers or corporations. As O’Doherty
remarked in 1977, the NEA money “allow[ed] alternative spaces a rare and heady freedom –
freedom from worry about pleasing a less than sympathetic public; freedom to take risks;
freedom to serve whom and what they will.”
501
Although it may seem surprising today, in the
aftermath of the so-called Culture Wars in the 1980s – when socially conservative
Congressional members vigorously attacked the NEA’s funding of overtly sexual and
provocative works by American artists – Congress did not meddle into the affairs of the
particular grantees in the 1970s.
502
In fact, art historian Grant Kester also observes that
“[w]hat [was] striking about the [NEA’s] artists space funding model...[was] the central role

499
Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse, 194.
500
Larson, “Rooms with a Point of View,” 35.
501
Ibid.
502
After the first round of artist awards were given in 1967, there were many complaints that the NEA favored artists
working in the mode of modernist abstraction, but historian Binkiewicz concludes that “it was more politically acceptable
to support freedom of expression than their personal tastes – even though, ironically, that meant supporting the high
modernist tastes of cultural officials at that time.” In addition, to avoid conflict with awards, Chairman of the NEA Nancy
Hanks “quietly advised the Visual Arts Program staff to delete proposals for specific projects from grant applications” so
that the awards would be given for their previous achievement rather than to fund a specific potentially controversial future
project. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse, 126–129.
255
assigned to contemporary artists as the beneficiaries and constituency of public funds, and
the relative indifference to” public opinion of the work.
503
Indeed, as the MOCA example
illustrates, alternative spaces were often unconcerned with reaching lay audiences; their
audience was other artists. As we saw in Chapter One, Marioni’s experience in having to
appeal to a broader, non-art specialist public at the Richmond Art Center limited his ability
to sponsor the kind of art he was most interested in; his sponsorship of some shows that did
not have a general appeal provided the grounds for his dismissal. Although the Richmond
Art Center was also supported by government funding, its budget came from the local city
government, and its programming was aimed at a local community of amateur artists and
craftspeople. With the NEA, Marioni’s experience was different. Public funding allowed him
to be free from pleasing not only the art market, but also the general public.
Another factor in the growth in alternative spaces in the 1970s was the availability of
inexpensive urban space, which was important given that the primary fixed cost of running a
gallery was rent. Due to white flight from the cities and the recessions that nagged the
American economy in the seventies, many urban centers were filled with unoccupied
buildings. In San Francisco and other cities, the 1970s was also a time when light industry
began to relocate out of the urban center and into neighboring suburbs and towns.
504

Throughout the decade, the South of Market district, where MOCA and other alternative
spaces were located, was undergoing a massive redevelopment initiative (ultimately resulting
in the construction in the 1980s of the Yerba Buena Center, a large hotel, retail and

503
Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” 118.
504
New York’s Soho district is the archetypal example of an urban neighborhood where loft spaces once occupied by light
industry and warehouses were replaced by artist studios and galleries in the 1970s.
256
entertainment complex), which resulted in low-cost or even free facilities for many local
alternative organizations.
505
MOCA’s first location at 86 Third Street in a former office
space, was a reasonable one hundred dollars a month (about five hundred fifty in today’s
dollars), which he initially split with Terry Fox, who also used the space as his studio (Figures
4.1 and 4.2). By early 1972, Fox had moved out and Marioni was evicted because he failed to
pay rent, but others were being evicted as well since the building had been condemned for
destruction.
506
By the start of 1973, Marioni began renting the second space at 75 Third
Street for two hundred fifty dollars a month, a reasonable amount for five thousand square
feet, but he did not pay this for long (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). When he fell late in rent payments
in 1974, he decided to petition the building owner to “donate” the rent to MOCA. Because
Marioni had registered MOCA as a non-profit corporation, any donations made to the entity
could qualify as a tax deduction. In addition to writing a personal request to the owner,
Marioni asked a few curators at Bay Area museums to write the owner of the building to
assert MOCA’s importance in the art community.
507
The owner agreed to this arrangement,
which may have been due to the fact that the building had been unoccupied for the two
years prior to MOCA’s occupation of the space and the tax deduction at least provided some
earnings from the building.
508
As a result, Marioni no longer had to pay rent. About a year

505
For more on the redevelopment of San Francisco, see Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan, City for Sale: The
Transformation of San Francisco, Rev. and updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
506
The building was never torn down and still stands today.
507
Tom Marioni to Robert L. Coleman, undated draft; Tom Marioni to George Neubert, September 28, 1973; Brenda
Richardson, Berkeley Art Museum, to Robert L. Coleman October 1, 1973; John E. Peetz and George W. Neubert,
Oakland Museum, to Robert L. Coleman, October 4, 1973; Thomas H. Garver, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
to Robert L. Coleman, October 19, 1973; Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
508
In Marioni’s letter to George Neubert, September 28, 1973, Marioni stated that the building had been unoccupied for
the two years prior.
257
later, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency bought the building, and because its policy
was to keep the rent the same as the previous owner, Marioni continued to get the space for
free. Because of this arrangement, Marioni stayed in the building for twelve years until, in
1984, he was evicted because the building was to be demolished. By this point, however,
MOCA had practically ceased to exist.
509

The San Francisco alternative space Site/Cite/Sight run by Marioni’s friend Alan
Scarritt also benefited from the cheap rent. Scarritt reports that he obtained a ten-thousand
square foot sky-lit space in the center of San Francisco for six hundred dollars a month.
510

He divided up the loft into an exhibition space, five studios plus a darkroom. Scarritt used
one studio as his own and rented out the remaining four at cost, so he was able to get a free
studio once he started receiving NEA grants in 1977. Scarritt also attributes his success in
winning grants to the fact that he was well-liked by Bay Area artist James Melchert, who in
January 1977, had replaced O’Doherty as the head of the Visual Arts program at the NEA.
Having been involved in exhibitions at MOCA since its founding in 1970, Melchert knew
firsthand how these spaces fostered a spirit of experimentation in new genres, and he
continued the flow of NEA funding to alternative spaces begun by O’Doherty.
511

In conclusion, a number of fortuitous factors went into the blooming of the
alternative art space movement in the seventies. First, the landmark legislation to establish
the NEA in the mid-1960s that resulted in a program that escaped Congressional

509
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 102–103.
510
Mike Roddy, a former classmate of Scarritt’s, and Marilyn Bogert, Scarritt’s wife at the time, helped Scarritt start Site and
to renovate the space they rented, but Scarritt fronted most of the money for the initiative (with some help from Bogert)
and was the primary overseer of the space. Alan Scarritt, interview by author, September 26, 2011, Los Angeles, California.
511
Steinbach, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Space,” 7; Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse, 193.
258
intervention during this decade. Second, sympathetic personnel, as artists O’Doherty and
Melchert at the head of the Visual Arts Department were enthusiastic about supporting art
scenes that were not credentialed by the establishment or particularly popular with the
public, but that were innovative. Finally, the funding came on line in time to foster the
demands of the alternative art space movement, and did so up through the 1980s. At the
same time, state and local funding also made a significant impact on funding for alternative
spaces in certain areas, notably in New York City. This was not the story, however, in
California and San Francisco, where little local funding was devoted to visual art.
512

Combined with the availability of cheap space, the proliferation of credentialed artists, and a
sense of self-determination on the part of contemporary artists, the growth of alternative
spaces in San Francisco and across the country throughout the 1970s and 1980s was a key
material factor in the rise of new forms of temporal, situational art.

The Changing Model of the Alternative Art Space
As NEA funding grew, the organizations that it funded changed. By the mid-1970s,
some organizations were springing up for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the funds
that were available. Many alternative spaces were no longer run by artists and became more
professionalized and ultimately more like museums. The shift in the structure of alternative
spaces from artist-run experiment to board-administrated organization is illustrated by a
second conference on alternative arts organizations held in Los Angeles in April 1978. In

