John Giorno

John Giorno (December 4, 1936 – October 11, 2019) was an American poet, performance artist, multimedia artist, and activist. A leading figure in the New York avant-garde, he was known for expanding the possibilities of poetry through sound, performance, recordings, telecommunications, and visual art. In 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting poetry through innovative media, and in 1969 launched Dial-A-Poem, a telephone-based poetry project that brought contemporary poetry to a mass audience.

Giorno was associated with artists and writers including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Brion Gysin. He was Warhol's lover and appeared in the artist's early experimental films, including Sleep (1964). His own work evolved from found-text poetry influenced by Pop art and cut-up techniques into a distinctive style characterized by repetition and spoken-word performance.

A practicing Tibetan Buddhist for nearly five decades, Giorno integrated Buddhist philosophy into his poetry and artistic practice. In 1984, he founded the AIDS Treatment Project through Giorno Poetry Systems to provide direct financial assistance to people living with AIDS. His work has been exhibited internationally and is regarded as influential in the development of performance poetry and multimedia art.

Early life and education John Giorno was born on December 4, 1936, in New York City, the only child of Amadeo and Nancy (Garbarino) Giorno. After college he briefly worked as a stockbroker before becoming involved with New York's emerging artistic and literary communities.

Career

Early artistic career and affairs During the early 1960s, Giorno became acquainted with artists and writers including Ted Berrigan, Jonas Mekas, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. Warhol featured Giorno in his experimental films John Washing (1963), a 4½-minute short, and the Sleep (1964), which depicts Giorno sleeping for more than five hours. Inspired by Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns, Giorno began incorporating techniques of appropriation and found text into his poetry. This culminated in The American Book of the Dead (1964), portions of which were later published in his first poetry collection, Poems (1967), which featured cover art by Rauschenberg.

In 1965, Giorno also met writer William S. Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin. Their experiments with cut-up and montage techniques profoundly influenced his work, and through Gysin he produced his first audio poems, "Subway Sound," which was presented at the Paris Museum of Modern Art Biennale in 1965. Giorno celebrated queer identity throughout his writing such as "Pornographic Poem" (1965).

Giorno Poetry Systems and Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments In 1965, believing that poetry lagged behind developments in visual art, music, and performance, Giorno founded Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting poetry to new audiences using innovative technologies.

In 1967, through a chance meeting at Rauschenberg's apartment on Lafayette street, Giorno met Bell Laboratories engineer Fred Waldhauer, who was developing an electronic device that converted sound into colored light. The two collaborated throughout the summer, with Waldhauer adapting the "light organ" to visualize Giorno's sound poems by translating pitch into color and volume into brightness. Giorno began incorporating the technology into performances and installations later that year.

In February 1968, he premiered the work in a performance of Purple Heart at the Architectural League of New York as part of the Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments (ESPE) series. The performance combined electronic sound compositions created with Robert Moog and the light organ, which analyzed the audio and displayed it through banks of colored lights.

Dial-A-Poem In 1968, inspired by a conversation with Burroughs, Giorno conceived Dial-A-Poem, an installation that allowed callers to hear recordings of contemporary poetry over the telephone.

The project attracted millions of callers and was included in the Museum of Modern Art's influential Dial-A-Poem exhibition in 1970. It became one of the earliest examples of telecommunications being used as an artistic medium.

From 1976 to 1979, Giorno also hosted The Poetry Experiment and presented his eight-part series Dial-A-Poem Poets, with Charles Ruas, on WBAI-Pacifica Radio.

Activism and Buddhism During the late 1960s, Giorno's poetry evolved from direct appropriation of newspaper articles to montages of disparate texts and eventually to his signature double-column poems, which employed repetition across and down the page to recreate the echoes and distortions of his live performances. Many of these works were collected in Balling Buddha (1970). His poetry also became increasingly political, and he participated in protests against the Vietnam War. During the war, Giorno and activist Abbie Hoffman contributed broadcasts to U.S. troops over Radio Hanoi, prompting Vice President Spiro Agnew to describe them as "would-be Hanoi Hannahs." His work also appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine 0 to 9.

In 1971, Giorno traveled to India, where he met Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhist philosophy became a recurring theme in his poetry, particularly beginning with Cancer in My Left Ball (1972).

Later career Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Giorno toured internationally with Burroughs, developing an amplified style of performance poetry that combined spoken word with electronic sound. During this period, Giorno was a prominent figure in New York's avant-garde, performing at venues including CBGB and Judson Church, where he combined rock music with spoken-word poetry. From 1982 to 1989, he led the band John Giorno, which adapted his poetry into experimental musical performances. In addition to his solo spoken-word performances, he also collaborated with Spanish rock musician Javier Colis on a series of music-and-poetry performances.

In 2008, Soft Skull Press published Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, the first career-spanning collection of Giorno's poetry, edited by Marcus Boon.

In 2010, Giorno had his first one-person gallery show in New York City, entitled Black Paintings and Drawings, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, wherein he exhibited works that chronicled the evolution of the poem painting.

In 2011, Giorno starred in one of two versions for the music video to R.E.M.'s final single "We All Go Back to Where We Belong".

From October 2015 to January 2016, the retrospective Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, conceived by Giorno's husband, artist Ugo Rondinone, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The exhibition featured Giorno's work alongside contributions by artists including Angela Bulloch, Anne Collier, Judith Eisler, Pierre Huyghe, Elizabeth Peyton, Michael Stipe, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Warhol. In 2017, it expanded to citywide retrospective presented across nine nonprofit venues and fifteen partnering institutions in Manhattan. Organized into eight thematic sections, it brought together more than 300 artworks, 600 audio recordings of Giorno's poetry, and approximately 15,000 archival photographs and documents, tracing his career while examining his connections to the Beat Generation, Tibetan Buddhism, AIDS activism, and the New York avant-garde. In his memoir, he wrote, "I wanted to thank William for being a great hero of gay sexual freedom. I wanted to reward him for his noble efforts. … I wanted to offer him bliss."

Giorno met Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone on March 11, 1998, after Rondinone attended one of his poetry performances and contacted him about a potential collaboration. The two instead began a romantic relationship, while also collaborating on a number of artistic projects over the following years. On February 10, 2017, Giorno married Rondinone, who was 26 years his junior.

Giorno lived at 255 East 74th Street, when a small carriage house was located on the property. He later lived and worked from three lofts at 222 Bowery on the Lower East Side.

Death Giorno died of a heart attack at age 82 on October 11, 2019, at his home in Lower Manhattan. He was survived by his husband Ugo Rondinone.

In 2020, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Giorno's posthumous memoir, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment.