NARRATOR: 

Tom Marioni is a pioneering conceptual artist and a mainstay of the Bay Area arts community. A sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker, Marioni is perhaps most widely known for his weekly beer salons, in which invited artists and guests come to the artist’s studio and other venues to meet, drink beer, and converse. The first salon took place at the Oakland Museum in 1970. In 1979, SFMOMA displayed– and later acquired into its collection– FREE BEER, an installation of debris from Marioni’s gathering.  

Here’s Marioni recalling the first meeting of the salon series he’s titled The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. 

TOM MARIONI:  

Somebody asked me what my philosophy was, ‘cause I wrote this book Beer, Art and Philosophy. And I said, “The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art.” That’s my philosophy, and I guess that’s my content, too. That the beer is an aid to communication. In the seventies, I called it Café Society—then my—my idea of café society was like drunken parties where ideas were born. Like that. 

Well, I’m a romantic, and I wanted to try to recreate the kind of Paris scene in the nineteenth— early twentieth century. 

So in the Oakland Museum, I invited sixteen friends and we came there and we had the experience of the beer, and then the debris was left on exhibit. But the point in— in the first time in the Oakland Museum was that the— the debris from the— from the beer party was like evidence for— from a crime. Like that. So people could— would come to the museum and they would see that and they’d right away know what happened there. There was a beer party and there was debris everywhere, you know? Empty— empties and everything. 

Like Duchamp said, the public interprets the work and completes the work, because the artist makes 50% of the work, and then by the public completing, interpreting it and understanding it, they complete the work.  

People have said that they didn’t know that when they were drinking beer with their friends, they were actually performing my work.