512
The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) was a particularly generous donor. In 1977, the nearly $27 million
budget of the NYSCA was more than the arts spending of the other forty-nine states combined. About $9 million of this
figure was spent on visual arts, mostly to institutions on the basis of seven public dollars matching every private dollar.
Many of the New York City alternative spaces, including Electronic Arts Intermix, Inc./Institute for Art and Urban
Resources and 112 Workshop, received funding from both the NEA and the NYSCA. Patton, “Other Voices, Other
Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space,” 81.
259
stark contrast to the 1975 conclave at the Farm, “The New Artsspace” was a multi-day,
professional conference organized by LAICA. Comprising panels with invited
representatives from across the country, the organizers of the New Artsspace put out a
glossy, color brochure and a modest book that included several commissioned essays and
individual pages on fifty-seven different alternative spaces around the country.
513
Although
the intent of this conference was broadly the same as that of the Floating Seminar, that is, to
exchange ideas about alternative spaces, unlike the latter, which was organized by an artist
for other artists, the New Artsspace was fundamentally a meeting of administrators. Critic
Melinda Wortz observed, “the [New Artsspace] conference actually was not an artists’
conference, but rather was called for administrators or would-be administrators of
alternative spaces, including artists who are involved in the inception of policy-making of
such spaces.”
514
Although artists were still involved in setting up alternative spaces in the late
1970s, professional administrators dominated the field and the days of the artist-cum-
director like Marioni were waning. MOCA – whose activities were reduced to two events in
this year – was included in the book and Marioni was invited to participate on a panel, but
most of the organizations represented in this meeting were bigger, more complex
organizations, with much larger budgets than MOCA.
LAICA, for example, was run by a non-artist director, Bob Smith and a twelve-
member board made up of dealers and collectors as well as artists.
515
Smith stated that
“museums structurally represent first the board of directors, second the institution itself,

513
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, The New Artsspace: A Summary of Alternative Visual Arts Organizations Prepared
in Conjunction with a Conference, April 26-29, 1978 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, 1978).
514
Melinda Wortz, “New Artsspaces - A Conference Overview,” Artweek 9, no. 21 (May 27, 1978): 2.
515
Walter Gabrielson, “LAICA: Only Game in Town,” Art in America 62, no. 6 (December 1974): 43.
260
thirdly the curator, and finally the artist. LAICA’s intention is to reverse this order of
priorities.”
516
Yet the fact that LAICA had a board of directors and a curator already created
a museum-like impression. Despite the express intention to turn the hierarchy of museum
constituents on its head at LAICA, its rules stipulated that an artist had to locate a curator
who would be willing to organize an exhibition that included her work in order to be shown
at LAICA.
517
While Marioni managed to secure a modest amount of NEA funding ($10,000
annually) through the fiscal year 1977, LAICA’s budget in 1977-78 was $105,000, while the
medium for alternative spaces was $30,000-80,000.
518

Another example of a more professional alternative art space was 80 Langton Street
(Figure 4.5), which originated as a collaborative effort by members of the San Francisco Art
Dealers Association (SFADA), especially due to efforts by Wanda Hansen, in 1975.
519
Each
dealer rented storage space in a large warehouse at a rate that would subsidize a fifteen
hundred square foot area that could be given free of charge to artists who wanted to use it as
an exhibition space. A committee composed of a critic (Judith Dunham), an artist (James
Pomeroy), a collector (David Robinson) and two dealers (Sylvia Brown and Edward De

516
“Alternative Exhibition Space,” State of the Arts: The Newsletter of the Cultural News Service 1, no. 5 (May 1977) clipping from
“Publicity 1977” folder, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.
517
Ibid. clipping from Publicity 1977[?] folder, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Papers, Archives of American
Art, Washington D.C.
518
Clive Robertson, “The New ArtsSpeak Conference,” Centerfold (June 1978). Robertson also reports that LAICA had a
staff and artist program of an additional $280,000, but I have not been able to verify the validity of this assertion.
519
The idea for 80 Langton Street originally developed out of the success of an artist-initiated performance series titled
South of the Slot, held in November 1974. In this series, artists organized one-time performances twice a week for six weeks
in a warehouse located in an area in San Francisco that was south of the cable car lines. Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual
Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 40; Larson, “Rooms with a Point of View,” 36. Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art
Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the Meeting Held October 2, 1975 at The Farm, San Francisco, 15.
261
Celle) was set up to review proposals for exhibitions.
520
Although artists remained involved
in the vetting process, the committee was clearly dominated by non-artists. In the following
year, 80 Langton Street became independent of the SFADA, obtained non-profit status, and
collected its first NEA grant. While MOCA and 80 Langton received the same grant amount
of $10,000 in 1976, by 1977, 80 Langton received a larger grant of $12,500, which rose to
$15,000 in 1978 and $20,000 in 1979.
521
Clearly 80 Langton’s organizational structure and
involvement of non-artists made it much more bureaucratic than MOCA’s one-artist
operation, but it also made it more successful in winning grants. MOCA’s last grant was
given in 1977. In spite of his friendship with Melchert, who had by then ascended to the
head of the Visual Arts Department at the NEA, Marioni could no longer make the cut.
Ultimately, Marioni was not prepared professionalize his space, which would entail forming a
board of directors or managing a staff, in order to remain current with the rapidly rising
criteria for alternative art spaces.
Although the grant application process was quite relaxed in 1970 (and very much in
the hands of the O’Doherty), as the NEA itself became increasingly bureaucratic and its
policies codified, it demanded more planning and accountability from its applicants.
522
By
1977, the application process was a “rigorous, six-to-nine month procedure” that
“encouraged [applicants] to structure, plan and document their operations carefully – as well

520
San Francisco Art Dealers Association to Tom Marioni, May 13, 1975, Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley
Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.; Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 40.
521
National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report Fiscal Years 1976-1979, Washington D.C., National Endowment for the Arts,
1976-1979. 80 Langton Street also won a grant from the San Francisco Foundation in the amount of $18,500 grant to be
paid over a year beginning in March 1980. “80 Langton Receives Grant,” Artweek 10, no. 18 (May 5, 1979): 15.
522
NEA funding for alternative spaces grew dramatically throughout the decade, with the overall Visual Arts Program
budget increasing fivefold from 1970 ($970,000) to 1978 ($4,900,000). Elaine A King, Pluralism in the Visual Arts in the
United States, 1965-1978: The National Endowment for the Arts, an Influential Force, 1986, 233.
262
as to seek leading art world names to decorate their applications.”
523
In order to obtain
government funding, art spaces had to become more professionalized and systematic. Critic
Robyn Brentano, writing about 112 Greene Street observed (Figure 4.6):
Although the grants insured [sic] that the workshop could continue free from
commercial considerations and the special interests of private funding, their advent
in turn created new demands – for policy, scheduling, budgets and record keeping –
things which necessitate an administrator and threatened to put an end to the
anarchic, spontaneous flow of events in the space.
524

In a comparatively short time, a once organically-structured exhibition program became
more planned, managerial, and administratively responsive to the state. Art historian Wallis
advances a particularly deterministic view of NEA support, calling it a form of Foucauldian
“govermentality,” where the state exerts social control through the imposition of a doctrine
that becomes naturalized and self-applied.
525
In his view, the NEA procedures compelled
alternative spaces into adopting conventional business structures and hence muzzled the
oppositional voices raised by alternative spaces.
526
While Wallis accurately points out that
members of alternative ventures altered the way they ran their organizations in order to
better conform to funding agency standards and that the government furthered its state
interests through this mechanism of funding – an interest that included a perhaps not so
ominous “provi[sion of] training for unemployed citizens (highly educated artists)” – he
overstates the original oppositional character of alternative structures. Marioni is a good
example of an artist who seemed genuinely disposed to anarchic interventions against the

523
Patton, “Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space,” 81.
524
Robyn Brentano, “Introduction,” in 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: History, Artists & Artworks, ed. Robyn Brentano and
Mark Savitt (New York: New York University Press, 1981), x. quoted in Wallis, “Public Funding and Alternative Spaces,”
174–175.
525
Wallis, “Public Funding and Alternative Spaces,” 176–178.
526
Ibid., 174–175, 177.
263
museum system, but in fact welcomed the patronage of the state and was unconcerned
about how this might compromise his dissent. At the same time, Marioni never did conform
to the state induced administrative standards.
Thus, the entrance of the NEA on the art world scene had a paradoxical effect: it
may have favored and encouraged the alternative art space movement, but it also
fundamentally changed alternative art space structures, moving them towards the
professional norms of the museum system, and leaving behind artists like Marioni who were
not interested in professionalizing their art space as much as they were interested in
innovating new art practices. As Marioni describes it today, the reason that other
organizations were successful in securing grants at this time was that they became “arms” or
“employees” of the government, whereas he did not receive funding because he simply
“operated like an artist.”
527
Although this description is a little too self-serving – it is arguable
whether the managers of the other spaces were arms of the government and unclear what it
meant exactly to “operate like an artist” – it is fair to say that the development of the art
world environment through the seventies made it much harder for him not to act like a
seasoned administrator.
528
But he persisted in his loose managerial style, and MOCA

