I ♥ John Giorno

Ugo Rondinone John Giorno Archive

THANX 4 NOTHING

For his 70th birthday in 2006, John Giorno wrote the autobiographical poem THANX 4 NOTHING. Beneath its apparent clarity, this work of maturity and wisdom evokes the poet’s past with gratitude: “I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything, and as a token of my appreciation, I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits.”

Filmed barefoot on a Parisian stage by Ugo Rondinone, Giorno turns away from literary genres of confession and elegy, contrasting them with the legendary image of the poet as a moralistic sage.

Rondinone describes the creation of the work: “In the fall of 2011, I filmed John Giorno in the old vaudeville theatre, Palais des Glaces in Paris. I filmed him 24 times in a black tuxedo and 24 times in a white tuxedo and from all four sides. Each side was filmed in four different shot sizes—close-up, medium shot, three-quarter shot, wide angle shot. For each take, John Giorno performed the entire poem THANX 4 NOTHING. The challenge was to synchronize each frame exactly to the pace of the diction of the poem.”

Referencing drugs, alcohol, and sex, Giorno delivers a spiritual act of transmission in a mix of biting irony and Buddhist wisdom. Love and treachery, friendship and rivalry, benevolence and malevolence are all acknowledged without any value judgments, even when it comes to America, which he thanks “for its neglect.”

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John Giorno Archive

The installation of THANX 4 NOTHING is surrounded by the John Giorno Archive (1936–ongoing), a facsimile of Giorno’s original archive made up of 15,147 documents. The archive mixes his private life and artistic life through remnants of family albums, travels, social engagements, and documentation of poetry, performance and visual work. Each digitized element has been reproduced on a sheet of colored paper and adapted to a standard A4 scale. The entirety of the installation has been arranged chronologically and displayed on the walls of Sky Art in a grid. Colored poem drawings, paintings and prints by Giorno from 1966 to the present are also hung atop this installation, creating a panoply of color and content that mirrors his rich history.

Visitors are invited to dive further into Giorno’s life by looking at binders of archival material, compiled by archivists Marcia Bassett and Anastasia Clarke, that are available on nearby tables. With its publications, posters, photographs, records and products, this archive makes the diversity of Giorno’s work tangible.

Rondinone remarks about the archive: “When I saw John Giorno’s archive for the first time in 2000, I was impressed by its vast size and how he had methodically organized the archive in a timeline by dating and labeling the boxes with archival material dating back to 1936. Giorno’s archive is the main reason I am doing the exhibition. The challenge was to present a literary archive as a visual exhibition.”

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On the evening of the June 21st summer solstice, Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno —the first major U.S. exhibition about the American poet, artist, activist and muse John Giorno—will open simultaneously across 13 locations in New York City. I ♥ John Giorno is a work of art by Giorno’s husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of John Giorno—an artist whose work has influenced generations. Taking place in his chosen hometown, the exhibition affords a unique opportunity for Giorno’s contributions to be recognized within the canons of American poetry and art history, and celebrates the artist’s 80th birthday.

I ♥ John Giorno is an unprecedented collaboration between leading non-profit and alternative spaces across New York, which are joining forces for the first time to mount a multilayered exhibition on a single subject. Partner venues include: Artists Space, High Line Art, Howl! Happening, Hunter College Art Galleries, The Kitchen, New Museum, Red Bull Arts New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Sky Art, Swiss Institute, White Columns, and 80WSE Gallery. Reconfigured as a festival, including installations in galleries and public spaces, as well as a full roster of public programs and events, I ♥ John Giorno is free and open to the public.

Expanding upon the exhibition that took place at Palais de Tokyo in Paris from October 2015 to January 2016, I ♥ John Giorno has been re-conceptualized specifically for New York, highlighting Giorno’s significant relationship with the city, and his singular role in creating and fostering community here. The 18-part exhibition has been divided by Rondinone into chapters reflecting the layers of Giorno’s life and work, his longstanding influence on and dedication to his chosen hometown of New York City, and his relationships with artist friends, lovers and collaborators including: Richard Bosman, Phong Bui, Angela Bulloch, Anne Collier, Verne Dawson, Judith Eisler, John Giorno, Mark Handforth, Matthew Higgs, Pierre Huyghe, Françoise Janicot, Scott King, Elizabeth Peyton, Ugo Rondinone, Erik Satie, Kendall Shaw, Michael Stipe, Billy Sullivan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peter Ungerleider, Joan Wallace, and Andy Warhol, whose work will be presented as part of the festival.

The exhibition format echoes the symbiotic relationship between Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno, who have been both partners and collaborators for the past two decades. Rondinone describes the show saying: “I ♥ John Giorno is a kaleidoscopic exhibition about the life and work of American poet and Tibetan Buddhist John Giorno, whose rich and stimulating life has woven many threads of American culture and spirituality. Within the dreamscape of the exhibition, one is invited to wander through the juxtaposed realm of art and poetry where image and language build upon themselves in a layered stream of consciousness driven by the biographical, the conceptual, and the emotional.”

John Giorno (b. 1936, New York City, USA) is an artistic innovator who has been defying conventional definitions of poet, performer, political activist, Tibetan Buddhist, and visual artist since he emerged upon the New York art scene during the late 1950s. In the 1960s, he began producing multi-media, multi-sensory events concurrent with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He worked with Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in 1966, and with Bob Moog in 1967-68. His breakthroughs in this area include Dial-A-Poem, which was first presented in 1968 at the Architectural Society of New York, and was later included in the MoMA’s Information exhibition in 1970. His contributions are significant to many culturally defining moments: the Beat generation, Pop Art, Punk, the Pictures Generation, and the hip-hop era. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris; and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; among others.

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) is a renowned mixed-media artist who lives and works in New York. Recent solo shows include: your age my age and the age of the rainbow, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; let’s start this day again, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; every time the sun comes up, Place Vendome, Paris; girono d’oro + notti d’argento, Mercati die Traiano, Rome; becoming soil, Carre d’Art, Nîmes; seven magic mountains, Art Production Fund and Nevada Museum of Art/Desert of Nevada; vocabulary of solitude, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; I ♥ John Giorno, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; golden days and silver nights, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and artists and poets, Secession, Vienna. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. Upcoming shows include the world just makes me laugh at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; and good evening beautiful blue at Bass Museum of Art, Miami.