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I N T E R N A T I O N A LFEBRUARY 2020

POPE.L

RAYYANE TABET

REMEMBERING JOHN GIORNO

AF 2.20 Cover Round 3_EW.indd 1 1/13/20 5:39 PM

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Opposite page: John Giorno, THE WORLD JUST MAKES ME LAUGH, 2017, silk screen on canvas, 48 × 48".

This page: John Giorno, New York, 1980. From the album art for Sugar, Alcohol, & Meat: The Dial-A-Poem Poets (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1980). Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe.

JOHN GIORNO 1936–2019

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LAURA HOPTMAN

JOHN GIORNO, who left New York and this world on October 11, 2019, at the age of eighty-two, was one for the pantheon. He described himself as a poet, though in his brilliant life he was also a visual artist; a performer; a record producer and distributor; a civil-rights, gay-rights, and aids activist; a central, vocal member of the Tibetan Buddhist community in America; and a philanthropist who quietly supported poets and artists in need. A beautiful, social being with a smile that was like sunshine, he also inspired generations of our country’s most radical artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, critics, and idols of the beau monde. John knew them all, and was among the most radical of them all, using his remarkable gifts of language, charm, and creative fortitude in the service of what can be described as positive subversion: the celebratory smashing of political, social, sexual, cultural, and metaphysical conventions.

He was precocious, beginning art classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn at age ten and writing his first poems at fourteen. He was exposed to contemporary poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where he saw Dylan Thomas perform and where he read the poems of Federico García Lorca and Allen Ginsberg. In 1961, John fell in with an art crowd that included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and, momentously, Andy Warhol. Captivated by John’s charisma, Warhol cast him in a number of short films, most notoriously Sleep (1963), a five-hour-and-twenty-one-minute black-and-white record of John slumbering peacefully. Sleep made John famous, presenting him as the quintessential muse: exquisite, unconscious, and anonymous. In fact, this moment of somnambulant superstardom signaled his awakening, marking the beginning of his poetic and artistic life. Inspired by

John Giorno giving a reading at St. Mark’s Church, New York, April 28, 1974. Photo: Gianfranco Mantegna.

William S. Burroughs, John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, New York, 1981. From the album art for Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, and William S. Burroughs’s You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1981). Photo: Jimmy DeSana.

John Giorno, WELCOMING THE FLOWERS, 2007, a suite of eighteen silk screen prints on board, each 161⁄2 × 161⁄2".

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FANNY HOWE

IN 1966, as John Giorno was moving into an abandoned YMCA on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, I was moving into a joint at 36 Bowery, a few blocks away. I had a dog named Woofer, about three friends, and a typewriter to keep me going. My mind was traveling the same rails that John’s was. It’s worse than I thought, Everyone is a complete disappointment, Thanx for nothing, Life is a killer. Suicide sutra was one I would’ve wanted to learn.

Fifty years later, one of my only friends from back then, Charles Ruas, introduced me to John, still living on the Bowery, and John invited me to stay at the Bunker if I ever needed a room. I soon did and stayed for only one night, with my grand-daughter and a friend. There, he made us dinner and we talked about religion, and then the girls went off to one room and I to another. There I lay, sleepless with a black-and-yellow bull’s-eye target (punctured) hanging on the wall beside me. William Burroughs had lived there for seven years, and the room itself was obsessed with guns.

Outside, twelve destitute men and women shouted and sang and slept or knocked things around, all acting more insane than I had been fifty years before.

Everything made a long-distance noise. Tibetan Buddhist ceremonial colors hung as if tossed out of another time. It was like a remnant factory.

I had recognized John, over the supper plates, as a born monastic in the spirit of those monks I already knew—two Zen, one hermit, five Benedictines, and a poet. He told jokes that he laughed at and described the tireless nature of his work prepar-ing for a performance. Poetry has no rules, but it respects the discipline that sound requires.

He cleaned the dishes. He went up the wide stairs to the upper loft where he slept among his houseplants and indoor trees. I knew he practiced Nyingma meditation, loved lots of people, and was detached from hideous human thoughts, though he knew they were there, and he told me he could fly across oceans and mountains without losing the mind he so cherished, the one with-out boundaries where wisdom and humor emerged as one. FANNY HOWE IS A POET WHOSE MOST RECENT BOOK IS LOVE AND I (GRAYWOLF PRESS, 2019).

Warhol’s found-image silk screens, John began to compose poems stitched together from headlines clipped from the New York Post and the Daily News. These works were pledges of allegiance to Pop and a sharp turn away from the New York School poetics that dominated literary discourse at the time.