527
Tom Marioni, interview by author, August 28, 2010, San Francisco, Calif.
528
Marioni also attributed his failure to obtain more NEA grants to the fact that the Carter Administration directed the
NEA to increase geographical diversity, with the result that funding was spread out across the country, rather than
concentrating them in the large urban centers like San Francisco. Yet other San Francisco alternative spaces like 80 Langton
Street, La Mamelle and Site/Cite/Sight continued to receive funding when MOCA did not. Marioni, as well, attributed the
discontinuation of the grants to the fact that MOCA did not have a “multicultural board.” Marioni, interview, August 28,
2010; Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 115. He implied that the NEA began to favor organizations that
demonstrated ethnic diversity rather than avant-garde activity. The NEA’s mission certainly changed during this period – as
did the values of the larger society – so that recognizing ethnic diversity and gender equality became more politically
acceptable and desirable, but by and large, the organizations receiving money (including 80 Langton Street, La Mamelle and
Site/Cite/Sight) were run by white, mostly male artists, and white, male artists certainly received the lion’s share of
individual artist’s grants. It seems, then, that the primary reason that MOCA’s grants stopped was because he “operated like
an artist” and could not formulate a credible, well-considered program to justify the government grants. Indeed, the
publicity surrounding Marioni’s art projects directed at museums, which seemed to cross the line between art and self-
dealing behavior, may well have made funders leery of him.
264
remained a one-man operation throughout its entire existence, in part because he liked to
maintain control over all of MOCA’s activities, and also because he lacked the inclination or
skills needed to recruit a staff or to build a board of trustees.
529
Marioni did everything from
curating to grant-writing to printing invitations to sweeping the floors, which may have
passed the muster for the NEA when it was first getting its bearings, but doomed MOCA
from the grant perspective over the long run. MOCA was always as much a personal art
project as a “museum,” and as such, could not be slotted into the formats and protocols of a
professional arts organization.

MOCA as Conceptual Work of Art
Indeed, although Marioni did not found MOCA with the intention that it would be a
work of art, over time – in the late 1970s – Marioni began to see it as one, a conclusion
which flowed naturally out of Marioni’s conception of art as consisting in the framing of
everyday events by the artist. As Marioni emphasized again and again, art was defined by the
artist’s power to “see” the art in a situation. Thus his day to day life of running an exhibition
space could be reimagined as a kind of artmaking if he designated it so. Indeed, some of the
later projects held at MOCA attest to Marioni’s vision of the space as an art project.
As early as 1973, when Marioni re-opened MOCA at 75 Third Street thanks to the
money from the NEA, he began to package the venture as a kind of art object. To this end,
Marioni created a combination publicity packet-invitation to the reopening of MOCA that
was mentioned in the Introduction to this dissertation. Recall that the mailing consisted of

529
Marioni appointed a musician Burt Arnowitz as his so-called video curator for a brief time in 1973, but Arnowitz was
not paid and never did any curating. Marioni hired him so that he could have access to Arnowitz’s video camera, which few
artists could afford at the time. Marioni, interview, August 27, 2010.
265
three cards (Figures 4-6), the first of which proclaimed: “You are cordially invited to the
opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art Wednesday, January 3, 1973, 7 to 11 p.m., in its
new quarters occupying 10,000 square feet of exhibition space at 75 Third Street, San
Francisco, California;” and the second that added: “MOCA has over 200 works of art in its
permanent collection, 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, a restaurant and cocktail
lounge, and 7 stories of parking available next door.”
Despite Marioni’s insistence that MOCA had “over 200 works of art in its
permanent collection,” these were not traditional museum objects. They were
documentations of events that had taken place at MOCA. If, indeed, they formed a
“permanent collection,” they were never put on display. In fact, the opening exhibition
showed no objects whatsoever. Although Marioni may have been interested in showing off
the space since MOCA had been homeless for most of the previous year and a physical
venue was not something that he took for granted, the exhibition, which displayed the
physical space of MOCA rather than any artworks that would be placed inside of it was also
Marioni’s signal that the museum itself could be considered an artwork. Marioni also may
have considered the space interesting to see precisely because it was not a white box.
Marioni was fascinated by the details and the history embedded in the former printing
factory, and wanted to keep in productive tension the newly imposed art function of the
museum to the work space that it had taken over. This is why he left the interior of the
building as he found it, opting not to refurbish it by painting over the walls or sanding the
floors.
Three years later, Marioni’s fetishization of the space and objectification of MOCA
as an artwork became more apparent with a work entitled The Restoration of a Portion of the
266
Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Museum of Conceptual Art (February 10, 1976). After a
deranged museum visitor slashed Rembrandt’s famous painting Night Watch at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in September 1975, the museum decided to build a room to
allow the painting to be seen while being restored. Inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s ongoing
repair effort, Marioni decided to restore a section of the wall, ceiling and floor of the main
room of MOCA, which had been painted white by the artist Darryl Sapien, as part of his
piece in the Second Generation group show held a year before (Figure 4.7).
530
Despite the fact
that Marioni generally encouraged artists to make their works site-specific, and although he
kept residue from other artists’ pieces including a room-like enclosure constructed with two
by fours and plasterboard by Howard Fried (Intraction, 1973), a small matchstick piece by
New York artist Mel Bochner as well as chairs suspended from the ceiling by New York
artist Vito Acconci (Waiting for the End, 1975), Marioni thought that Sapien’s paint job was a
“white elephant.”
531
Moreover, the residue exceeded the importance of the artist: “it was too
much for who he was.”
532

Besides, Marioni saw the activity of preservation and restoration as one of the
functions of the museum, but ultimately it was not art that he was interested in preserving so
much as quality of the space itself. As he stated in his memoir, “Being concerned with
traditional museum functions like preservation, collection and restoration, I kept the space as
a relic of the mechanical age.”
533
Fetishizing the worn, tattered character of the space,

530
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 113.
531
The permanent collection items are listed in Matsumoto, “Alternative Spaces for Art Exhibitions,” 6. Marioni’s quote is
from Marioni, interview, August 17, 2009.
532
Ibid.
533
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 113.
267
Marioni decided to have the white-painted section of the ceiling, wall and floor surfaces
restored to their “original” state, or at least the way they were prior to Sapien’s intervention,
which was pretty much unchanged from the date MOCA moved into the building in 1973,
when the interior surfaces still bore the residues in the form of ink spills, grime and marks
left by machinery of the printing company that had occupied the space for fifty years.
534

Marioni hired David Ireland, who was a printmaking student of his wife Brown, to perform
the restoration of MOCA. Over the course of a month, Ireland painstakingly recreated the
texture and color of the walls by scraping off the adhered paint, applying a new coat that
matched using the original color of the wall, and using smoke, printer’s ink and dust to
recreate the years of use.
535
Rather than transform MOCA into the pristine white box
environment typical of museums and galleries, Marioni intended to exhibit the wear and
decrepitude of the once industrial space (Figure 4.8). Marioni captured Ireland’s process in
photographs and video and when it was complete, he sent out invitations and hosted an
exhibition reception to present the restoration to an audience, followed by a video screening
of the process at Breen’s Bar. Marioni not only framed The Restoration as an artwork, but the
very walls of MOCA, too, became the objects of display.
The following year, Marioni again put the space of MOCA on exhibition. Called
Open for Inspection, Marioni invited people to an open house at MOCA on Wednesday,
September 21, 1977. He posted a printed statement three paragraphs long, which functioned

534
Marioni’s fascination with the quality of the physical space is manifested in a video recorded after the show All Night
Sculptures in 1973. Marioni takes the cameraman through the space room by room ostensibly to recount the one-night event
but instead spends much of the time carefully describing all of the architectural details of the building. Marioni, All Night
Sculptures, 1973.
535
Matsumoto, “Alternative Spaces for Art Exhibitions,” 6; Karen Tsujimoto, “Being in the World,” in The Art of David
Ireland: The Way Things Are, ed. Karen Tsujimoto (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum of California, 2003), 35.
268
as a kind of manifesto for MOCA in its later years and a justification for Marioni’s
exhibitions of MOCA as a space rather than as a vessel in which to show other artist’s
projects. The statement began by recounting a brief history of MOCA and establishing it as a
pioneer in the history of presenting temporal art:
MOCA…was founded in 1970, not as an alternative art space, but as an addition to
the already existing structure of the art world. The word “museum” was deliberate so
that MOCA would be seen as establishment right from the start. MOCA, however,
was separated from existing museums in its dedication to presentation of art actions,
rather than objects of art. At that time other museums were not interested in showing
this art.
536

He continued to explain that by 1975, the alternative art space movement was established,
“with regular programs, regular facilities and regular exhibitions month to month,” implying
that for all the ballyhooed oppositional structure of the alternative art space movement, they
ended up mimicking the operational structure of museums, even as traditional museums
were seeking to act more like alternative spaces by hosting performance festivals and the
like.
537
He concluded, “Now because of the large number of possibilities open to artists
making temporary art, MOCA has stopped presenting performances. Exhibitions since 1975
are situational (bar-room video and environmental).”
538
After Second Generation, Marioni
decided to stop organizing live events at MOCA, concluding that “performances have
become academic….And there isn’t any need to do it any more.”
539
Why Marioni focused
his negative feelings toward performance art in particular, and not installation art or video,

