Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
234 CULTURED other places. Now he mounted the first large-scale exhibition of his partner's life work, "I ♥ John Giorno," at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. "The 'I' stands for everyone," Rondinone says. "Whenever you read the title, you imply yourself in that love." The multimedia exhibit, which runs through January 10, inhabits nine rooms, each devoted to an aspect of Giorno's life: a film of him reading "Thanx 4 Nothing" in the first room; in another, the LP and CD albums of Giorno Poetry Systems that he began producing in 1965, "accessible in that room through iPad," Rondinone says; a room featuring 200 works from Dial-A-Poem, (available at the exhibit or through an après-garde approach by calling +33(0) 800 106 106 until January 10); or a room devoted to 12 works of Giorno by Warhol. "I call the exhibition a dreamscape," Rondinone says. "Where image and language build up themselves in a layered stream of consciousness." After graduating from Columbia University and a short career in the business world, Giorno fell into Andy Warhol's circle in 1962, into a world in which artists appropriated ideas, photographs, advertising slogans, phrases and images, and in which a film could consist of a single, unmoving person barely breathing. Warhol immortalized Giorno in the black-and-white movie "Sleep," five hours of a nude Giorno sleeping, including a 45 minute close up of his abdomen. "He was quite sexy back in the day," says Stephen Holden, The New York Times critic, who was a 23-year-old poet when he encountered Warhol's posse. "Little did I know that all these people I knew back in the '60s and '70s would become legendary. It was just bohemian, scraping along. But even though they didn't have much commercial success, they knew they would go down as artistic figures of the day." Giorno was at the forefront of spoken word and mixed media productions. "In his first performance, he gave away LSD pills so people would have a full field experience listening to music and having a good time," says Rondinone. Holden notes that Giorno wrote explicit poems and talked about lovers in ways that were "honest" but also "contemptuous." Giorno is prone to reveal his lover's sexual proclivities, and just in case someone did not know they had been lovers, to announce that Warhol was "beautiful from the neck down." Frank O'Hara, a poet of the so-called New York School, once said that Giorno was "a poet among painters." (As Holden notes, "Giorno was his own school of poetry.") In the same way that the painters in the midcentury changed the definition of art from representation to presentation–proclaiming "this is art"–Giorno turned gnomic phrases like "life is a killer" and "it doesn't get better" into free verse through rhythm and repetition with a loud voice. Stand-up performances were sometimes combined with film images or a Moog synthesizer. These recitations, which dominate the exhibit and are readily available on YouTube, almost require that Maynard G. Krebs poke you in the ribs and say "Get it, man?" But Giorno sees himself as separate from the Beats. "The poets before him would sit and give a lecture," Rondinone says. "John was the first poet who would take a microphone and perform his poems." In addition, Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg were Zen Buddhists. Giorno practices the oldest form of Tibetan Buddhism, Nyingma, which among other things celebrates bodily pleasure. While Rondinone refers to them as each other's muses, Giorno prefers to think that a relationship between two creative minds creates an invisible "third mind," the title of a book by his close friends William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that was published in 1978. To make a third mind, Giorno once said: "sex helps but isn't necessary." "Even though they didn't have much commercial success—they were just bohemians scraping along—they knew they would go down as artistic figures of the day." —Stephen Holden