from the archive - john giorno

Born in New York City in 1936, John Giorno grew up between Brooklyn and Roslyn Heights in an Italian American family. In 1951, at fourteen, Giorno wrote his first poem for a school assignment, an experience that led him to recognize himself as a poet.

At seventeen, he moved from the suburbs to Manhattan to attend Columbia University, where he earned a BA in 1958, majoring in Literature and minoring in Asian Studies. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before returning to New York, immersing himself in New York’s literary and artistic circles, following the work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and other Beat writers.

In 1965, Giorno founded Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS), bringing poets, artists, musicians, photographers, and designers together through performances, recordings, and publications. Around this time, Giorno met William S. Burroughs, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator, and Brion Gysin, who introduced him to sound poetry (poésie sonore) and encouraged his exploration of sound and recording technology. 

In 1966, Giorno volunteered behind the scenes for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances developed through collaborations between artists and engineers. These collaborations also gave rise to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization founded by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, to sustain and expand such exchanges. Giorno’s work on the performances, including camera work for Rauschenberg, introduced him to ways of making sound, light, and movement interact. Through him, Giorno also met synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog, with whom he began developing electronic sound compositions. These experiments fed into his Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments, sound and light installations in which he electronically altered and looped recordings of his voice. Audiences could enter the physical space of the poem, experiencing its rhythms and repetitions through sound rather than reading them on the page.

Alongside his experiments with sound, Giorno continued to publish extensively. His first book, Poems (1967), was edited by Peter Schjeldahl and featured a cover by Robert Rauschenberg. Inspired by the use of “found images” in the work of Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, Giorno began applying a similar logic to language, assembling poems from existing texts. “Pornographic Poem” (1965), included in the collection, was composed from excerpts of a found erotic letter.

Buddhism shaped Giorno’s understanding of death, love, friendship, and the ego, informing both his writing and his daily life. Questions of consciousness, perception, and the nature of existence recur throughout his poetry, performances, and visual work. In “Dakini Software” (1969), Giorno brings the dakini, a female figure associated with awakened wisdom in  Tibetan Buddhism, into the same poetic world as sexuality, the body, and contemporary culture.

Founded amid the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and shaped by the counterculture of the 1960s, Giorno Poetry Systems became a platform for both artistic experimentation and political activism. In 1984, Giorno established the AIDS Treatment Project through GPS to provide financial assistance to people living with AIDS. The epidemic would claim the lives of many of his friends and fellow artists, including photographer Peter Hujar and actor and writer Cookie Mueller. The project initially supported small organizations serving people with AIDS, particularly people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community who were often overlooked by government programs and larger foundations. GPS later established the Poets and Artists with AIDS Fund, providing emergency grants for basic living and medical expenses. By 1994, the project had distributed $460,732, funded in part through royalties donated by artists and musicians involved with GPS Records.

In 2015, Rondinone curated Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, the first retrospective devoted to Giorno’s life and work, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Conceived as a “love letter” to Giorno, the exhibition brought together artworks, archival material, performances, projects, and personal documents that shaped his career. In 2017, the project was reimagined across thirteen venues in New York, bringing its different strands into the city where Giorno had lived and worked for more than five decades. That same year, Giorno and Rondinone married.