John Giorno

The American poet and performance artist John Giorno (1936-2019) was born and lived in New York. He attended James Madison High School, where he was incredibly inspired by his English teachers. After graduating from Columbia University in 1958, he briefly worked as a stockbroker before entering into the world of arts.

Giorno was always fascinated and influenced by poetry and art, and his work combines the two, alongside music, visual arts and performance. His career was marked by frequent collaborations with lovers, friends and acquaintances; both artists and poets. He was the subject of Andy Warhols 1963 film 'Sleep', and worked with William S Burroughs and Robert Rauschenberg.

Giorno was renowned for revolutionising poetry, transforming it for the modern age using art, music, modern media and performance. His use of multimedia allowed him to bring experimental poetry to wider audiences, and push the boundaries of the very definition of poetry itself at the time. He founded the non-profit Giorno Poetry Systems in 1965 to promote his work and that of his peers, particularly focusing on experimental poetry and sound. In 1967 he created Dial-A-Poem, a line to various free recordings of poems by writers such as Alan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Frank O'Hara. Included in the 'Information' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2012, it is still reachable today.

Amongst his various techniques were recording sounds from the New York subway, copying newspaper text and rearranging it (found poetry), and creating double column poems. He is considered to be the inventor of Performance Poetry, and was a huge influence on Poetry Slam, still popular today. His 'Poem Paintings' contain phrases from his poems, transformed into artworks and colourful text paintings, such as the silkscreen and installation 'Thanx 4 Nothing'. His silkscreens show both his Buddhist faith and a Pop sensibility. He celebrated queer sexuality in his work, contrary to his contemporaries and cultural constraints at the time: an example of this is his 1964 'Pornographic Poem' piece, which was later made into a record. He also founded an AIDS charity in 1984.

Giorno exhibited his multimedia alongside Warhol in the 1960s, and performed across the world. Notable exhibitions include "You Got to Burn to Shine" at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2019); " Artists and Poets ", Secession, Vienna (2015); and “Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language," at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012). His works are part of collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.

He was the subject of a major retrospective, entitled 'I Love John Giorno' by his partner Ugo Rondinone, held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015/6.