Ugo Rondinone — I Love John Giorno — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 21, 2015 → January 10, 2016

Ugo Rondidone : I ♥ 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.

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.’¹

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.

Curator : Florence Ostende

¹ Marcus Boon, ‘Introduction’, in Subduing Demons in America, Selected Poems 1962-2007, Soft Skull Press, New York, 2008, p.X.