In the videotape shown at New Langton Arts accompanying a set of retrieved and refashioned items from his Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA, the industrial loft that he used as a center for his art activities from 1970 to 1984), Tom Mariani says, “I intend to hang onto the past—that’s why I like San Francisco so much.” The past as Marioni displays it is both autobiographical and objective, an adumbrated nexus of erstwhile events and things that bear their own stamps of timeliness and formality Every form in its own way, he implies, is poignant. His care for the forms things take is monumental (in