Tom Marioni at Margarete Roeder - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2000 by Sarah Valdez

Tom Marioni has been an unflagging proponent of the Conceptual art movement since the late '60s. He has under his belt such acts as tossing pieces of string into the air to make "One Second Sculptures" (1969), declaring drinking beer with friends to be the "highest form of art" (1970) and asking the DeSaisset Art Museum in Santa Clara, Calif., to purchase a car for him with the allotted exhibition budget (1972). His latest show at Margarete Roeder included mostly works from 1999 and 2000, as well as a smattering from the '70s and '80s.

On the tangible side, movement-related drawings have been a creative mainstay for Marioni, and there were several in this show. Flying with Friends (1999) is the product of a number of people, including the artist, having run around a room, leaping to make horizontally oriented, curved lines with multicolored pencils on white paper attached to the walls. The beautifully sparse, gestural marks of this piece have an organic elegance, and evoke the energetic movement that went into making them. Other such pencil works (all from 2000) are of vertical, squiggly multicolored lines drawn on top of one another, down the center of white paper, like the path of a trickle of water. Marioni considers making them a form of meditation.

Other abstract pieces include Process Print (1970), which Marioni made by running pieces of paper through an offset lithograph machine set up with brown ink and no image. The papers are hung sequentially in the order they went through the machine (with some omitted so that the sequence would fit the gallery wall), forming a friezelike band both natural and mathematical-looking in its display of color in gradually diminishing amounts.

Marioni has long believed in the sonic potential of sculpture, and has made much work representing birds and flight. These two interests are expressed in a peevish manner in Violin Bird (1972)--which is an actual violin dangling from the ceiling with a winglike piece of paper hanging over its bowed side. A light was trained on the creation so that it cast a bird-shaped shadow on the wall. See What I'm Saying/Sound of Flight (1972-85) expresses the aviary esthetic more eloquently. The piece is the result of a performance in which Marioni attempted to aurally induce a trance in himself and his audience. On view was a light-colored piece of beige sandpaper stained with airy, gray arcs from the artist's repeated drumming with silver drum brushes. The simplicity of these traces speaks volumes--and points to the limitlessness summoned up by the idea, and not the fact, of flying.