The Beloved New York Artist, Beat Poet, and Warhol Film Star John Giorno Has Died

The poet and text artist John Giorno, who was the silent
protagonist 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 the late, bravura
performances of his own poems, Giorno’s legendary status in the New
York art world is assured.

Giorno, who has died on October 11 at age 82, was filmed in 2006
performing a poem he had written on his 70th birthday. Behind the
camera was his husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The poem,
called THANX 4 NOTHING, dealt with the
death of friends and lovers, as well as sex, betrayal, and Giorno’s
recurring periods of depression. He made often dark subject matter
beguilingly life-affirming. Rondinone’s carefully
choreographed, multi-screen installation behind his partner kept
pace with Giorno’s theatrical delivery and his rhetorical twists
and turns, 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.
But reading Allen Ginsberg’s beat classic Howl in
1956 and meeting Warhol in 1962 changed all that. Giorno’s artistic
and romantic relationship with Warhol resulted in the
flim Sleep, a silent love letter that runs for
more than five hours. However, Giorno was always much more than one
of Warhol’s good-looking muses.

Giorno went on to push beat poetry into a new visual and
high-tech direction. He created verbal collages based on
appropriated texts, which evolved further thanks to friendship with
the artist Robert Rauschenberg. Giorno’s pioneering work—he said he
was trying to bring poetry up to speed with avant-garde visual
art—led to the establishment of the 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 providing compassion, it
also offered practical help and 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, an
expansive 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 that celebrated 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.” Reflecting on the the subdued
watercolor from 2019, which would be one of his last artworks,
Westerwater added: “I think of this sculpture as an ode to his
boundless creativity and zest for life.”

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Film Star John Giorno Has Died appeared first on artnet
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