PARIS.- I Love John Giorno is the first retrospective of the life and work of the American poet John Giorno (born 1936, lives and works in New York), a key figure of the American underground scene of the 1960s. The exhibition is conceived by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (born 1964, lives and works in New York) as a work in its own right.

‘I structured the exhibition in eight chapters, each representing a layer of Giorno’s multifaceted work. Taken as a whole, they reflect how he works and help us to understand the dual influences that American culture and Buddhism had on his life and art,’ 2 Rondinone explains.

‘Rondinone has crafted this exhibition with the rigour of a physiognomist, shaping Giorno’s inner life as a mirror of his work. Palais de Tokyo has been transformed into a ‘hall of mirrors’, where visitors are invited to explore the labyrinth of a life reflected in a thousand shards of mirror, from previously unseen early Warhol films to Buddhist thangkas and Giorno’s poem paintings.’ Florence Ostende.

Giorno was an iconic character in Andy Warhol’s early films who found inspiration in the appropriation of found images by Pop artists and captured the real-life colloquial language of advertisements, television, newspapers and street slang. A leading figure in the lineage of the Beat Generation, he revived the genre of ‘found poetry’ and worked to make poetry accessible to all.

Since the early 1960s, Giorno has seen poems as viruses that must be transmitted to as many people as possible. His 1968 seminal work Dial-A-Poem allowed people to listen to poems over the telephone simply by dialling a number and quickly received over a million calls.

Whether they are recorded on an album, painted on a canvas, delivered on stage or deconstructed in the pages of a book, Giorno considers poems as images that can be endlessly reproduced using different technologies. ‘In the age of sampling, cut and paste, digital manipulation of text, appropriation as art form – which finds its peak in hip-hop and the textual orgy of the World Wide Web – the world is finally catching up with techniques and styles that Giorno pioneered several decades ago.’ 3

Combining poetry, visual arts, music and performance, the exhibition reveals the significant influence of Giorno’s life and work on several generations of artists who have portrayed him, from Andy Warhol’s cinematic masterpiece Sleep (1963) and its remake by Pierre Huyghe, to R.E.M, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elizabeth Peyton, Françoise Janicot, Verne Dawson, Billy Sullivan and Judith Eisler.

The section dedicated to Giorno Poetry Systems (1965-1993) is curated by Matthew Higgs who invited the artists Angela Bulloch and Anne Collier. It retraces how Giorno Poetry Systems produced, released and promoted more than 50 LPs and albums by 150 artists, musicians, poets and performers, including Frank Zappa, Debbie Harry, William S. Burroughs and Phillip Glass.

Famous for his anthropomorphic sculptures, black masks and hyper-realistic clowns, for this exhibition, Rondinone has reinvented the retrospective format as portraiture and recaptures a form of spirituality through the connections between art and poetry.

‘The title I Love John Giorno is a collective «I» in which Ugo Rondinone invites each of us to share and to feel the spiritual and political commitment of an iconic figure of American counterculture. This exhibition is not just the first Giorno retrospective; it is a declaration of love that heralds the invention of a new genre.’ Florence Ostende

With: Anne Collier, Angela Bulloch, Verne Dawson, Judith Eisler, John Giorno, Mark Handforth, Matthew Higgs, Pierre Huyghe, Françoise Janicot, Scott King, Elizabeth Peyton, Ugo Rondinone, Erik Satie, Michael Stipe, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andy Warhol.


(1) Taken from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with John Giorno in 2002, in Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews Volume 2 , Milan: Charta, 2010.
(2) Taken from Florence Ostende’s conversation with the artist in December 2014.
(3) Marcus Boon, ‘Introduction’, in Subduing Demons in America , Selected Poems 1962-2007, Soft Skull Press, New York, 2008, p.X.