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

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 art-making 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 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.