John Giorno (b. 1936, New York, US – d. 2019, New York, US) graduated from Columbia University (1958). He is considered a leading figure of the Beat Generation – a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s through the cultural phenomena. He briefly worked as a stockbroker in New York before meeting Andy Warhol in 1962.
Warhol remained an important influence on Giorno’s developments in poetry, performance and recordings. Further inspired by subsequent relationships with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Giorno began applying Pop Art techniques of appropriation of found imagery to his poetry, producing The American Book of the Dead in 1964. Giorno embraces two disciplines, poetry and art, which have been a source of mutual fascination and inspiration for the artist. He is considered the inventor of Performance Poetry and Dial-A-Poem – a free telephone line to connect listeners to recordings of original works of poetry.
His life and work were celebrated in the expansive retrospective project Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, presented at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015 and at 13 institutional venues across New York in 2017. Other recent exhibitions include You Got to Burn to Shine, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2019); Call and Response: Recent Acquisitions from The Bass Collection, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, US (2017); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015) and Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US (2012).
