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Tom Marioni at Yerba Buena Center
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Mark Van Proyen
This very selective survey of the work of Bay Area conceptual artist Tom Marioni was first and foremost an exercise in balanced understatement. Titled "The Golden Mean," the show comprised three distinct components that were carefully orchestrated by the artist to address the tension between the functions of the gallery as a site of contemplation and as a site of social interaction.
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The first component consisted of two series of modestly scaled colored pencil drawings on tinted paper, one titled "11 Line Drawings" (1998) and the other "7 Line Drawings" (2002). Like recordings of the most subtle seismic shifts, all had been generated by making repeated marks according to basic prescribed situations (such as determining how far the artist might be able to reach while in a specific sitting position). Each drawing is the residue of a ritualized graphic process that seems close in spirit to Tai Chi movements--part meditation and part martial art.
Simplicity and restraint earmarked an adjacent room containing a stage (it hosted a musical performance by The Buddhist Band--Ishan Clemenco, Bill Morrison, Yoshi Wada, William T. Wiley and Marioni--several weeks after the opening of the exhibition) along with two sculptural works, each a conjugation of three irregular cubes whose dimensions and incremental relationships were keyed to the ratio of the golden mean. The larger, The Temple of Geometry (2004), is made of white-painted Sheetrock set upon an aluminum frame and at first glance seemed like an unobtrusive feature of the building's own architecture. By contrast, the smaller work, a table-sized piece titled Musical Instrument that Cannot be Played (2004), is coated with several layers of elegant black lacquer.
The third element offered a convivial alternative to the others. Free Beer took the form of a bar where beer was provided gratis at appointed hours, always drawing a crowd similar to those pictured on a nearby flat-screen video monitor showing other such parties held at the artist's studio. This was the most recent manifestation of a project in social sculpture that Marioni has executed many times around the world (originally at the Oakland Museum in 1970) called "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art." In this most recent iteration, a simple woodblock print of the Greek character Pi (1998), developed from a drawing for which the artist used a large feather dipped in ink, hung above the bar. For the Zen-inclined Marioni the pi symbol is laced with deep significance, not only because it indicates the indivisible factor that can resolve the dialectic between straight and curved lines, but also because it bears a striking resemblance to the Hey character of the Hebrew alphabet, which midrashic tradition associates with the principle of free will.
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