Tom Marioni Art

Art Brokerage: Artist Tom Marioni was born in 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy from 1955-59. In 1969, as an art action, Tom Marioni released a tightly coiled metal tape measure into the air. The instrument started out as a circle, then opened up and created a loud sound as it made a drawing in space, and finally fell to the ground as a line. The work was titled One Second Sculpture, and it demonstrated several principles of Conceptual Art. This type of art was new at the time but has now become a major influence on artists and on our society. A principle demonstrated by “One Second Sculpture” is that duration can be an element in art. Another is that the lasting form of an artwork is created and later re-created in the viewer’s mind. And a third principle is that elements other than the visual (in this case, sound) may be part of the form of an artwork.