Selected History: 1970-1984

1970 Films by Sculptors (March) Sound Sculpture As (April)

Arlo Acton, Allan Fish, Terry Fox, Paul Kos, Jim Melchert, Jim McCready

Body Works, video exhibition, Breen’s Bar downstairs

Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Dennis Oppenheim, William Wegman, Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman

19716 Comedy Sonatas at MOCAChris Burden, Secret Hippie MOCA FM, 25 one-minute audio works KPFA radio

1972Dennis Oppenheim, Violations, photo projectNotes and Scores for Sounds, Mills College, Oakland, CAThe San Francisco Performance, Newport Harbor Art MuseumBay Area Roach Clip Show, San Geronimo Art Center

1973Free Beer every WednesdayChris Burden, Howard Fried, Paul CottonJoseph Beuys, 12-hour video lecture, Edinburgh, Scotland 4 Artists/ComposersAll Night Sculptures

John Woodall, Terry Fox, Stephen Laub, Frank Youmans, Barbara Smith, Joel Glassman, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Bonnie Sherk

Dan Graham, film installationBenefit BuffetLinda Montano Handcuffed to Tom Marioni for 3 Days Dennis Oppenheim, installations

1974Actions by Sculptors for the Home Audience, Broadcast on KQED TV San FranciscoMOCA Ensemble, concertChinese Youth Alternative, installation

1975Second GenerationVito Acconci, installation/performance 1976The Restoration of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Main Gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art by David Ireland Odalisque, Dianne Blell A Tight 13 Minutes, 13 one-minute video works in Breens Bar

1977Café Society, every Wednesday in the saloon of MOCA, Breens Café Open for Inspection, one-day public viewing of the MOCA space

1978Sound Piece, Robert BarryThe Next Governor Lowell Darling, San Francisco headquarters, Breens Bar 1979The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art A Situation, Masashi Matsumoto

1980Tony Labat, Jose Maria Bustos, installations/performances 1981Elegant Miniatures from San Francisco, exhibited in San Francisco and Kyoto

www.tommarioni.com

Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) 1970–1984Tom Marioni

Excerpted from Beer, Art and Philosophy, a memoir by Tom Marioni. Published by Crown Point Press, 2004

Earlier that year, in March, I had started my own museum as an excuse for a party. I was still curator of the Richmond Art Center, but I wanted to do more radical things than I could do at Richmond. I rented a large room at 86 Third Street, south of Market Street in San Francisco. The Museum of Conceptual Art began at the start of a new decade, 1970, and continued until 1984. All the things that happened there in the first few years were actions by sculptors. I even did a show called Actions by Sculptors for the Home Audience. It was made for KQED-TV, a PBS station, in 1974.

There were very few painters in the Conceptual era; painting was not part of the avant-garde anymore. You evolve from painting to sculpture; that’s how I saw it in the `70s. My museum was for action art, actions by sculptors, and site-specific installations. The first publicly announced show was called Sound Sculpture As. Maybe it was the first Sound Art show anywhere. A movement called Sound Art came into being later, but it did not exist in 1970. Sound was used by the Fluxus artists in the 1960s, but their sound performances were concerts. Fluxus was an irreverent international group, like the Dada artists of the 2̀0s, with more poets and musicians than visual artists. John Cage influenced Fluxus. He was a composer, and what he did was music, not sound art, because his intent was music. Music has an organisation based on a time signature. If somebody hammers a nail into a piece of wood, and if it’s in a music context, it could be music. But if it’s done by a sculptor to demonstrate the physics or materiality of sound, then it’s Sound Art. In Sound Art, the sound is a sculpture material.

I invited nine sculptors to make sound works for my show, which took place on April 10, 1970. Each artist produced sounds by manipulating a material. Terry Fox hit a bowl of water against the floor and made a sound like bong. Paul Kos trained eight boom microphones at two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice. People listened, trying to hear the inaudible sound of the ice melting. Mel Henderson fired a thirty-caliber rifle in the room, which had about a hundred people in it. Jim Melchert, who was out of town, gave instructions to one of his students, Jim Pomeroy, to perform his work. Pomeroy went to Breen’s Bar and telephoned my space. He had been instructed to let the phone ring fifteen times, then hang up, then put another nickel in and do it again for fifteen rings. The room was filled with people listening to the telephone ring thirty times. That was a good piece.

My alter ego, Allan Fish was one of the nine artists in the show. Again, as in Richmond, the artist sent instructions for the curator to perform the work. I was announcing all the artists’ performances as they occurred, and I announced I would be performing Allan Fish’s piece for him. I climbed to the top of a stepladder and, with my back to the audience, peed into a big galvanised tub. As the water level went up, the sound level went down. It demonstrated a principle of physics. Since my back was to the audience, it was clear that this was not about exposing myself. It was funny and shocking, but mostly funny.

Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) was founded in a room above Breens Bar, San Francisco. An image of the bar appears on the front cover of this guide.