536
“Open for Inspection,” September 1977, document, Tom Marioni, personal archive, San Francisco, Calif.
537
Marioni also seemed to take pride in the fact that MOCA no longer had any regularly scheduled programming: “Since I
do not want to produce ‘filler’ shows, MOCA’s exhibitions are not regularly scheduled.” Ibid.
538
Ibid.
539
Loeffler, “Tom Marioni in Conversation with C.E. Loeffler,” 3.
269
which were also being shown by many venues around town, may be related to the fact that
performance became the key term associated with vanguard art in Northern California and
had completely supplanted the appellations conceptual art or sculptural action that Marioni
preferred.
540
In any case, Marioni decided that environmental exhibitions like The Restoration,
and bar-room video presentations like A Tight 13 Minutes, which was an exhibition of
thirteen one-minute videos held at Breen’s Bar in December 1976, were still not “academic”
– that is, they were fresh and worth doing. Ultimately, the printed statement served as claim
that the event/non-event of Open for Inspection itself was now a legitimate and even vanguard
art activity.
541

By the end of the decade, when the activities at MOCA had all but ceased, MOCA
became fully objectified in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(SFMOMA) in 1979. In 1978, SFMOMA Curator Rolando Castellón proposed that the
museum organize a group of exhibitions dedicated to the alternative art space and the
conceptual, performance and installation art associated with these spaces.
542
For the first part

540
By the late 1970s, all of the activities at MOCA from the early 1970s had been begun to be historicized as performance
art. See, for example, William Kleb, “Art Performance: San Francisco,” Performing Arts Journal 1, no. 3 (Winter 1977): 40–49;
Roth, “Towards a History of California Performance: Part One”; Loeffler and Tong, Performance Anthology: Source Book of
California Performance Art. Loeffler’s volume was first published in 1980.
541
By the late 1970s, Marioni’s devotion to the dissolution of the stable art object, which had struck him with a revelatory
force in 1968, had begun to wane. As he explained in a text he wrote in 1979, “Now the break from the object isn’t an issue
anymore. Ten years ago it was important to make a statement against materialism by making actions instead of objects.
Now with some artists in my generation, there’s a return to the object.” Tom Marioni, “Manifesto 1979,” in Writings on Art:
Tom Marioni 1969-1999 (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2000), 57. While anti-materialism as a strategy against the
preciousness of rarefied art objects seemed radical in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the late 1970s, temporal art had
become normalized to the extent that it no longer held the scandalous potential it once did, nor carried out the same radical
critique. Not only had it become a popular draw, but it had begun to be commodified. Thus maintaining a home for this
kind of art was no longer an urgent goal. Marioni, who had renounced making art objects since 1968, now began producing
saleable objects again in the late 1970s, and like many of the first generation conceptual artists, obtained representation
from the San Francisco dealer Paule Anglim in 1977. Marioni, however, to this day has not achieved a high level of financial
success from selling his work.
542
Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 6; Rolando Castellon, “SFMOMA 75th
Anniversary Oral History Project: Rolando Castellón,” interview by Jess Rigelhaupt, Transcript, March 19, 2007, 29–30. See
also Tanya Zimbardo, “Jim Pomeroy – Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog,” San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art blog entry, October 5, 2009, http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/10/tz-on-pomeroy/#more-6344.
270
of this initiative, Castellón invited each of the founders of three Bay Area alternative spaces
– the Floating Museum, MOCA, and La Mamelle – to organize a separate exhibition at the
museum about their organization.
543
(This trio of exhibitions was soon followed by a larger
exhibition titled Space/Time/Sound – 1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (1979), which was
developed by Castellón’s colleague, Suzanne Foley, as part of the original initiative proposed
by Castellón.) Here, finally, in the heart of the Bay Area art establishment, Marioni achieved
a certain recognition, not for any single piece, but for MOCA as a whole. By this time, artists
and critics could look back on the significance of alternative spaces to Bay Area art history
and their achievements throughout the decade, and MOCA began to garner some of the
attention Marioni had craved during the early 1970s.
The three exhibitions were titled The Floating Museum at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (various dates in 1978), The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (May 11-June 24, 1979) and La Mamelle, Inc. Video and Publications 1975-1979: A
Retrospective (December 21, 1979-February 3, 1980). The Floating Museum exhibition, which
was also called “Global Space Invasion II,” consisted of a series of six gallery exhibitions
(which were performances) at the museum, each curated by a guest artist, and several weeks
of performance art at the museum auditorium.
544
The exhibition of La Mamelle featured an
installation of magazines as well as a display of photographs, slides and videos of events

543
Castellón seems to have initially considered involving 80 Langton Street and Site in the project as well. Rolando
Castellón and Phil Linhares to Carl Loeffler, October 13, 1977, La Mamelle, Inc. Video and Publications 1975-1979: A
Retrospective exhibition archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Calif.
544
An extensive series of performance art using spaces around the city was also programmed in association with the
exhibition. Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 42–43.
271
sponsored by La Mamelle over its five year history.
545
One assumes that the three spaces
were chosen according to a criterion of historical importance (MOCA being widely
acknowledged as the first alternative space in the Bay Area) or current prominence (the
Floating Museum and La Mamelle offering well known and different models of alternative
organization). Whereas MOCA was a more conventional fixed exhibition venue, the Floating
Museum facilitated the production of art events around the city for artists; and La Mamelle,
while it had a space at one time, primarily focused on documenting and publicizing the
activity of artists through writing and video.
546

Rather than organizing events, as Hershman did for the Floating Museum, or
showing documentation of past events, as Loeffler opted to do, Marioni chose to represent
his alternative organization through photographs of the physical space and an interactive
installation of a table, chairs and a refrigerator filled with beer. The exhibition was divided
into two sections, one part documentation and one part re-creation, each installed in its own
gallery. The documentary section consisted of an installation of a group of twenty-four color
photographs of MOCA by Paul Hoffman (Figure 4.9). Titled The MOCA Suite, the
photographic series depicted the physical site of MOCA, highlighting the empty space
mostly bare of artworks. The second gallery included a table, a few chairs, a refrigerator
stocked with beer, and shelves attached to the walls to hold the empty beer bottles that
would result from use of the work (Figure 4.10). The press release explained that:
“Marioni…has designed a room which closely simulates and records the social ambience of

545
Ibid., 197. La Mamelle also used auditorium to hold “Alternative Functions: A Conference” on May 24-25, 1979. Judith
L. Dunham, “A Wake for the Seventies,” Artweek 11, no. 1 (January 12, 1980): 5.
546
One of the main projects of La Mamelle was the publication of Performance Anthology in 1980, a compendium of the flurry
of performance activity that occurred throughout the state. Loeffler and Tong, Performance Anthology: Source Book of California
Performance Art.
272
the original and existing space. He hopes thereby to temporarily transfer the social function
of MOCA to within the [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art].”
547

Perhaps he chose to highlight the physical space and the beer drinking activity of
MOCA because at the time of the exhibition this was the main MOCA event, a regular
Wednesday beer drinking gathering under the auspices of MOCA but held at Breen’s Bar,
which Marioni at this time called “the saloon of MOCA.” This gathering, which he dubbed
Café Society, 1976-1979 (Figures 4.11 and 4.12), continued the Wednesday events that he
hosted at MOCA in 1973-74 discussed in Chapter Two, which in turn grew out of his 1970
Oakland Museum piece, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art
addressed in Chapter Three. Marioni moved the event out of MOCA and into a commercial
bar in order to absolve himself of the responsibility for paying for the beer, which he could
no longer afford, and in addition, because the new location, a public place on the first floor
of the building, was easier to access and more congenial to socializing than the upper floor
space of MOCA.
548

But what happened when this beer drinking gathering was transferred to SFMOMA?
How did the museum explain to visitors that they could violate conventional museum rules
and physically interact with the installation, that is, open the refrigerator, help themselves to
a beer, sit down at the chairs and table, and drink the provided alcohol?
549
A statement
written by Marioni was posted on the wall, and a guard was stationed in the room –

