Tom Marioni/Colony Club

by Alex Hetherington, 6 Jun 2008

Anne Colvin, Neil Mackintosh (of Tart, SF) and I went to Tom Marioni’s drinking party on Wednesday; it runs from 5pm through until about 8/9pm at Crownpoint Press on Howard, it’s his studio and gallery space I guess, with an area that looks like a small bar with soft red leather couches and seats at the bar. Tom is a kind of conceptual art superstar with connections to Scotland in the form of Richard Demarco, he has also shown internationally at major galleries, though he describes himself at ‘emerging’. Anyway looking forever like Quentin Crisp with DKNY glasses, he holds this drinking party every Wednesday since I believe 1959. At the bar we see numerous older generation San Francisco artists, a few very big names here; but I shan’t name drop, there’s too much of that already. Artists hand out cards/invites for upcoming shows in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, photographs are taken and everyone signs a guest book that logs your participation in what really amounts to get drunk and talking about art.

Anne was talking about her idea for her project at New Langton asking Tom to perhaps be a guest speaker at what she calls a private club in a kind of update to The Colony Room in the 1960s and 70s. I think it’s a great idea; she also discussed a re-enactment of Marioni’s Piss Piece (and I immediately thought of Jonathan Monk, Helen Chadwick); here he pisses into a large copper container from a high ladder: “it’s all about the acoustics” he explains.

I bring a forty dollar bottle of red wine. Everyone brings booze, and we listen to Jazz. An older man, who looks like Matisse in denims, sits guzzling a beer; he apparently winters in Edinburgh having studied there in the 1950s. Tom and a video artist talk about their time, years ago, in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Tom also talks about the time he, according to Laurie Anderson, spent on a desert island; is this the liquor talking too?

Eventually we also talk to Paul, a writer in his sixties, a kind of academic on pop culture and postmodernism, stuff; he illuminates us with his recent research project: Jennifer, a glamour model from LA, who also uses performance art in her “work”. I dunno, the air reeks of mid-life crisis. I liked the man who talked about Duchamp being a chess player and his question of the day: about winning and losing, and his mail art while running a construction business, he also talks at length about the art market, value of art pieces, art tax breaks etc. A lot about money in a country with very little subsidy. He asks me about my work and where I have shown; he thinks I am cool. He has a lovely friendly face, very open and delightful. This is good company. And I think that’s what this is all about.

Anyway back at Falkirk perhaps we can set this kind of thing up too, boozing with your elders.