John Giorno Put Poetry on the Line
Article excerpt
In iconic works like his "Dial-a-Poem," the artist offered a moment of sustained attention, a sense of relation, a novel perspective.
John Giorno, "LIFE IS A KILLER" (2018), acrylic on canvas (photo courtesy Giorno Poetry Systems; all other photos Tara Anne Dalbow/Hyperallergic)
LOS ANGELES, Through a sleek, ergonomic handset, the voice of poet Diane di Prima recites “Revolutionary Letter #7” (1971), in which she imagines a million earthworms tunneling under society’s oppressive structure until it falls. Press another button on the touch-tone phone resting on the round white table, and you may hear Frank O’Hara promising that “We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying,” or John Giorno observing that “the meeting of the two minds is the awareness of the space they are sharing together.”
Giorno launched Dial-a-Poem in 1968 as a bank of rotary phones and answering machines with which anyone could call a free 212 number and hear a poet recite a poem. Under his direction, the telephone, a fixture of mass communication, became a distribution network for an ancient art form, carrying verse through the same circuitry that delivered sales pitches and political spiels. Two years later, and after more than a million calls, the project was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s influential conceptual art survey, Information. Today, it’s the first work visitors encounter in John Giorno: NO NOSTALGIA at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. Sitting in one of the white leather chairs with the receiver pressed to one ear feels a little like therapy, where each poem is exactly what the doctor ordered: a moment of sustained attention, a sense of relation, a novel perspective, a commiserating voice or a rousing one.
Installation view of John Giorno, "DIAL-A-POEM (Push-Button Edition)" (1968, 2019)
The alternately technicolor and monochrome paintings and silkscreens lining the light-filled gallery offer their own form of address. Works like "FILLING WHAT IS EMPTY EMPTYING WHAT IS FULL" (2015) and "EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER" (2015, 23) feature oversized, center-justified typography. Borrowing the authority of newspaper headlines, they replace reportorial rhetoric with koan-like reflections on Buddhist detachment, the pleasures of intimacy, the wisdom of befriending death, life’s great absurdity. Poetry is presented here as language worthy of front-page visibility, imbued with the same urgency ordinarily granted to catastrophe.
The archival material distributed across three vitrines makes a similar case for poetry’s relevance. Giorno’s typewritten drafts, dense with found text and references to current events, appear alongside their source materials: a sympathetic New York Times review of the Beach Boys’ 12th album, Smiley Smile (1967), or a report on the tragic death of an electrical pole repairman. On the far wall, the silkscreen “A YOUTH WINCES” (1971) registers as a caption for an absent photograph of a student shot at a protest at the University of California, Berkeley. The text is replicated in two staggered columns, a visual analog to Giorno’s recording technique of overlaying voices, and further evidence of his multimedia approach to making that refuses distinctions between mediums and genres.
Installation views of JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA
A concern with circulation and accessibility governed his broader practice. Giorno put poems on matchbooks and business cards, moving them beyond stolid tomes and elite institutions and into the wild and raving New York City of the 1970s. Art belonged to the public, he insisted, another tool to take up in the struggle for civil rights and equal access to medical care. Far from didactic or sterile, his placards and leaflets thrum with his signature sexual intensity and trenchant wit. It was not enough to survive; people had a right to pleasure, companionship, delight. “Treat a stranger as lover, hug them as good friends or as 15 years ago you might have had fabulous sex with that same stranger,” reads the beginning of one of the broadsides on view. Nearby, an Earth Day flier lists the mailing addresses of government officials and corporate executives, alongside instructions for what, exactly, he thought the public should send them: Mail beef lungs to: Anthony Luce, President, Con Edison 4 Irving Place New York, N. Y.
The synth-heavy soundtrack to Bruce Conner’s “CROSSROADS” (1976) resonates up from the foundation’s first-floor theater, occasionally distracting from di Prima’s voice on the other end of the receiver. Conner’s film recomposes declassified footage of atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll into sublime images that oscillate between beauty and terror. The juxtaposition of the explosions with Giorno’s phone bank prompts the observation that technology is never neutral. It can be conscripted for destruction, or it can be rewired to foster relation, remediation. As I turn to leave, I’m reminded of media artist Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1984 assertion that “artists need to create on the same scale society has the capacity to destroy.” She may well have had Giorno in mind. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the medicine he’s prescribed remains as nourishing now as it was then.
Left: John Giorno, "EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER" (2015, 23), silkscreen on canvas; right: John Giorno, "FILLING WHAT IS EMPTY EMPTYING WHAT IS FULL" (2015), acrylic on canvas
Installation view of John Giorno, "DIAL-A-POEM (Push-Button Edition)" (1968, 2019)
Installation view of JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA
Installation view of JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA
JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA continues at the Marciano Art Foundation (4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Windsor Square, Los Angeles) through July 18. The exhibition was curated by Hanneke Skerath and Carlos Valladares.