547
The Museum of Conceptual Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art press release, 1979, San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, San Francisco, Calif., 1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art archives, San Francisco, Calif.
548
Marioni, interviews, August 27, 2010 and July 11, 2011.
549
Fritz Maytag, the owner the local Anchor Steam company, donated twenty-five hundred bottles to the museum. Marioni,
“SFMOMA 75th Anniversary Oral History Project: Tom Marioni: Conceptual Artist,” 17.
273
according to Marioni in a recent interview, to stop minors from drinking – but presumably
the guard could also inform the adults of their rights to the free beer.
550
Or perhaps a
museum staff member who was eating their lunch in the space would provide a model for
other museum-goers.
551
One critical absence at the installation at SFMOMA in 1979,
however, was the artist himself, who was unable to attend because he had to be out of town
for the duration of the exhibition. While Marioni participated as the host for each of his
earlier beer drinking events, Marioni was not at the museum at one o’clock each afternoon
when the gallery was opened and visitors were permitted to partake of the complimentary
beer.
552
While Marioni’s choice to represent MOCA using the installation of the table, chairs
and refrigerator reflected his vision of MOCA as a meeting place or clubhouse for artists, the
installation also demonstrates how, over time, MOCA became less a performance or
installation space and more an object in itself. Unlike the sampling of the other art spaces,
MOCA’s installation displayed it as something that was containable inside SFMOMA, rather
than giving the sense of it as an ongoing enterprise that paralleled the museum.
After years of trying to break into SFMOMA as an artist or a curator, it seems almost
tragic that Marioni was not able to attend the exhibition. Yet this absence almost makes
psychological sense, given the ambiguity of his relationship to the museum system and the
art establishment: he wanted both to be accepted in the system and to undermine the system,
and, refusing to sublimate both his dependence and resentment, he used them as the energy
for his pieces. When, finally, he was accepted, the project of undermining fell apart – in

550
Tom Marioni, telephone interview by author, August 21, 2011.
551
Marioni heard that museum staff members enjoyed eating their lunches in the installation. Ibid.
552
Ibid.
274
being memorialized, his ironic gestures were both accepted and deflected. His absence,
perhaps unwittingly, signified his refusal to accept the system’s acceptance of him.
While this exhibition represents the finalization of the long process through which
MOCA became, itself, an art object, from Marioni’s point of view, it also represents the
beginnings of its historicization by a traditional museum. If Marioni founded MOCA as a
critique of mainstream museums for failing to provide a space for ephemeral, conceptual art,
then these exhibitions marked the moment when his critique was finally being
acknowledged.
In contrast to the participatory potential that The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art offered, Space/Time/Sound (December 21, 1979-February 10,
1980) was considerably less interactive, displaying primarily documentation of performances
and site-specific works of “twenty-one artists who use space, time and sound as their
medium – instead of traditional paint or metal and stone.”
553
While installation pieces from
the 1970s by six of the twenty-one artist were recreated, the remaining pieces were
represented by black and white photographic-blowups and text panels or videotapes.
554
Out
of the twenty-one artists listed, all of the seven core MOCA artists were included: Marioni,
Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, James Melchert and Bonnie Sherk, as
well as other artists who showed at MOCA including Stephen Laub, John Woodall, Linda
Montano, Darryl Sapien, Richard Alpert, and Jim Pomeroy.
555

553
Space/Time/Sound – 1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area press release, 1979, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San
Francisco, Calif., 1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art archives, San Francisco, Calif..
554
Janice Ross, “Extracts of a Decade,” Artweek 11, no. 3 (January 26, 1980): 20.
555
Laub and Woodall were included in All Night Sculptures, 1973. Montano invited Marioni to be a part of her work,
Handcuff, 1973, in which the two artists were handcuffed together for three days and lived at MOCA, and the last three
275
Space/Time/Sound was not well received by the local press and public, and was
roundly criticized for displaying live performances and installations in such a way that
flattened and crippled the art. Reviewer Janice Ross remarked, “Aside from the
videotapes…the information in the show seems to have already been condensed into
catalogue format.”
556
Another critic, Robert Atkins, commented that
Space/Time/Sound strips this sometimes difficult art of a context, and I’m certain the
show is virtually unintelligible to most non-art buffs. Reliable sources at the museum
suggest that this is the least popular exhibition mounted in years. I don’t doubt it.
557

While documentation may be appropriate for archives, the problem for a museum dedicated
to contemporary art is that showing documentation can be wholly unsatisfactory to the
viewer, losing the power of the original live work. Hence Atkins concluded, echoing the
voices of Futurists and Robert Smithson alike, “Space/Time/Sound is a post-mortem for the
Seventies. Call it ‘the museum as mausoleum.’”
558
Artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s
called the museum a mausoleum in part because of its way of sealing off the art from the rest
of the world, but also because it failed to show avant-garde, temporal forms of art like
performance and installation art. Ironically, when the museum attempted to become more
up-to-date through this exhibition, it was again criticized for deadening the work. Marioni
and other artists wanted nothing more than recognition by the museum, but perhaps they
did not realize that when that happened, their work would also be changed by the
institutional context – categorized, chronologized, academicized and even ennervated. If

artists were all in MOCA’s 1975 Second Generation exhibition. Marioni was the only artist who showed a current piece from
1979.
556
Ross, “Extracts of a Decade,” 20.
557
Robert Atkins, “The Senility of the Seventies: New Art Made Old,” The Bay Guardian (San Francisco, January 17, 1980),
15.
558
Ibid.
276
Marioni felt that museums made painting seem lifeless and academic, then what this
exhibition demonstrated was that the context of the museum could have the very same
effect on performances and installations. In addition, because this art had emerged in more
marginal alternative spaces, transplanting it to museum display was a delicate process that
had evidently not been thought through. The ephemeral artworks lacked the polish and
finish that museum-goers were accustomed to, and more importantly, they were so
uninteresting in their current documentary state that Atkins concluded, “The point may be
that this kind of lively, experiential art can’t be shown in a museum at all – and certainly not
in documentary form.”
559

Although Space/Time/Sound may not have garnered favorable critical reviews or
public response, it was nevertheless important to the artists who were included and certainly
benefited their careers. As Atkins astutely observed, “The museum establishes its liberal
credentials and artists need this kind of support to compete in the grant/gallery arena.”
560

Being shown in the established museum could help an artist obtain representation by a
gallery or win a grant from the NEA. Although the artists involved might have been
disappointed with a negative response from critics and general audience members, they were
gratified to receive establishment recognition in the most direct form, that is, an exhibition at
the most prestigious museum of contemporary art in Northern California. If they were
looking for career advancement and for securing their place in history, this was a major step
in that direction.

559
Ibid.
560
Ibid.
277
The other important contribution of this exhibition was the catalogue, which was not
released in time for the exhibition but was published one year later. Not a traditional
catalogue, in which illustrations of pieces are arranged and numbered, this primarily text-
based volume told the history of conceptual art in San Francisco through brief essays about
various topics, as well as extensive individual profiles of art venues and artists involved in the
movement.
561
The profiles were not listed in alphabetical order as might be expected, but
revealed a bias toward Marioni and MOCA. The profile for the Richmond Art Center was
the first listed in the section on established venues, the profile for MOCA was the first in the
section on alternative spaces, and the profile for Marioni was the first in the list of artists.
562

Even where MOCA was not the explicit subject of the text, it featured works that were
performed or installed at MOCA.
563
The catalogue’s privileging of Marioni and MOCA
testifies to his seminal role in the development of conceptual art in the Bay Area, at least in
the view of curator Foley. The first publication to document the 1970s activities of San
Francisco conceptual and performance artists, the catalogue is still the single most
comprehensive source of information for this work.
564

With The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
Space/Time/Sound, Marioni’s longtime hope of garnering recognition for conceptual art by

561
The catalogue also includes a comprehensive chronology of events and publications from the decade. Constance
Lewallen, “Chronology,” in Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s (San Francisco; Seattle:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by the University of Washington Press, 1981), 128–199.
562
Foley, Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s, 3.
563
In a section titled “Studio Pieces and Street Pieces,” for example, the essay includes a description of Dianne Blell’s
Odalisque and Ireland’s Restoration. Ibid., 29–30.
564
A new catalogue accompanying the 2011-12 exhibition State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, organized by curators
Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, was just released as I was completing this dissertation. The essays in this volume also
constitute a significant scholarly contribution to the history of Bay Area conceptual art. Lewallen and Moss, State of Mind:
New California Art Circa 1970. Lewallen also contributed the comprehensive annotated chronology that appeared in Space,
Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s.
278
dominant art world institutions was realized, and the experimental art that MOCA showed as
well as the achievement of the alternative space itself was acknowledged. When Marioni
opened MOCA in 1970, he aimed to provide a space for conceptual art and a meeting
ground for conceptual artists. Because the temporal work he promoted was radical, untested
and not fully understood as art, he needed to persuade the San Francisco art world of its
very legitimacy. But in 1979, Marioni’s advocacy mission to spread the gospel of conceptual
art was no longer needed, and conceptual artists had other venues to chose from besides
MOCA. By the late 1970s, MOCA as well as places like 80 Langton Street and La Mamelle,
had themselves become seen as the establishment and as a closed, inaccessible world by a
new generation of artists, who in turn decided to establish their own art exhibition spaces.
565