In 1966, John moved to 222 Bowery, an imposing nineteenth-century building, formerly a YMCA, that had provided a home or studio for artists such as Fernand Léger, Mark Rothko, Michael Goldberg, and Lynda Benglis. It was shortly there-after that William S. Burroughs and the polymath poet, artist, and mystic Brion Gysin rendezvoused in a loft downtown and began their collaboration on The Third Mind (1978), a project of cut-up and assembled texts and images that both considered a “book of methods” for merging visual art and literature. John was with Burroughs and Gysin during this period—he believed in their work and served as a tireless helpmeet for both—and the experience changed his poems. For a time, he organized them into split or double lines of text running parallel to each other down the page, allowing for chance juxtapositions of stanzas. In 1975, John found Burroughs a New York redoubt: a windowless space in the basement of 222 Bowery that Burroughs called “the Bunker.” The space suited the author’s dark and paranoid point of view so well that he lived in it for seven years. When Burroughs moved out in 1982, John transformed the Bunker into a space for Buddhist teachings and meditation, retaining its nickname in Burroughs’s honor.

Since the beginning of his career, John was interested in democratizing the distribution of poetry so that it could reach a wider audience. In the mid-’60s, he began chopping up longer poems into exclamatory stanzas, laying them out like

Left: John Giorno giving a reading at Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 10, 1983. Photo: Françoise Janicot.

Right: Dodrupchen Rinpoche at John Giorno’s Bunker, New York, June 24, 1989.

He told me he could fly across oceans and mountains without losing the mind he so cherished, the one without boundaries where wisdom and humor emerged as one.

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JOAN JONAS

DIAL-A-POEM WAS SEMINAL, a most wonderful work. I will never forget the experience of picking up that black receiver, dialing the rotary phone, and listening to a poem, a continuation of the oral tradition through the distance. And this was just the beginning.

I attended many of John’s readings. He had a special way of performing his work, which I think had to do with his breath. Breathing in and out with the words in relation to the rhythm and pace of the poem. There was a continuous flow. An energy, quiet but powerful, as the sound filled the space. Although I had known John since the ’60s, it was only in the last few years that I felt a friendship. We were the same age. He was a warm and generous person. His spiritual practice was an inspiration to the commu-nity. A friend recently wrote me to say that of all of us, John was pure spirit.

Once, I told him I have a difficult time sleeping. John told me that he could fall asleep at any time in any place. I will remember him always in Andy Warhol’s Sleep. He was the star and always will be. JOAN JONAS IS AN ARTIST LIVING IN NEW YORK.

ANNE WALDMAN

AS A FELLOW BUDDHIST, John Giorno taught me something about “dakini principle,” about devotion, about the agency of the poet as trickster in the world. He was clever about technology, inspired by Bob Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver’s E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) He was disciplined, inscru-table, a unique performer—both powerful dharma seer and folksy prophet. He was a prodigious infrastructure artist. I can still see him making son et lumière extravaganzas at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, visual poems and silk screens, Dial-A-Poem and his Giorno Poetry Systems: an archive of recordings and events and collabo-rations. And agitprop on Wall Street long before Occupy! We had faith in a revolution of consciousness as well as in sexual and gender liberation, and interconnectivity was sizzling in ’60s New York. How much more generative could one day be? How much more purposeful? John was in the center of this maelstrom. And his energy never abated during his whole long, generous life. We grumbled as we watched the moon landing with Jasper Johns in Nags Head (couldn’t the US do better in helping the jobless and homeless?) and chanted mantras with Allen Ginsberg at the Chicago 8 trial, with Bobby Seale cruelly shackled in the court-room. I had to talk down Andrea Dworkin (and a host of enraged feminists) from boycotting William Burroughs and John as they took the stage at the Poetry Project in 1972. We traveled to India together to seek the wisdom of Tibetan masters who spoke of impermanence and luminosity and the Dark Age. John’s poetry was often ironic, timeless: “Just say no to family values, and don’t quit your day job.” I loved his smile, so many lifetimes of gnosis and engagement and activism, and the making of art in our aston-ishing existence.

ANNE WALDMAN IS A POET LIVING IN NEW YORK WHO ALSO DIRECTS THE JACK KEROUAC SCHOOL OF DISEMBODIED POETICS SUMMER WRITING PROGRAM IN BOULDER, CO. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

Left: John Giorno, JUST SAY NO TO FAMILY VALUES, 1997, silk screen on paper, 22 × 22".

Right: Film strip from Andy Warhol’s Sleep, 1963, 16 mm, black-and-white, silent, 321 minutes. John Giorno.

