Vision: Word of Mouth

[Various Artists]

Vision: Word of Mouth

Oakland, USA: Crown Point Press, 1980

Boxed set of 3 12” vinyl records

Edition of 1000

VISION was a journal of contemporary art published by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press irregularly between 1975 through 1982, which was edited and curated by Tom Marioni under the auspices of his “Museum of Conceptual Art (MoCA)”. The format typically took the shape of a magazine, with Issue #5 being a box of photographs and #4 being a boxed set of vinyl records. 

For this project twelve artists from California, New York and Europe were each invited to prepare a twelve minute talk on any subject. The artists included: Marioni, Robert Kushner, Marina Abramovic & Ulay, John Cage, Daniel Buren, Joan Jonas, Bryan Hunt, Chris Burden, William T. Wiley, Brice Marden, Pat Steir and Laurie Anderson.

From the liner note: "This meeting took place on Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands in the Pacific ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan, a few degrees above the equator north of Australia. Thirty-seven people met together over a period of a week in January 1980. Prepared talks by the twelve participating artists were given in the evenings before and after dinner. The days were spent exploring."

The box set includes a 4 page booklet, illustrated with black and white photographic portraits of the artists.

"In 1980, as part of a project called Word of Mouth, I was invited, along with eleven other artists, to go to Ponape, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. The idea was that we'd sit around talking for a few days and that the conversations would be made into a talking record.

The first night we were all really jet-lagged. But as soon as we sat down the organizers set up all these mics and switched on thousand-watt light bulbs, and we tried our best to seem as intelligent as possible.

Television had just come to Ponape a week before we arrived, and there was a strong excitement around the island, as people crowded around the few sets.

Then the day after we arrived, in a bizarre replay of the first TV show ever broadcast to Ponape, prisoners escaped from a jail, broke into the radio station and murdered the DJ. Then they went off on a rampage through the jungle armed with lawnmower blades. In all, four people were murdered in cold blood.

Detectives, flown in from Guam to investigate, swarmed everywhere. At night we stayed around in our cottages listening out into the jungle.

Finally the local chief decided to hold a ceremony for the murder victims. The artist Marina Abramović and I went, as representatives of our group, to film it.

The ceremony was held in a large thatched lean-to, and most of the ceremony involved cooking beans in pits and brewing a dark drink from roots. The smell was overwhelming. Dogs careened around barking, and everybody seemed to be having a fairly good time, as funerals go.

After a few hours, Marina and I were presented to the chief, who was sitting on a raised platform above the pits. We'd been told we couldn't turn our backs on the chief at any time, or ever be higher than he was. So we scrambled up onto the platform with our film equipment and sort of duck-waddled up backwards to the chief.

As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn't advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn't speak unless spoken to, I wasn't able to inform him that he wasn't going to get twelve pictures, but only one, very, very complicated one.

After a couple more hours, the chief lifted his hand and there was absolute silence.

All the dogs had suddenly stopped barking. We looked around and saw the dogs. All their throats had been simultaneously cut, and their bodies, still breathing, pierced with rods, were turning on the spits. The chief insisted we join in the meal, but Marina had turned green, and I asked if we could just have ours to go. They carefully wrapped the dogs in leaves and we carried their bodies away.”

- Laurie Anderson

Crown Point Press Holiday Sale

Beginning today and continuing until December 8th, Crown Point Press is offering discounts on both printmaking supplies and artists books & monographs. Books by or about John Cage, Tom Marioni, Ed Ruscha, Amy Sillman and others are 20% off when you use the code HOLIDAYBOOKS on the checkout page.

Visit the store here, for details.

Crown Point Press

Crown Point Press opened in 1962, with a mandate to "use traditional printmaking techniques for new art ideas”. Founded by printmaker Kathan Brown, it began in a storefront in Richmond California, moved to a basement in Berkeley, spent a few years in Oakland and in 1990 relocated to the building where they currently reside, at 20 Hawthorne Street in San Francisco.

Crown Point typically invites four or five artists a year to produce works in their large studio, assisted by their master printer, which are then sold in the adjacent gallery. Over a hundred international artists have participated in the program, including Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Chuck Close, Richard Diebenkorn,  Anish Kapoor, Sol Lewitt, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha (the subject of their current exhibition). John Cage, who had never worked with etching before, decided to produce prints using "earth, air, fire, and water”.

"It seems like the artists have selected us more than we selected them. I mean, it isn’t really up to us. I think that we got something going and one artist will tell another and they really appreciate what we did with somebody else and then the person says, “Oh well, I think so and so would like to come.” It’s kind of a snowball thing,” Brown told Katrina Traywick in 2011.

Valerie Wade, who showed us around, began at the press in 1988 as a sales representative. In 1993, she became Gallery Director, and in 2006 assumed her current position as director, overseeing day to day operation of the press and sharing the management of artist projects with Brown.

The store features a small selection of catalogues, artists’ books, and artists’ writings, with several titles from artist Tom Marioni, who has been married to Brown since 1983.

Marioni was the editor of the art journal Vision, which the press published in the mid-seventies. The store offers copies of the periodical, with issues two through five available. Vision #4 is a 3 LP box set record titled Word of Mouth, which features Cage, Burden, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Brice Marden, Joan Jonas, Daniel Buren, and others. It’s available for $75 US. Vision #5, from 1982, is a boxed set of photographs Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Christo, John Cage, Joan Jonas, Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle, Richard Long, and Dorothea Rockburne. It is available for $50 US. Both of these prices are well below secondary market pricing.

The store also stocked issues of View: A Series of Interviews with Contemporary Artists, including John Baldessari, Iain Baxter, Terry Fox, Al Held, Judy Pfaff and several others. They were priced at $5.00 US.

For more information, or to order online, visit the Crown Point Press website, here.

Tom Marioni | Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir

Tom Marioni
Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir
San Francisco, USA: Crown Point Press, 2003
223 pp., 8.5 x 6.5", softcover


From an amazon review by Marioni's son:

The Act of Drinking Beer with my Dad is the Highest Form of Art September 10, 2007
By Reno Marioni
Format:Paperback
As a young kid, I grew up in my dad's studio. I remember various refrigerators with the "FREE BEER" sign on them and his weekly wednesday gathering of friends drinking beer in his studio or at the old San Francisco Breen's Bar on his turf corner at 3rd and Mission. Years later, I would see his refrigerator and a wall of empty anchor steam beer bottles lined up at the SFMOMA and would bring a humorous smile to my face--thinking my dad is the only person I know who could transform beer drinking into art--beer art. Although I am biased, I love my dad's work. There is always a puzzle, a natural beauty and a bit of humor in every one of his works.

My father's book takes a look at the development and history of conceptual art in the 1960's until now through his eyes and his experiences. Many of his ideas and art were very advanced for his time and are very relevant today. If you want to get another perspective on conceptual art, read my dad's book....and have a nice cold beer ready.

disclaimer: my dad did not ask me to write this :-)