Between 1978 and 1981, a host of San Francisco art and music performance spaces
associated with the punk movement opened including Club Foot, Jetwave, Artists in
Revolution in the Eighties, Valencia Tool and Die, Club Generic and A-Hole.
566
Typically
established by a small group of artists (and rarely surviving more than a year or two), these
venues were makeshift and provisional, but attracted large crowds to their hundreds of
performances and exhibitions. Although MOCA’s moment as a unique alternative space was
past, clearly the need for spaces for artists to exhibit their work did not diminish in the late
1970s and early 1980s.
In the sociology of organizations, one of the fundamental questions is how the
organization reproduces itself. From this standpoint, alternative art spaces could be said to

565
Fredricka Droutos, Randy Hussong, Sabina Ott (co-founders of Jetwave), and J.C. Garrett (founder of Club Foot)
personal communication with author, June 2009.
566
For more on these spaces, see Robert Atkins, “Trends, Traditions and Dirt: The Current State of Art in Northern
California,” LAICA Journal, no. 31 (Winter 1981): 31–32; Kristine Stiles, “Negative Affirmation: San Francisco Bay Area
Art, 1974-1981,” in Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81 (Los Angeles and New York: The Museum of
Contemporary Art and DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011), 29–30.
279
have faced a structural problem, as most did not survive beyond a few years or outlast their
founders.
567
In San Francisco, the Floating Museum ceased its activities in 1978, La Mamelle
stopped holding events in 1979 and Site/Cite/Sight closed in 1983. The Bay Area
organization with the longest lifespan was 80 Langton Street, which with its official board
and able administration, reincarnated itself into New Langton Arts in the 1980s and survived
until 2009. Overall, the 1970s alternative art spaces that had the most success in existing to
the current day were located in New York City, which evidently had a big enough art
constituency and local governmental funding to support the transformation of these
organizations into larger, more bureaucratic entities. Unsurprisingly many of these spaces
were not begun by artists but by arts administrators. Artists Space, a venue founded in
response to an initiative put forth the New York State Council on the Arts administrator
Trudie Grace and noted critic and art historian Irving Sandler, is still in operation today.
568

The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, established in 1971 by Alanna Heiss, became
what today is known as P.S. 1, a leading contemporary art museum affiliated with the
Museum of Modern Art.
569
Heiss, a former program director of the Municipal Art Society,
presumably had more of the managerial skills and enthusiasm for conducting the
administrative business of the space than an artist like Marioni.

567
Lynne Warren, “Chicago’s Alternatives,” in Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1984), 21.
568
Kim Conaty, “Artists(’) Space,” Art Spaces Archives Project, http://www.as-ap.org/content/artists%E2%80%99-space-
kim-conaty-0; Trudie Grace, “Artists Space,” Art Journal 34, no. 4 (Summer 1975): 323. The founding of the space, although
spearheaded by arts administrators, was conceived in consultation with artists, however, as artists were given high levels of
decision-making power in the exhibition process.
569
The Institute of Art and Urban Resources originally did not have a dedicated space, but was devoted to converting
abandoned spaces across New York City for use by artists. In 1972, P.S. 1, which was a closed city school, became one of
the permanent exhibition spaces and studio facilities of the Institute. Julie Ault, “A Chronology of Selected Alternative
Structures, Spaces, Artists’ Groups, and Organizations in New York City, 1965-85,” in Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985:
A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (University of Minnesota Press; Drawing Center, 2002), 33. P.S. 1 became
an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in 2000.
280
On the other hand, perhaps it is a mistake to think of the reproduction of the
alternative art space as encoded in the survival of each individual space – perhaps it is the
form that is transmitted, with new spaces popping up under the impulse of the older models.
The survival of the form, then, depends on the limited life of the individual spaces, which
would otherwise absorb the energy that should go into new spaces. In a comment made
during the 1975 Floating Seminar discussion, artist Jo Hanson hinted at this possibility:
the one [problem] that I find is that one tends to get bogged down in bureaucracy in
whatever kind of alternative venture. And I don’t know the solution. I just know that
unless somebody is willing to put in time administering and managing and so on, that
the endeavor doesn’t last very long. And maybe that’s alright, maybe that’s just the
nature of the Floating Museum and the Floating Seminar. You just do it as long as
you have the energy for bureaucracy, then you stop and somebody else begins when
they have the energy for bureaucracy.
570

Indeed, the amount of energy and commitment that any one individual – especially an artist
– could expend on running an alternative space was limited, but when the commitment of all
of those individuals is added up, something like a movement emerges.
Hanson’s remarks also point to the fact that overseeing an alternative space had the
drawback of cutting into an artist’s artmaking time. Indeed, artists often left alternative
venues when they found it was taking away from their personal production.
571
Even though
Marioni ran MOCA with as little bureaucracy as possible, it nevertheless required him to
attend to many administrative details. Marioni’s solution was to simply redefine his curatorial
acts as part of his artistic practice, so that running MOCA could be understood as part of his
artistic oeuvre.

570
Artist Jo Hanson quoted in Kagawa, A Survey of Alternative Art Spaces: Floating Seminar #2: A Revised Transcription of the
Meeting Held October 2, 1975 at The Farm, San Francisco, 60.
571
Warren, “Chicago’s Alternatives,” 21.
281
Conclusion: Free Beer: A Private Party Turned Public

In 1980, artist Alan Scarritt left his position as head of Site/Cite/Sight, a San
Francisco alternative space that he had helped to found in 1976, and moved to New York.
572

His departure coincided with the closing of Site, which still had one thousand dollars of
grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts remaining in its bank account.
Scarritt, who considered Marioni a mentor and a friend, decided to turn over the money to
Marioni for the benefit of MOCA. As Marioni observes, “It was a way for his space to
sponsor an event at my space.”
573
Marioni, who was no longer able to obtain government
grants for MOCA at this time, decided to use the funds to once again mischievously dole out
free beer to his artist friends. He printed up “artists’ credit cards” that he handed out to his
colleagues, who could use the cards to “pay” for beer at Jerry and Johnny’s bar where
Marioni’s salon met every Wednesday. (The salon, which had been meeting at Breen’s bar
since 1976, moved next door to Jerry and Johnny’s bar in 1979 when Breen’s closed.) An
artist could show the card to the bartender to obtain free beers. The bar kept a running tab
of the amount of alcohol dispensed and Marioni paid the total at the end of each month.
574

When the money obtained from Scarritt was about to run out, by a stroke of luck, a collector
who had heard about the credit card scheme and wanted to support it offered to buy one of
Marioni’s drawings for one thousand dollars if Marioni would agree to use the money to

572
Scarritt is not sure if he gave the money to Marioni at this time because Site actually continued until 1983 under the
management of Jill Scott. Scarritt, interview.
573
Marioni, interview, August 21, 2011.
574
Ibid.
282
continue the artists’ credit cards.
575
Marioni happily complied, and all told, the collector’s
contribution combined with the original money from Site covered the cost of drinks for
Marioni and his artist friends at Jerry and Johnny’s for over a year.
576
Even though the
collector footed the bill for the event, he did not expect to be and was not made a regular
participant in the salon. The gathering was not intended for collectors. In the spirit of The
Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970 the credit cards were meant for
the exclusive use of artists.
Although MOCA has long closed, Marioni’s weekly salon continues to this day.
Rather than at a bar, the gathering takes place at Marioni’s studio on Howard Street in the
South of Market district just a couple of blocks away from the two buildings that formerly
housed MOCA (and incidentally, also a couple of blocks away from the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)). The current event, too, is designed as a social
gathering for artists to relax and have fun. Unlike past salons, Marioni now has a bring your
own bottle policy, which is not limited to beer, and one of the artists participating is
designated bartender and made to serve the drinks. Another innovation – although perhaps
comparable to Marioni’s early interest in showing videos at his weekly gathering at MOCA in
1973 – is that one of the attendees gives a short reading as part of the entertainment for the
evening.