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tabloid headlines and printing them on all manner of cheap, reproducible objects, ranging from neon-colored flyers to T-shirts, to his now well-known silkscreens on canvas. Fascinated by magnetic-tape recording, he became involved with the Paris-based poesié sonore (sound poetry) movement, making lifelong friends of its founders, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck, and Françoise Janicot. The activities of the sound poets, which featured live and recorded exper-iments with magnetic tape, set the stage for John’s best-known work, which marked his first highly visible foray into the art world: the interactive installation Dial-A-Poem.

In essence, Dial-A-Poem was a series of toll-free telephone numbers that a person could call to hear recordings of the greatest poets of that era—like Ginsberg and John Ashbery, Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman—reading their own work. John exhibited it in 1969 as an interactive installation, first at the Architectural League of New York and then in 1970 as part of “Information,” Kynaston McShine’s landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which presented artist-created systems of information organization as Conceptual art. It was such a success that it convinced John that audio recording was the most effective and subversive way to bring poetry out of the subculture and into the wider world. Beginning in the 1970s, he set about releasing LPs of hundreds of poets, artists, and activists reading their own poetry. Starting a record label under the industrial-sounding name Giorno Poetry Systems, John recorded everyone from Ashbery to Frank Zappa, Kathleen Cleaver to John Cage, and Joe Brainard to Debbie Harry, and produced and distributed anthologies like Life Is a Killer (1982), which featured Amiri Baraka, Jim Carroll, Jayne Cortez, and the classic

You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (1981), with Burroughs and Laurie Anderson.

In his literature, art, and lifestyle, John set an example of how to buck what Burroughs famously called “Control”—and of how to not die but thrive doing it. John’s work is joyfully out and defiantly porn-positive: From his 1965 panegyric about a gangbang (“Seven Cuban / army officers / in exile who were at me / all night”) to his more recent paintings declaring i want to cum in your heart, he made sure that his life was an example of absolute freedom from social con-vention and that his work was a volley of buckshot aimed at the nannies of twentieth-century middle-class American social mores. As he said many times, always with a gentle smile and a joint in his hand, “They can all go fuck them-selves.” Society, by the way, periodically clapped back at him. For decades, the snootier precincts of the New York School omitted him from their magazines, anthologies, and cushy residencies. Around 1969, in the midst of his antiwar work, the FBI sent him a surprise package containing a lot of marijuana, for which he was briefly imprisoned. And while he was invited to the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 1994, his relationship with the Pop artist, both professional and romantic, has effectively been written out of the official Warhol biography.

In 1997, John met his future husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, who would introduce John’s work to a new generation of artists, writers, and curators (including me). It was Rondinone who encouraged John to return to making visual art, and who reintroduced his work to the art community in an exhibition he curated for the Swiss Institute in New York in 2002. Thereafter, John began to produce

Left: Cover of John Giorno and Anne Waldman’s John Giorno & Anne Waldman (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1977).

Above: John Giorno with his 1968–70 Dial-A-Poem, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970. Photo: Gianfranco Mantegna.

Right: Cover of Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, and William S. Burroughs’s You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1981).

He was disciplined, inscrutable, a unique performer—both powerful dharma seer and folksy prophet.

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you were always only self-serving,thanks for exploiting my big egoand making me a star for your own benefitthanks that you never paid me,thanks for all the sleaze,thanks for being mean and rudeand smiling to my faceI am happy that you robbed me,I am happy that you liedI am happy that you helped me,thanks, grazie, merci beaucoup.

John’s life inevitably became a work of art when, in the fall of 2015, his hus-band created “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno,” an artwork-cum-exhibition by and about John that contained his extensive archives, publications, and recordings; the entire Giorno Poetry Systems catalogue; his paintings, watercolors, prints, and multiples; and—finally—paintings, films, videos, and songs by numerous genera-tions of artists who were inspired by him. A sweeping multimedia portrait of John by the love of his life, “I ♥ John Giorno” was also a public proclamation of how much John had given the New York art world and how much we had happily taken from him. “It doesn’t get better!” reads the inscription from John in my copy of his 2008 poetry collection, Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems, 1962–2007. It’s a quote from one of his poems, and a classic John line. His deep Buddhist beliefs allowed him to always find joy in lived experience while accepting the inevitable presence of suffering in all aspects of life. To quote another of John’s poems from an epic period in his production: “It’s not / what happens, / it’s how you / handle it.”

visual art with regularity, from ecstatic print portfolios like WELCOMING THE FLOWERS, 2007, to his final series of paintings and sculptures, which was on view in a solo exhibition at New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery at the time of his death.

John was a consummate and unforgettable performer, and a legendary reader of his own work who, with protean breath control and physical stamina, could recite his poems from memory no matter the length. (His mnemonic feats were, by his account, made possible thanks to meditation, which he practiced four hours daily for more than forty years.) John read not only with his voice and his distinct Noo Yawk inflection, but also with his entire body, having developed a repertoire of gestures that had a distinctly punk-rock energy. He electrified his audiences, bringing them to their feet even at the sleepiest of gatherings.

