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Vision #4 - Word of Mouth (1980)



  1. Tom Marioni - A History of the Museum of Conceptual Art
  2. Robert Kushner - On Decoration
  3. Marina Abramovic/Ulay
  4. John Cage - From "Diary"
  5. Daniel Buren - Communication No. 2
  6. Joan Jonas - Double Lunar Dogs
  7. Bryan Hunt - Space Colonization
  8. Chris Burden - Glider Lecture
  9. William T. Wiley - What Isn't Masked for Something Else
  10. Brice Marden - Notes on Process
  11. Pat Steir - Once A Man Was Walking
  12. Laurie Anderson


VISION #4 Word of Mouth 1980

Prepared talks by 12 artists recorded on Ponape, an island in the Pacific Ocean

Vision is an art journal edited and curated by Tom Marioni of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) and published and produced by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press. Number 1, California, 1975; number 2, Eastern Europe, 1976; and number 3, New York, 1976, are journals with articles and with artists' works designed to be produced as pages in a magazine. For number 4, this issue, artists were given time on a phonograph record rather than pages in a magazine. The phonograph records were produced with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Museum of Conceptual Art. Twelve artists from California, New York and Europe were each invited to prepare a twelve minute talk on any subject. The trip to the island of Ponape was arranged and paid for by Crown Point Press, publishers of fine art etchings and of this journal. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of Stanley and Elise Grinstein, David and Mary Robinson, Rena Bransten, Qustin Conkey, Robert Orton and Eddie Orton. We would like to thank, also, Robert Shumaker for recording the talks and Bob and Patti Arthur of the Village Hotel, Ponape, for their hospitality.

Tom Marioni: 12 minutes, because of the restrictions of time on an LP record, so 2 on one side, 3 records, 12 people. And I had invited Joan Jonas, and she said that she couldn’t go because she was planning on doing a performance in the Guggenheim Museum in 1980. So I invited Laurie Anderson in her place, and Laurie Anderson wasn’t so big then, she was up and coming. The same with Marina Abramovic, she was unknown really at that time. Anyway, so then Laurie Anderson accepted right away and then Joan Jonas called back, and said that she had changed the date on the Guggenheim so that she could go. So there was like maybe too many performance artists on that thing, because it was Brice Marden and a few painters, but there were maybe too many performance artists, because of Joan Jonas coming back again.

Stephen Perkins: And Cage, he was in from the start?

TM: Yeah, oh yeah. I had invited two or three others, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, and they couldn’t do it.

SP: Very interesting project, must have been a very fascinating time just hanging out and seeing how the people worked together, or didn’t.

TM: It was 3 camps: there were the Europeans, the New Yorkers and the Californians. At first we were all equal, but then it kind of started to break down into those groups, that was interesting.