575
Ibid.
576
Ibid.
283
Marioni describes today’s weekly event as a “private club” complete with “house
rules.”
577
One of the rules prohibits guests from “invit[ing] guests without checking with the
management.” Marioni explains:
People coming into this scene should be sympathetic to the situation. This is an
artist’s club. I told one guy who was bugging me not to come back. He didn’t know
who Sol LeWitt [sic] was. If you don’t know who Sol LeWitt is, you can’t come in.
578

Because the salon is an “artist’s club,” guests at the event are supposed to be knowledgeable
about and sympathetic to art; especially conceptual art, which is why the faux pas of not
knowing the name of one of the most prominent conceptual artists is grounds for exclusion.
But knowing Sol Lewitt’s name does not necessarily entitle entry to the club; art collectors
are banned from attending. Marioni explains, “I know the way some artists act around art
collectors. I’ve been guilty myself of kissing up to them, but not enough to actually sell my
work.”
579
The concern for an egalitarian sociability thus prompted the exclusion of one
group, although oddly, curators and other museum professionals are not banned from
attending, perhaps in memory of the help Marioni received from a curator when he first
mounted The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends.
Yet despite the importance that Marioni places on having artists only at this event,
the re-enactments of Marioni’s drinking events organized by museums (including the
installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 discussed in Chapter Four)
have changed the rules to the extent that the drinkers can now be members of the general
public. Recent museum incarnations resemble the current salons in Marioni’s studio in that

577
Marioni, Beer, Art, and Philosophy: A Memoir, 118.
578
Ibid., 120.
579
Ibid., 121–122.
284
the installations include a refrigerator full of beer behind a bar, and Marioni arranges for a
bartender – usually a local artist or perhaps a director or curator of the sponsoring institution
– to distribute the beers, but the substance of the piece is much different, in that the primacy
given to the artist is no longer the case.
When a museum takes over the presentation of a free beer party of Marioni’s – as
many American and European museums have opted to do since the 1990s including most
recently, SFMOMA (2009), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010), Centro Andaluz de
Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2010), Centre d’Art et de Culture, la Ferme du Buisson,
Marne-la-Vallée, France (2011), Arnofini, Bristol, United Kingdom (2011), and
Kunstlerhaus, Vienna (2011) – not only does the intended audience change, but also the goal
of putting on the party. No museum has opted to reincarnate Marioni’s art happening just as
it was realized in 1970 in the Oakland Museum; no museum, apparently, wants to underline
the elitism that restricted the guest list to artists. In fact, the values of the piece have been
reversed: it is now mounted to appeal to a broad audience and to demonstrate its publicness.
Whereas The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends, Café Society and the current salons in Marioni’s
studio were about solidifying the bonds between like-minded practitioners and providing the
artists with the support and at least a private recognition that they – not the patrons or the
directors of the museum, and not even the public – were the foundation and indeed “stars”
of the art world, the recent museum events are about generating ties between the institution
and the public. Initially, Marioni was not motivated by a desire to open up a point of
connection with or to mingle with the general public – his encounter with the general public
at the Richmond Art Center had not, after all, been that encouraging – but was interested in
wresting the definition of art away from both the general public and the museum system.
285
Marioni’s sense of the museum was as a place that should be more relevant to contemporary
artists, not more friendly to the public.
As it is produced today, Marioni’s piece resembles some of the other participatory art
practices that emerged in the 1990s that have been grouped under the rubric coined by
French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, “relational aesthetics” or “relational art.” Relational
aesthetics, which is also the title of Bourriaud’s book, refers to artwork that produces social
interactions, or in Bourriaud’s words, “an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere
of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and
private symbolic space.”
580
While critics have attacked Bourriaud for various aspects of his
theorization of these practices, including his implicit assumption that the social interactions
created by these works are necessarily positive – a kind of engagement for engagement’s sake
– his advocacy of this relational or interactive strand of art of the 1990s was hugely
influential in raising the profile of the artists involved including Angela Bullock, Liam
Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christine Hill, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Phillipe
Parreno, and Rikrit Tiravanija, among others.
581

One of the most well-known of these artists and most relevant to the discussion of
Marioni is the ethnically Thai, New York-based Tiravanija, who gained fame for works in
which he distributed free plates of Thai food and bottles of beer to gallery visitors (Pad Thai,
1990; Untitled (Free), 1992) or otherwise provided settings for people to interact and socialize.
In Untitled (meet tim and burkhard), 1994, for example, which was performed at the

580
Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 14. At times, Bourriaud seems to argue that all
art had the potential of creating social relationships (i.e. a painting in an exhibition can inspire discussion among a group of
spectators) but relational art foregrounds this interest in the intersubjective and interactive.
581
The most thoughtful critique of Bourriaud’s position is Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October
110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.
286
neuegerriemshcneider Gallery in Berlin, he organized a party; the list of materials gives a
sense for what transpired – “furniture, refrigerator, TV-Set, videotape, music, drinks, lots of
people” – and suggests that his events were not so different from Marioni’s social events.
582

Just as Tiravanija’s parties were, at least theoretically, open to anyone who happened to come
by the gallery – he did not specify what kinds of people, just “lots” of them – Marioni’s
public museum events are also open to anyone.
The participatory nature and populist orientation of Tiravanija’s and Marioni’s
projects makes them appealing to art institutions seeking to find some way to connect with
their audiences. Marioni’s free beer party – when it is made open to the general public –
becomes the perfect vehicle for a museum to be seen as magnanimous (because gives away
free drinks) and approachable (due to the lowbrow association of beer). After all, though
some may still question whether drinking beer should be considered art, the free beer is hard
to refuse.
The increased use of participatory projects by museums, however, has come under
severe criticism. Art historian Anna Dezeuze, for example, observes that the contemporary
artist is:
caught between a new type of management ready-to-use participation as a tool for
higher productivity, and a leisure industry always thirsty for new forms of
entertainment….the contemporary artist is increasingly cast as a service provider –
whether as a creative source of new ideas for business training, or as a kind of party
planner. If…1960s artists…still sought to offer participants genuine forms of non-
alienated experience, such an option no longer seems relevant today, as experience
itself has become an economic commodity.
583

582
Bruce Hainley, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing? Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Art of Living,” Artforum 34, no. 6
(February 1996): 54–59.
583
Anna Dezeuze, ed., The “Do-It-Yourself” Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2010), 16.
287
Museum historian Karsten Schubert also shares an equally bleak view of museums today.
584

Citing art historian Rosalind Krauss’s influential 1990 essay, “The Cultural Logic of the Late
Capitalist Museum,” Schubert claims that in the new museum, “sensation and spectacle
would take the place of contemplation and experience” and artworks become
a variable in the overall equation of the democracy of spectacle. It is not read in
isolation but as part of a chain of stimuli selected and calibrated to keep the client-
visitor amused: the artist’s autonomy is sacrificed to the institution’s overreaching
corporate ambition.
585

By these accounts, Marioni becomes a glorified party planner whose work allows the
corporatized museum to better compete as a place of entertainment amid the many
spectacular and immersive choices offered by the growing leisure industry.
586

And yet, the characterizations of the museum by Dezeuze and Schubert, assuming
that the ways in which capitalism affects the museum is inevitable, uniform and total, seem
somewhat alarmist and overreaching. Although an increasingly commodified art sphere
certainly constrains the choices of individuals, I suspect that if we examine more closely the
ways in which museum visitors perceive their experiences, or how museum employees see
their jobs, we will discover that individuals do not conform so neatly to dominant ideological
constructs. If the field of cultural studies has taught us one thing, it is that any given person’s
“use” of what the culture industry offers up is often personal and surprising. In the words of
Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Eveeryday Life (1984), we must “[assume] that…users make

584
Karsten Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day, 3rd ed.
(London: Ridinghouse, 2009), 160.
585
Ibid., 175.
586
Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93.
288
(bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant
cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.”
587

Returning to Schubert’s remarks, we also see that they were premised on a nostalgic
ideal of the museum as an artist’s sanctuary:
The [new] museum has lost the privileged place it held for artists as an intellectual
sanctuary, where their rights were protected and their wishes respected above all else.
The new museum no longer constitutes a special, safe realm but is part of an
encroaching and all-consuming malaise: on one hand the market place, where artists’
work is literally consumed, on the other hand, the museum, where the consumption
is metaphorical, where their art is offered as diversion and entertainment….The
artist’s role, previously at the centre of the museum, has become, like everyone else’s
marginal.
588

But contrary to Schubert’s view, the museum was always a place of contestation by the artist.
My study of Marioni demonstrates that not all artists had the privilege of occupying the
central position of the museum. Only those selected to be included in the museum’s shows
and collections were afforded the special treatment of having their rights protected and their
wishes respected. For most of Marioni’s career, he was excluded and marginalized by the
museum.
So can one begrudge Marioni in his acceptance of the new public terms of The Act of
Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, given the fact that his struggle for
recognition kept foundering on his irreverent attitude to both the public and the elite art
world system? Perhaps this newfound fame is earned. And in fact the public versions of the
free beer event make sense given the recent rise in attention given to the artist. Now that he
is routinely invited by established institutions to show his work, he does not have to be as

587
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiii–
xiv.
588
Schubert, The Curator’s Egg, 175–176.
289
concerned with fighting for his own space at museums, and he no longer has to be as
consumed with building and shoring up a community of conceptual artists. Past the paradox
of his resistance/dependence both within and without the art world of his time, the stakes
are now lower. He is now free to open up his events to museum officials, trustees and
visitors alike. And perhaps he, as well as the other museum constituents, understands the
irony of this conclusion of his career all too well, and incorporates it in the way he perceives
these re-enactments.
290
Bibliography

Interviews Conducted

Acconci, Vito. Interview by author, February 22, 2009, Brooklyn, New York.
Brown, Kathan. Interview by author, August 12, 2009, San Francisco, Calif.
Fried, Howard. Interview by author, January 14, 2008, Vallejo, Calif.
Kos, Paul. Interview by author, August 8, 2009, San Francisco, Calif.
Lewallen, Constance. Telephone interview by author, October 14, 2011.
Linhares, Phil. Interview by author, December 12, 2009, Los Angeles, Calif.
Marioni, Tom. Interview by author, numerous occasions between 2007 and 2012 including:
January 30, 2007, February 2, 2007, June 27, 2008, August 10, 2009, August 17, 2009,
February 24, 2010 (telephone), August 27, 2010, August 28, 2010, June 19, 2011 (telephone),
June 28, 2011 (telephone), July 11, 2011 (telephone), July 24, 2011 (telephone), August 21,
2011 (telephone), San Francisco and Los Angeles, Calif.

