The Beloved New York Artist, Beat Poet, and Warhol’s Sleeper, John Giorno Has Died

The poet and text artist John Giorno, who was the silent star of
Andy Warhol’s epic, “anti-film” Sleep, was always the
star of his own show. Be it via a dial-up poetry service in the
late 1960s, or late, bravura performances of his own poetry,
Giorno’s legendary status in the New York art world is assured.

Giorno, who has died aged 82, was filmed in 2006 performing a
poem he wrote on his 70th birthday. Behind the camera was his
husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The poem THANX 4
NOTHING dealt with the death of friends and lovers,
sex, betrayal, and Giorno’s periods of depression. He made the
often dark subject matter beguilingly life affirming.
Rondinone’s carefully choreographed, multi-screen installation
kept pace with Giorno’s theatrical delivery, the poem’s rhetorical
twists and turns, as well as immortalizing his charismatic stage
presence.

Born in 1936 in New York, Giorno studied at the city’s Columbia
University before briefly, and improbably, becoming a stockbroker.
Reading Allen Ginsburg’s beat classic Howl in 1956,
and meeting Warhol in 1962, changed all that. Giorno’s artistic and
romantic relationship with Warhol resulted in Sleep,
a silent love letter on film that runs for more than five
hours. But Giorno was always much more than one of Warhol’s good
looking muses.

Giorno took beat poetry into a new direction. He created verbal
collages based on appropriated texts, which took a high-tech turn
thanks in part to his friendship with the artist Robert
Rauschenberg. It led to Giorno’s groundbreaking nonprofit, Giorno
Poetry Systems, and its 1967 Dial-a-Poem project. Subscribers were
able to listen for free to recordings of poems at the end of a
telephone by fellow poets and artists, such as Patti Smith,
William S. Burroughs, and John Cage among others.

Giorno will also be remembered as a pioneering and courageous
gay rights activists who in 1984 turned his poetry nonprofit into
the AIDS Treatment Project. As well as compassion, it provided
practical help, sometimes cash, to men who were often treated as
social outcasts in their dying days.

A sprawling retrospective in 2015 curated by Rondinone called “I
John
Giorno” underlined the poet’s achievements as a visual artist in
his own right. Opening at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a sprawling
version of the solo show came to New York in 2017, where it spread
across 13 venues. The show featured Giorno’s paintings, sound
installations, drawings, and videos, and, of course, Rondinone’s
installation based on Giorno reading of THANX 4
NOTHING.

The curator and director of New York’s Drawing Center, Laura
Hoptman, wrote that it was an astonishing gesture on Giorno’s part
to give his life’s work to his partner to be material for his own
art. Perhaps only “an artwork as big as Manhattan” could do justice
to Giorno’s gift, she said.

Last month, Giorno installed new work in his solo show “Do the
Undone” at Sperone Westwater in New York. In a statement, his
friend and the gallery’s co-founder Angela Westwater said: “When
installing his last sculpture, NOW AT THE DAWN OF MY LIFE,
John explained to me that he wanted the space to be meditative and
ruminative, but not somber.” She added: “I think of this sculpture
as an ode to his boundless creativity and zest for life.”

The post The Beloved New York Artist, Beat Poet, and
Warhol’s Sleeper, John Giorno Has Died appeared first on
artnet News.