In the past ten years, the art world finally came to understand what literary festivals internationally had known for decades, and John’s relentless touring on the poetry circuit began to include performances at major museums and interna-tional biennial events. “Prefer crying in a limo to laughing on a bus,” John wrote, and he was never one to decline an appearance at an art opening, a glamorous party, or a photo shoot. He looked great in a tux, as anyone who watches Rondinone’s twenty-channel video installation featuring John reading his epic poem “Thanx For Nothing: On My 70th Birthday” (2006) can attest. I recom-mend you see it, as John’s performance makes clear that he both delighted in his belated embrace by the art world and recognized that it was all bullshit. As he wrote to the cultural community to which he gave so much:

thanks for celebrating me, thanks for the resounding applause,thanks for taking everything for yourselfand giving nothing back,

From left: John Giorno, PREFER CRYING IN A LIMO TO LAUGHING ON A BUS, 2017, ink-jet print, 26 × 26". John Giorno, I WANT TO CUM IN YOUR HEART, 2017, ink-jet print, 26 × 26".

Right: Ugo Rondinone, Thanx 4 Nothing (detail), 2015, still from the 2K video component (black- and-white, sound, 24 minutes 14 seconds) of a mixed-media installation additionally comprising four screens, sixteen monitors, and a carpet.

In his literature, art, and lifestyle, John set an example of how to buck what Burroughs famously called “Control”—and of how to not die but thrive doing it.

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John had just finished writing his memoir when he died, using his carefully tended archive as well as his prodigious memory to recall the details of his life. In its last paragraphs, he emphasizes his readiness for the next big experience in his life—his death. He reiterated his preparedness in a number of poems he produced in his final decade and a half on earth. As he wrote in 2004, “I go to death / will-ingly, / with the same comfort and bliss / as when I lay my head / on my lover’s chest.” I regret that John came into my life a mere twenty-two years ago, but in that short period I tried to see him perform as much as possible. I was fortunate to hear him read my favorite of his poems, “Everyone Gets Lighter” (2002), enough times to quote bits of it. A Buddhist explanation of the complex notion of emptiness, the poem concludes:

Everyonegetslightereveryonegets lightereveryone getslightereveryone gets lighter,everyone is light.

The sentiment still uplifts me even though I know that a light has gone out in New York, a light that illuminated the very best and worst of the art world and human nature.

LAURA HOPTMAN IS A CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE DRAWING CENTER IN NEW YORK.

john giorno is

a precious luminous primordial palace · a map of the human soul · an object of desire · a prom night filled with tears and laughter · a wall covered with words · a second summer · a spirit that burrows into your head and leaves you shining · a time capsule about culture and counterculture · a meditation on life and how to live it · an occasional sunset reflected on the window · a bowery boy · a gay-rights activist · a poet in love with the poetry of fanny howe · a glory morning · a practitioner of the nyingma lineage of tibetan buddhism · a small white sailboat on the bay · an exploration of time place and memory · a spring rain over a sloping orchard · a passage · an untold story · a pause · a bouquet of flowers · a bright smiling face · a barbra streisand christmas album · a full day looking for sex in the golden age of promiscuity · an ancient apricot tree · a daylight · a wistful meditation on the world and its beauties, mysteries, and injustices · a hand made of air · a sitting down by the river · a body-language oralist · a breathing in the water · a fleeting memory to which no date or place can be attached · a celebration · a slender elder with an upright posture · a release of silence and peace · a pebbled island · a walt whitman dressed as gertrude stein dressed as dylan thomas · a golden present · a restless language · a spiral progression of circles · an italian american from roslyn heights · a wild water adventure · a secret yogi · a hole in the roof of the pantheon · an inevitable sentiment · a radio hanoi hippie · a mirror set in the crotch of a tree · a distant blue · a door into the void · a collection of short stories · a color of grace · a swim-ming with lizards · a let me tell you · a long solitary walk · a palm tree growing out of a crack in the rocks · a manual for misery and happiness · an all moons all suns · a student of dudjom rinpoche · a blue rocking horse · a tantric beast performer · a feeling that we had hardly begun and we were already there · a dharma sister and brother · a setting a river on fire · a rainbow drawing with a house under it · a great white whale leaping from the water and rolling into it again · a dazzling mind · an umbrella tree along the tiber · a radical faerie · an arch of a bridge · a friend a muse a lover · a place to stay · UGO RONDINONE IS AN ARTIST BASED IN NEW YORK. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

UGO RONDINONE