I ❤ John Giorno

The major retrospective on the beat poet John Giorno at Palais de Tokyo, organised by his partner, the artist Ugo Rondinone, is an extraordinary occasion to see a wide range of his work toghether with the homage from a selection of contemporary artists.

The major John Giorno retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo was another curatorial carte blanche handed to Ugo Rondinone but the giddy heights of its biographical detail would have been unthinkable without his very personal, moving and painstaking act of love for his partner, the great and influential American poet.

It is an almost static choreography and a monumental tribute divided into eight intense chapters on his life and work that the curator Florence Ostende has coordinated and rearranged in this boundless space. It is as real as the reconstruction of what are actual rooms and situations in the life of John Giorno, and a homage resulting from a selection of artists of often very different generations.

I love John Giorno, Palais de Tokyo, veduta della mostra — Top and above: I love John Giorno, Palais de Tokyo, exhibition view

It features the lightness of Angela Bulloch, who accommodates visitors in a delightful lounge where they can collectively experience the prolific production of the John Giorno Poetry System, introducing a poetry that slips from page to recording. Pierre Huyghe reproposes his 1998 Sleeptalking, a memorable production exercise rewriting the Warhol precedent and eliminating its purely documentary approach with a long voice-off interview with the poet that distorts the style of the remake of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep. It skilfully mixes media and formats in an exchange with an expanded work that is testimony to the palpable persistence of a return of the New York underground and the race backwards in biological time for Giorno’s art and life.

What remains unaltered in the contemporary searches centred on John Giorno mythology is the force of the poetic act and its ability to catch hold, which in all the works on show seems to have propagated into a growing community of followers who have cultivated almost epidermal forms of devotion since he began his research. All perform a number of gradual semantic shifts, be they musicians such as Michael Stipe, painstaking reactivator of the hypnotic rhythm of John Giorno’s lyrics, or as in the case of Rirkrit Tiravanija artists simply fascinated by the energy of John Giorno’s brutal and direct slam.

A reuse of the seminal Warhol demon is nearly always at play in one way or the other, especially in the architectural dimension. With Tiravanija, it is the model once again, a scale 1:1 reconstruction of the artist’s workspace that becomes a highly successful container for poetic redistribution strategies tout court.

Giorno freed the poem from the page, took it into the streets, distributed across all media to make it a galaxy of critical sensibility and indestructible widespread beauty, outside and inside the exhibition. Rollerblading girls reactivate the distribution of texts as in the encounters with the public commenced in the late 1960s.

The exhibition proper, however, is penetrated as if in an initiation ritual by crossing the foyer decorated with the huge I LOVE JOHN GIORNO mural by English graphic designer Scott King. The intentionally cheap gadget effect disappears once across the threshold and immersed in a long black corridor. It is almost the abyss of an imaginary reading that opens before us, along with the powerful rhythm of a multi-screening, as if Arthur Rimbaud were to perform in Madison Square Garden or Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin, William Bourroughs or Kerouac could be reconvened in a meeting of noble spirits.

Thanx 4 Nothing is a wonderful poem written by Giorno for his 70th birthday in a presentation staged and filmed by Ugo Rondinone. In it, the poet turns into a magnificent crooner or boxer in an elegant tuxedo with bare feet on the stage of the Palais des Glaces in Paris.

The beat generation could not have a better installation in today’s anthropocene age. This performance will probably go down as one of the best attempts to drill from a seemingly inexhaustible deposit. Be it the joy of the Buddhist spiritual act so dear to all the beat poets or what John Giorno communicates, there is a surplus, his own secret energy in the meticulous and tireless activity of the performer, amanuensis, philosopher and archivist of a poetry that seems to spring from a collective act and is only fulfilled in the encounter with an audience.

The display of his archives in the central exhibition room is a mind-blowing undertaking, with poems turned into wallpaper but also thousands of documents and ephemera, as if this man had passed through dozens upon dozens of periods of recent art history, all available for consultation like the room of an enormous library.

A profound dedication to the text, perhaps echoing the daily practice of the Nyingma Buddhist school, which is in itself a transcription from Sanskrit to Old Tibetan, and the ancient passage from orality to writing are its precepts. This is more probably the secret behind the many sutra mantras and purified and effective texts that surround us and fill the exhibition, even in karaoke version.

Rondinone really pushes himself when he reproduces, in a bronze trompe l’oeil, the fireplace of their home and John Giorno’s altar. The room, completed with loans of Tibetan antiquities from the Guimet museum, generates the effect of being totally rooted in the perfection and mastery of a teaching that really does come from afar. However, for the contemporary public, the most adamantine gem in this Giorno-colossal remains the direct contact with Sleep, the original film that acts as an illumination in the nonsense of a timelessness removed from today’s alienating consumer pace.

It is the sleep of the poet but it is also the omnipresent hypnosis of the cinema, and the long, long hours of reality subtracted from life. For the entire duration of the exhibition, moreover, a series of events, readings and encounters on and with John Giorno will narrate the stages of his explosive path. A free-call number (only in France) also reactivates his historic 1968 D.I.A.L a Poem, offering endless possibilities, linked to chance, for direct and intense contact with the poetic act tout court.

I ❤ John Giorno

The major retrospective on the beat poet John Giorno at Palais de Tokyo, organised by his partner, the artist Ugo Rondinone, is an extraordinary occasion to see a wide range of his work toghether with the homage from a selection of contemporary artists.

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