Melchert, James. Interview by author, August 12, 2009, Oakland, Calif.
Neubert, George. Telephone interview by author, August 27, 2008.
Oppenheim, Dennis. Interview by author, February 20, 2009, New York, New York.
Richardson, Brenda. Interview by author, February 10, 2009, Baltimore, Maryland.
Scarritt, Alan. Interview by author, September 26, 2011, Los Angeles, Calif.
Sherk, Bonnie. Interview by author, January 17, 2008, San Francisco, Calif.
Smith, Barbara. Interview by author, March 10, 2010, Venice, Calif.

Archives and Libraries Consulted

Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, Calif.
Museum of Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, Calif.
291
Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, Calif.
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, Calif.
Richmond Art Center, Richmond, Calif.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Calif.
Tom Marioni, personal archive, San Francisco, Calif.

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308
Appendix: Figures

Figure 1: Tom Marioni, Conceptual Art calling card, 1970

Figure 2: Sol Lewitt, Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966

309

Figure 3: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

Figure 4: First card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art at 75
Third Street, 1972

310

Figure 5: Second card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art at
75 Third Street, 1972

Figure 6: Third card in mailing announcing opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art at 75
Third Street, 1972

311

Figure 7: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, 1968-72: Invitation
to Section XIX, 1968-69

Figure 8: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, 1968-72: Opening
of Section XIX, 1968-69

312

Figure 2.1: Tom Marioni, Bent Wood #8, 1967-68

Figure 1.2: Tom Marioni, Wall No.1, 1966-67
313

Figure 1.3: Tom Marioni, One Second Sculpture, 1969

Figure 1.4: Larry Bell, Untitled, c. 1969
314

Figure 1.5: Lloyd Hamrol, Situational Construction for Art Center, 1969

Figure 1.6: George Neubert, Post and Lintel Space, 1968
315

Figure 1.7: Bruce Conner, Untitled, 1969

Figure 1.8: The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition installation shot

316

Figure 1.9: The Return of Abstract Expressionism exhibition poster detail

Figure 1.10: Paul Kos, Condensation of Yellowstone Park Into 64 Square Feet, 1969

317

Figure 1.11: Ron Goldstein, Untitled, 1969

Figure 1.12: Terry Fox, Untitled, 1969
318

Figure 1.13: Mel Henderson, Untitled, 1969

Figure 1.14: Dennis Oppenheim, One Hour Run, December 1968

319

Figure 1.15: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), Birds in Flight, 1969

320

Figure 1.16: Letter from Thomas Marioni to Allan Fish

321

Figure 1.17: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue cover, 1969

322

Figure 1.18: Tom Marioni, Process Print, 1970

323

Figure 1.19: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, 1969, entry on Bob Anderson

324

Figure 1.20: The Return of Abstract Expressionism catalogue, 1969, entry on Dennis Oppenheim

325

Figure 1.21: Jim McCready, This Year, Burn the Church of Your Choice, 1970

Figure 1.22: Sculpture Annual submissions, Richmond Art Center, 1970 with Allan Fish
(Tom Marioni) paint splatter on pedestal submission (lower right)
326

Figure 1.23: Terry Fox, Levitation, 1970

327

Figure 2.1: A Participation Piece, invitation by Tom Marioni (front)

Figure 2.2: A Participation Piece, invitation by Tom Marioni (back)
328

Figure 2.3: Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice Melting, 1970

329

Figure 2.4: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), Piss Piece, 1970

330

Figure 2.5: George Maciunas in 1963 performing George Brecht’s Drip Music, 1959

Figure 2.6: Nam June Paik, Fluxus Champion Contest (aka Physical Music), 1962

331

Figure 2.7: Mel Henderson, Untitled piece for Sound Sculpture As with woman performer for
Terry Fox, Paul Kos and Herb Yarmo’s Untitled piece in background

Figure 2.8: Screening of Body Works, 1970, inside Breen’s Bar

332

Figure 2.9: Screening of Body Works, 1970, inside Breen’s Bar

Figure 2.10: Paul Kos, Pool Hustle, 1972

333

Figure 2.11: Bonnie Sherk, Traditional Performances: a piece within a piece, within a piece, etc., 1972

Figure 2.12: Howard Fried, Untitled, 1972

334

Figure 2.13: Stills from Howard Fried, Fuck You, Purdue, 1972

Figure 2.14: Mel Henderson, Attica, 1972 (version installed in museum)

335

Figure 2.15: Larry Fox, documentation of The San Francisco Performance road trip. Pictured
from left to right: Paul Kos, Mel Henderson, Bonnie Sherk, Tom Marioni.

Figure 2.16: Chris Burden, Bed Piece, 1972 at Market Street Program, Venice

336

Figure 2.17: The San Francisco Performance image used for the invitation. Pictured from left to
right: Howard Fried, Bonnie Sherk, Paul Kos, Tom Marioni, Larry Fox, Mel Henderson.

Figure 2.18: The San Francisco Performance newspaper, open to page showing contact sheet of
Larry Fox’s pictures taken during the road trip

337

Figure 2.19: Installation of photographs by Larry Fox, The San Francisco Performance, 1972,
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California

Figure 2.20: Terry Fox, Memento Mori, 1973, exterior view
338

Figure 2.21: Barbara Smith, Feed Me, 1973

339

Figure 2.22: Interior of MOCA space, 75 Third Street

Figure 2.23: Tom Marioni, The Artist’s Studio, 1973. Frank Youmans performs Marioni’s
piece by casting model Sally Pine.

340

Figure 2.24: MOCA refrigerator with Free Beer sticker

Figure 2.25: Wall of beer bottles collected from Wednesday afternoon open house

341

Figure 2.26: Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1960

Figure 2.27: Andy Warhol, 200 Campbells Soup Cans, 1962

342

Figure 3.1: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of
Art, October 26, 1970, Oakland Museum, Oakland, Calif.

343

Figure 3.2: Invitation from The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art,
October 26, 1970

344

Figure 3.3: Allan Fish (Tom Marioni), 6 x 6 x 6, June 5, 1971, Walnut Creek Civic Arts
Center, Walnut Creek, Calif.

Figure 3.4: Daniel Spoerri, Restaurant de la City Galerie, 1965, 53 in. x 53 in. x 13 ½ in.
345

Figure 3.5: Invitation to opening of Tom Marioni, My First Car, 1972

346

Figure 3.6: Tom Marioni, My First Car, 1972, De Saisset Museum, University of Santa Clara,
Santa Clara, Calif., screenshot of video taken at opening

Figure 3.7: Don Potts, My First Car, 1972
347

Figure 3.8: Panel from Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974,
7 panels, under glass, framed in brass, each 20 in. x 24 in.

348

Figure 3.9: Tom Marioni, Christmas Poem, 1972, lithograph on paper, 5 1/2 in. x 7 3/4 in. x
1/2 in.

349

Figure 3.10: Letter from Tom Marioni to Henry Hopkins regarding Christmas Poem, 1972
350

Figure 4.1: MOCA, 86 Third Street, interior

Figure 4.2: MOCA, 86 Third Street interior
351

Figure 4.3: MOCA, 75 Third Street, interior

Figure 4.4: MOCA, 75 Third Street, interior

352

Figure 4.5: 80 Langton Street, interior

Figure 4.6: 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street, interior, 1972
353

Figure 4.7: MOCA, 75 Third Street interior with painted remains of Darryl Sapien’s Tricycle:
Contemporary Recreation, March 14, 1975. (Chairs on ceiling are remains from installation by
Vito Acconci, Waiting for the End, 1975.)

Figure 4.8: David Ireland, The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the
Museum of Conceptual Art, 1976

354

Figure 4.9: Paul Hoffman, selection from The MOCA Suite, 1979

Figure 4.10: Installation shot of The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, 1979

355

Figure 4.11: Tom Marioni, Invitation to Café Society, 1976

Figure 4.12: Photograph of Café Society at Breen’s Bar, 1979

356

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