For 55 Years, Tom Marioni Has Pursued the Art of ‘Drinking Beer With Friends’

Outside of Tom Marioni’s studio on Howard Street, directly facing the great white side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s cruise-ship-like extension, I find the artist and a few friends smoking cigars. After some niceties, we head inside to begin Marioni’s long-running conceptual piece The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, which has taken place on Wednesdays in San Francisco since 1970.

As an artist and curator, Tom Marioni, 87, is perhaps best known for starting the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, which, in his own words, was created “as an excuse to party.” In 1970, it was the first alternative art space (probably) in the country.

His inaugural show was Sound Sculpture As, a concert of actions by sculptors that included Paul Kos’ now-famous The Sound of Ice Melting. He also invited a young Chris Burden to do his first-ever performance piece at MOCA, an “undercover hippie” act in which the artist had a star pattern stabbed into his chest, shaved his head, then donned a fresh business suit. MOCA closed in 1984.

Today, in Marioni’s studio, there’s an easy formality to the social assembly. Etiquette is paired with hands-on hosting. I’m instructed on where to leave my coat and I watch the regulars assume their positions on purple-topped bar stools running along a handmade, curved bar. Above the bar are seven framed photographs of men I know I’m supposed to recognize.

I sit down at one of the curved brown leather bar booths, which I learn were purchased from a Third Street bar called Breen’s, now gone. Marioni tells me he used to host the event there; NEA funding, he says, meant the beer was free.

“Breen’s had the longest bar in San Francisco,” Marioni tells me. “It served German food, with a steam table offering sauerbraten every Wednesday.” When Breen’s closed in 1979, he moved the piece next door to the also now-gone Jerry and Johnnie’s and printed credit cards for free beer on meeting days.

“I’m a born-again conceptual artist,” Marioni says with a smile while I accept my glass of Pacifico. The sentence spins off like a pick-up line. During the gathering, it is impossible to tell how many times the stories being traded across the table have been told.

For the next three hours, I am audience to the lost art of holding court. I become vaguely concerned while realizing how rarely I actually see people take the formalities of social pleasantries seriously. Structure is required for good conversation and the charming group of seven or so people gathered around the bar really understand this.

This is illustrated, in part, by several attendees who make up elegant glasses of water, each mixed then served with precisely three ice cubes, gingerly administered with tongs. The median age in the room must be 85, so one imagines there’s a limit on day drinking.

The act of drinking with friends is approached vivaciously. I enjoy myself entirely as gossip, light philosophy, art polemics, and the schedules of various opera houses across North America are tossed around the room.

“Do you remember that woman’s name,” Marioni queries, “I was handcuffed to her for three days?”

“Oh! You mean the nun!” Dan Max excitedly recalls.

“What was her name?”

“I can’t say.”

Someone walks in, catches up quickly, and has the answer: they’re talking about Linda Montano. We speak briefly of the New York artist Tehching Hsieh, to whom the Linda in question was tied to for a full year in the psychologically wounding endurance performance Rope Piece, before the conversation turns once again.

At one point Marioni picks up an invitation to his Jan. 12 event at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, tied to his 2024 book Social Art and then bends down, sweeping a few crumbs onto it with a hand brush, before flicking them off and then extending the card to me.

Lydi Titcomb, an art collector tactfully bartending (this is in accordance with a strict “no art collectors except in disguise” rule posted behind the bar), has arrived from San Francisco’s mayoral inauguration.

“It was wonderful,” she preens, in an elegant fitted cap and long-stranded necklace. “He invited everyone in for bagels and fresh cream cheese.” The decorum felt performative, pleasant. I couldn’t quite tell if it was sincere or ironic. I thought of Tippi Hedren in the pet store scene that opens Hitchcock’s The Birds.

What is conceptual art, anyway? It has a sort of “if you have to ask, it’s already too late” feeling. I asked every so often anyway. Nothing seemed to count.

Dan Max, an artist who’s been attending these meetings since the ’70s, jumps in to share a $100 dollar gift card presented to him by his local coffee shop for being “the best customer.” We admire the lamination. Such a card, and its hand-scrawled note of gratitude, could find its way into the framed objects on the wall, which included a matcha whisk carefully paired with a shaving brush and a collection of unusual glass beakers.

Anything considered with sensitivity, intention or a bit of humor might become a work of art.

The youngest attendee, and the latest person to be issued a “bartender diploma” by Marioni is the artist Alberto Cuadros, who alongside Laura Black and MP Knowlton runs Society of Art Los Angeles (SALA). Cuadros and Black are in San Francisco to broaden their organization’s scope, in part by drinking beer with Marioni.

Many of those gathered tell me they came to San Francisco in the ’70s to have a beer with Tom Marioni. If you were interested in conceptual art, it was the place to be. Cuadros, who hadn’t yet gone to art school when he started attending 10 years ago, echoes the sentiment.

“What I appreciate most is the link between what’s upcoming and what existed before,” Cuadros says of his first visits to Marioni’s weekly gatherings. “I would get these epic educations from 5:00 to 8:00 and then burst out to Howard Street, and feel like I was tapping into this epic portal to San Francisco.”

Thinking about Marioni’s project and how they too might imbue everyday life with art, Cuadros and Black have started centering their programming around the concept of a living archive. The organization’s idea is that it’s possible to bridge the past and the present through collaboration.

They place an emphasis on ongoing contributions and reinterpretations, Black says, “often involving diverse voices from the community.” Following Marioni’s lead, they hope to open a space downtown that invites people to engage with a non-esoteric and immediate setting for social art. The “art bar” (Cuadros has made several), is a guiding model.

Continuity is rare. The recent fires in California remind me of how often we imagine permanence, when really, we’ve built that idea on unstable structures. There have been so many declarations of the Bay Area’s stagnation, but what isn’t moving towards decay?

The fact that Tom Marioni has for 55 years been hosting a more-or-less weekly social gathering for friends to drink beer together excites me. A living archive is constituted by presence. It can happen when we gather; it is contained by repeated stories, by conversations, by talking with a friend over a beer.