John Giorno

This is the first monograph dedicated to the visionary American artist, poet and activist John Giorno. 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 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 S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, among many others.
This book traces how 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. A wide range of archival documents, images and ephemera form an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator and friend.
John Giorno (1936–2019) was a New York–born poet, performance artist and activist. After receiving early recognition for his starring role in Andy Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep (1963), Giorno created his iconic Dial-A-Poem at the Architectural League of New York in 1968. His wide-ranging legacy includes his foundation’s support of artists living with AIDS through the AIDS Treatment Project. He lived and worked in New York City with his husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, until his death in 2019.