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John Giorno with Dial-A-Poem phones, New York, 1970. © Giorno Poetry Systems Institute. Photo: Gianfranco Mantegna
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John Giorno: The Performative Word is the first monograph dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno (1936–2019) and accompanies a retrospective exhibition curated by Lorenzo Balbi and presented at the MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, part of Settore Musei Civici of the Comune di Bologna.
Emerging from the New York downtown scene of the 1960s, Giorno developed a singular artistic voice at the crossroads of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism over the course of more than six decades. By bringing the written word off the page and into performance, technology, and visual art, Giorno consistently challenged disciplinary boundaries and advanced a radical vision of language as central to human expression. Though often positioned at the margins of multiple downtown scenes—the Beats, Andy Warhol’s Factory, punk music, queer counterculture, anti-war activism—he was in fact an influential presence within all of them, operating as a conduit between coexisting cultural communities. His collaborators included Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.
This publication, edited by Lorenzo Balbi, Anthony Huberman, and Bonnie Whitehouse, introduces some of the many ways Giorno wove poetry into all aspects of daily life—by putting words on the wall, on the performance stage, on LP vinyl records, or on the telephone, in the context of the iconic Dial-A-Poem, one of his most celebrated works. A wide range of archival documents, images, and ephemera contributes to an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator, and friend, further illuminated by essays by Lorenzo Balbi, Kyle Dacuyan, Nicola Ricciardi, Ugo Rondinone, Laura Hoptman, and Drew Sawyer.
Below you can read an excerpt from the essay by Nicola Ricciardi featured in the publication.
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John Giorno, Raspberry/Pornographic Poem (The Intravenous Mind; LP 501), 1967. © Giorno Poetry Systems Institute
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The Book of John
by Nicola Ricciardi
There is a short story by science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury in which the protagonist, convinced he is standing before the elderly Picasso drawing shapes in the sand on a deserted beach, wonders what to do. “Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a block of that all-too-crumbling sand?” he asks himself. “Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster of Paris to cast a mold of some small fragile part of these?”[1] Ultimately, he ends up going back to his hotel, letting the tide wash the marks away, erasing his experience, which will remain the exclusive pleasure of his eye and his memory.
We may define the feeling that drives those who work in an archive as diametrically the opposite: to retain, protect, and allow those who come after them to continue having access to those marks, to observe them, contextualize them, and even understand them better than s/he can at that moment. While in Bradbury’s story, the drawing in the sand belongs only to those who have seen it, in the archive, every trace begs to be restored, reworked, put back into circulation. It is a reversed but mirrored gesture: not preserving for oneself but for others.
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John Giorno Band performing at CBGB’s, New York, December 9, 1986. © Giorno Poetry Systems Institute. Photo: Kate Simon
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Should we remain in the semantic field of traces in the sand, we might imagine the archivist like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—in particular when, on coming across a human footprint while wandering on the beach of an island he believes to be deserted, he immediately senses the urgency to reconstruct that cognitive void. For him, that footprint is a tear in the fabric of reality, which thus needs to be interpreted, reconstructed, endowed with meaning. In it, the shipwrecked Crusoe sees the possibility of another; he sees the Devil, and he even sees a reflection of himself when, with a childish gesture, he tries to superimpose his own foot onto the print so as to convince himself that nothing has changed. Every trace in an archive has this power: it can lead us to what we were looking for or to something we never imagined might even exist.
CONTINUE READING
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Giorno Poetry Systems, receipts ledger for AIDS Treatment Project, June 30, 1987. ©️ Giorno Poetry Systems Institute
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[1] Ray Bradbury, “In a Season of Calm Weather,” in A Medicine for Melancholy (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959).
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